2008 - My blogging year in review

Statistics

23,629 visits (85% increase from 2007)
37,498 pageviews (70% increase from 2007)

44.81% come to my site from a search engine
33.83% are referred traffic (Thanks Planetlotus and Codestore)
21.36% are direct traffic

Top five visiting countries: USA, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and my home country, Norway.

Top five browser profiles: 53.58% Firefox, 40.38% Internet Exploder, 2.84% Opera, 1.39% Safari, and 1.34% Chrome (impressive, considering it's time on the market).

Top 5 content of 2008

1. Cross client (Web/Notes) validation using JavaScript


2. Slick integration between FCKeditor and Lotus Domino


3. Using embedded view in $$ViewTemplate to control count


4. Embed multiple standalone forms on a domino form using DHTML


5. String to char-array in Java

Comment on Content

I would think the most useful thing I blogged about in 2008 would be the "slick" integration between FCKEditor and Lotus Domino. Although FCKEditor is a bloated beast compared to some of the other Rich Text editors out there, it is still a great editor.

I was probably most excited about my speedy templating engine. I still haven't released a demoapp due to laziness, and a couple more reasons.

1. I have a feeling that the templating engine is a solution to a niche problem. I use it as a way to go beyond some of the restrictions of Views in Domino (being aware of the index of the document you're rendering, what level it is on, etc, and rendering different output based on that information).


2. Templating engines are becoming less important/need to be rewritten when Domino 8.5 is released, and we have XPages.


3. There really hasn't been much response to my templating blogposts. It could be because I haven't been able to communicate what benefits there are in templating, or that the problems I've had with Domino/Views aren't common problems.

Missing content

I've still to publish a demoapp of the improved templating engine due to above mentioned reasons. If I get really motivated/someone motivates me, I may release a demoapp in 2009.

The beautiful URLs experiment got dropped once I found out that the technique generates a lot of errors in the domlog. Maybe XPages will make the URLs more flexible (it would be great to be able to map URLs per application/in the NSF).

2009

If everything goes as planned, I'll be at Lotusphere 2009. The hotel is booked, and flight/conference tickets are paid for. I'll depart from Norway January 17. and return January 23. Hopefully I'll arrive in time for BALD!

Blogging-wise, I'm becoming less and less motivated to do experiments. This is mostly because I can't come up with new, exciting (to me) problems to solve. With XPages and Lotusphere 2009, this will hopefully change.