Mark Monster

A lot of people have a year’s end blog post. This post is similar. Google Analytics is my friend for the stats.

The General Stats.

Everything stated as ‘previous’ are the stats for 2008. I really like the Visits and Pageviews stats, almost 4 times more Visits and Pageviews than last year. Also the average time people stay on my site is 40% higher.

About the content.

I wrote 33 articles in the year 2009, not that many compared to the year 2008 in which I wrote 50 articles. I hope this is not a trend for the year 2010. I hope to write more articles in 2010. But more important, what was the top-content in 2009?

1. Silverlight using WCF with Windows Authentication

2. Silverlight 3 and RIA Services – The basics

3. Silverlight 3 and RIA Services – The advanced things

4. Creating a Silverlight TagCloud UserControl

5. Silverlight 3 – WebClient, WebRequest and WCF calls using Credentials?

I think it’s interesting to see that the number 4 is an article from 2008. What will happen 2010, will we have this article about creating a Tag Cloud still in the top 10? Also in the top 5 we see an two-part series on RIA Services. RIA Services seems to be a popular topic.

Stats on users having support for Silverlight.

Sadly I changed the way I’m tracking the Silverlight support during the year, but I can give the stats for the last two months of visitors on my site.

November 2009:

December 2009:

Yes, these stats are nice, aren’t they? They show us on my site more than 80% of the visitors have support for Silverlight 3 or higher. But then again, this is for my site, which is heavily focused on Silverlight.

Alright the year 2010 has already started. I have a very interesting idea for a series on Silverlight, please wait for it.

Probably some people already saw my new blog design go live yesterday.

Less than a year ago I upgraded from Wordpress 2.2.1 to 2.6. Now I just wanted a new design. And for the sake of doing some HTML and CSS I made my own design. I must say I really like it myself.

The Past – Dreamplace by Sabiostar

The Present – Blue Mozaik by Mark Monster

What are the most awesome features?

Yes most of the things are just visible, that’s why it’s called a design. But I must say I really like the 3D-Tag cloud, originally made by Peter Gerritsen. But a few enhancements. Like getting the tags as an initParam and limiting the amount of tags shown. Besides that I also track the clicks in the tag cloud inside Google Analytics as events.

Further on I made use of jquery to add some nice small features where I need to manipulate the HTML-Dom. For example the comment-form shows your Gravatar while you’re just typing your response. The Gravatar API is very easy, just make sure you MD5-Hash the e-mail address and and add this to a specific url for basic support of Gravatar. For full API please visit their site.

If you find some things that can be done better, please let me know. I already fixed a small bug in the comment form this morning. And of course please let me know all the positive things you have to say about my blog.

I made it very clear that I’m blogging about .NET and Silverlight most of the time. This even though my blog is still kept alive by Wordpress, built in php.

I think most of my readers noticed a while ago. My focus is almost completely on Silverlight. This is because I think Silverlight is a very interesting piece of technology. Besides that I think there are lots of blogs about general .NET. Specialization is my power I think. I’m not able to write a lot of in depth articles about general .NET that aren’t about a topic that’s covered on another blog as well. So that’s my focus on Silverlight.

I think some of my articles are ranked good in the Silverlight community. A few minutes ago I had a look at the Skim page of SilverlightCream. My article about caching in Silverlight made it to this weeks top 5.

This encourages me to continue my work on Silverlight. I know there’s even a lot to learn on the Silverlight area, specially after Silverlight 3 Beta came out. But when a few weeks ago Ken Tucker asked me to contribute to Silverlight-Help, I just couldn’t say no. That’s why you can now read my Silverlight articles on both Silverlight-Help and this blog. Please let me know if you have questions or if you want to help on Silverlight-Help as well.

It has been more than a year since the relounce of my weblog. Just last week I started adding advertisements from Google Adsense to my blog. I do this because I hope to earn a little bit from the ads to pay the hosting bill.

I now have two small ad-blocks in the side bar, between the tag-cloud and the archives and after the blog roll.

Also the search is now done through Google. This way there are also ads displayed in the search results.

And finally I made ads active in the RSS-feed.

Yes it took me some time to get the TagCloud I created in Silverlight to work with WordPress. It’s very easy It isn’t that it’s difficult to set up the tagcloud but the documentation of WordPress isn’t very clear in my opinion. I found out I needed the functions get_terms and get_tag_link and the properties of a term. I used a small section of php code to assemble xml that I needed for the TagCloud.

<?php
$posttags = get_terms('post_tag', $args);
$outputTags = "<tags>";
if ($posttags) {
    foreach($posttags as $tag) {
        $outputTags .= "<tag count='";
        $outputTags .= $tag->count;
        $outputTags .= "' tag='";
        $outputTags .= $tag->name;
        $outputTags .= "' link='";
        $outputTags .= get_tag_link($tag->term_id);
        $outputTags .= "' />";
    }
}
$outputTags .="</tags>";
?>

This would essential output xml like:

<tags>
    <tag count='46' tag='.NET' link='http://mark.mymonster.nl/tag/net/' />
    <tag count='3' tag='Astoria' link='http://mark.mymonster.nl/tag/astoria/' />
    <tag count='8' tag='Blogging' link='http://mark.mymonster.nl/tag/blogging/' />
</tags>

This resulted in the Cloud page, click on a tag to see all posts belonging to the tag. I probably move along with this and write a Wordpress Widget to also replace the TagCloud in the sidebar with a Silverlight one.

I thought why not upgrade the WordPress since I was a lot of versions behind. I first looked at the different steps that are required to upgrade to the new version. Just four steps:

1. Delete your old WP files, saving ones you’ve modified.
2. Upload the new files.
3. Point your browser to /wp-admin/upgrade.php.
4. You wanted more, perhaps? That’s it!

Yes just four steps. You didn’t even need to make a backup first it seams. I’m glad I did make a backup, specially of the database. So which are the troubles I had to overcome.

The white page

I just went to the blog’s homepage, but saw nothing, yes just nothing. The management interface did work though. So when I went to the Design section I found out the theme doesn’t work anymore. Not only this, it was also removed from the blog. Very strange, so I selected the WordPress default theme to have at least something online.

The categories

I though a not supported theme, that can happen. But when looking at the default page I saw a list of empty categories, yes empty categories only the amount of posts in each category was shown. This did make me feel a little bit angry, where are categories gone to? After some Googling I found out people who have the same people including this by hand solution. Beside the missing of the category names also the hierarchy is lost. I didn’t fix the hierarchy because my new theme doesn’t support hierarchical categories.

The theme transition

Because the failure of my old theme I got looking into a new one. So goodbye Connections Reloaded.

Welcome Dreamplace.

During the Microsoft DevDays in May 2008 I found the book Blogging Heroes and bought it. Since I’m a blogger myself I thought I could learn a lot from the best appreciated bloggers in the world.
And yes this book is about the worlds finest bloggers. Bloggers like Gina Trapani of Lifehacker, Peter Rojas of Engadget and Eric T. of Internet Duct Tape have told their story.

The interviews covers things like monetizing, getting traffic and the enthusiasm in blogging. Although the blogs are very large with tens of thousands readers and a crew of 4 or maybe 10 people that can make a living of the blog, things I have got no ambition to. Still things like "Think every once in a while about you goals for blogging" or "Before blogging think about at least half a dozen articles before even considering blogging". Just a very good read for everyone involved in blogging.

My blog

I restarted blogging on the first of July. Since that day I posted 72 articles, this is actually the 1st one of the new year.  I wanted my blog to consist partly of posts about Life and partly about Technology. I think I have succeeded in this.

After all I’ve made a lot of posts in the first months and stabilized the amount of posts in the last three months.

Life

2007 was also the year of Lifehacking for me. As this hype already exists for some years now, I just got into Lifehacking for the first this year. I blogged about topics like the Law of Attraction and Time Management.

Technology

This year I learned a lot about Inversion of Control and besides this I studied some on the new technologies by Microsoft like WCF, WPF, WF, but also Astoria (now know as the ADO.NET Data Services) and MOSS 2007. But everything still was very basic, but there are too many new technologies released by Microsoft to be an expert in everything. But some basic understanding on these technologies is interesting for me to know.

Also this year was the year of publications. In September this year an article from my hand about Dependency Injection was published in the Dutch .NET Magazine. I also wrote two other articles with a former college.

This year I also completed my MCPD Enterprise Application’s certification. I’m not sure about what to do next year, but more on that in a different post.

My private projects

As I did in the past, I also started some small private projects this year. And the same as in the past no project did really make it to web. Like the Personal Performance Indicators project and the Local History project. I haven’t had much time to work on those projects, but they aren’t dead.

My private life

This year I moved from The Hague in The Netherlands to Zoetermeer in The Netherlands. Besides this I also changed jobs and now work for Rubicon. I still love working for Rubicon every day, haven’t found anything negative! Also this year I married my lovely wife Yvonne.

A lot of changes this year. And ahead a new year, the year 2008. More about 2008 in a post next year.

Note: I made all the charts using Google Chart API.

I just read an article on lifehacker.com about Translation in Google Talk. It works very good. Only the last translation should have been "Do you speak Dutch?", very strange the translation was actually a change in language even in the text.

This feature from Google could really help me since English isn’t my mother language. You can just invite the bot to your Google Talk account. Use language codes. For example Dutch to English is done by the bot nl2en@bot.talk.google.com and English to French is done by en2fr@bot.talk.google.com.

Bizner bank has published some Podcasts about Entrepreneurship. They are in dutch and Ben Tiggelaar speaks on those Podcasts. The podcasts have the book “Dromen, Durven, Doen” (or translated: Dream, Dare, Do) in mind.

An overview of those podcasts in dutch:

1. Voor de starters: Ondernemen…?
2. Voor de ondernemers: Ondernemen…?
3. Wat heb je als ondernemer aan je oude schoolrapporten?
4. Hoe weet je welke keuzes je moet maken als je binnenkort wilt gaan starten?
5. Durf jij je dromen over een eigen onderneming ook echt uit te voeren?
6. Doen! De belangrijkste stap voor een nieuwe onderneming.