2015 roundup

For the third year running, and the fourth time overall, I am actually writing a roundup article. Not exactly the most exciting stuff I write, but useful all the same, at least for me, if not for anyone else. It lets me look back at what I have done over the past year, and take stock of my writings and musings.

2015 has been an interesting year, marked by stability in my work life situation and change at home. I have remained an employee of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, in the service and support department, all the while keeping up with my studies, completing one module, and starting another. At home, we welcomed our second daughter back in June, a joyous occasion.

In the end of October we bought a new place to live, and the following two months saw a lot of packing, moving and decorating, as will the first few months of 2016, I’m sure. Mid-December we took delivery of our new car, about which you will in all likelihood read more about in the year to come.

In general, the year has seen a mix of content for the blog, mostly consisting of tech stuff, with some op-eds sprinkled in between. I have been good about jotting down ideas whenever they come to me, and creating posts in advance in a way that has allowed me to keep a pre-loaded stack of posts in the scheduling queue with as much as a two and a half-month lead time on posts; very comfortable. That stack dwindled to nothing towards the end of the year.

January was all tech, all the time, and half of it was Citrix specific, of all things. Likewise, February was tech and solution centric, and saw the start of the #TBT project. March and April saw opinion-pieces, and yet more how-tos. May saw yet more how-tos, this time mostly dealing with exchange user management, as well as the launch of brain teaser saturdays – we’ll see if they return or not. In June, I offered up a couple of op-eds, with the background for one hitting particularly close to home.

July saw mostly op-eds, along with a review, while August was a mix of thoughts on study, opinion-pieces, and a primer on powerpoint file size reduction. September was all about my opinions, starting with a review, and ending with a three-part discourse on the state of modern journalism as I see it, which even spilled over into October, where it was joined by another review, and some Mac-specific troubleshooting.

November was mainly tips and tricks of various kinds, with one op-ed about security questions and the lack of security inherent to still using them. December, likewise, has seen tips and tricks, as well as an op-ed (this article).

As I promised back in May, I also want to revisit my analytics. Here’s the data (as of December 14th):

• Monthly readership: 7’900
• Return visitor rate: 7.5%
• Feedburner subscribers: 95

As for geography, that data looks as follows:

1. United States (30%)
2. India (10%)
3. United Kingdom (9%)
4. Canada (4%)
5. Germany (4%)

All in all, 2015 has been a very good year for me, on several fronts, personal, as well as professional. Here’s hoping 2016 will be another good one.