Surprise, surprise: I have completed my first 1000 days of blogging on McuOnEclipse :-). And *finally* I have completed today the Compendium. When I started the blog back at Feb 1st 2012, it was the beginning of a journey to the unknown. And yes, it is still Kevin’s fault ;-). During these days (actually: nights) of that project, I have learned a lot, so let me share some of the data.

WordPress Statistics (dzone not included)

What I know about YOU

I’m hosting McuOnEclipse on WordPress.com. WordPress provides detailed statistics and detailed information about you :-). A number of articles get re-published on dzone.com from where I only have summary data. Pretty interesting data, and numbers don’t lie, right?

1. You have viewed the posts and articles 2’350’978 times. Your monthly view rate is 120’000 on WordPress and 35’000 on dzone.com, so you are very active reader. You read articles mostly during the week, less on week-ends. You are a very efficient and organized reader, as you read on average 2.51 articles with every visit. However, every Friday you go home earlier to drink a week-end beer, to have a delicious BBQ in your backyard, or to go out for a party with your friends and/or coworkers. Every week-end, you take your bicycle or motor bike and cruise through the world, take part in sports or family events, or taking amazing pictures you are going to share.
   

   Typical Weekly Page Views Pattern

2. You are not afraid to speak up and participating in discussions. You have submitted more than 7628 comments. You share your views, tips and tricks. You are helping me out, commenting with solutions to problems I have, or pointing readers to other interesting articles. Sometimes you are desperate and ask for help because you have not found any answers in official forums. You are friendly, patient and cooperative. But a part of you is working on the Dark Side and generates a flood of bad, bad, bad spam. If you do not stop spamming immediately, I will tell your mother!
   

   Spam

3. You are a very curious person. As my wife, who is always asking me about things I think is not worthwhile to tell about (“Is that couple still together? What kind of clothes did that person have? In what domain again are you working on?”). You master the internet technology, are a frequent user of search engines of all kinds. There are more than 655 readers who want to get updated immediately if there is a new post. An unknown number of you are using RSS feeds to get the news. Most of you are interested in how to program or debug a board, how to fix a bug or to use a workaround, how to slowly smoke a piece of meat, or having fun with an engineering joke.
4. You are fluently speaking/reading English. You are located in nearly every part of the Earth, except Central Africa. If you are located in China, you are using ways to bypass the WordPress blocks of your country. I have a single fan in Kiribati, but I don’t know on which island you are, so please let me know. You are searching the internet, and your favorite search terms are “mcuoneclipse”, “eclipse”, “doxygen”, “frdm”, “freertos”, “processor expert”, “hc-06”, and what is really, really scary: my name!
   

   Views by Region

5. You are an artist and you like any kind of beautiful pictures and photographs, even if they show bad soldering technique. Interestingly, you tend to ‘like’ WordPress my pictures more than my tech articles. Please consider liking technology too, as technology is not a bad thing. Your appreciation with ‘likes’ and ‘starring’ gives me a direction what my next post could be, or gives me an opportunity to learn more about your projects. Your favorite article is about Bluetooth.
6. Beside of nice photographs (food, landscape, boards, resistors, capacitors, …), you love source code and cannot get enough. I would say that you are obsessed by example code and snippets. You have forked my https://github.com/ErichStyger/mcuoneclipse repository more than 378 times which has thousands of files. You are a bit shy to use Git to feed back contributions: don’t worry, start slowly and it will work out well! On average, you download the McuOnEclipse components about 10’000 times every year.

My data might be wrong, or I’m misreading it. If that’s the case, post a comment to get it fixed :-).

Tips

Doing something is always a learning experience. And I can say that I have learned a lot. If you want to start your own blog (or are already blogging), I have a few tips to share:

1. Be authentic. Tell about what you do, what you think, what you are working on. Show your passion for your topic. A tutorial about blinking an LED: That’s of interest for *everybody*! If you work on a little thing change in-house heating system: that might be of interest for someone out there (maybe?).
2. Be useful. Think about what readers need, or what they are looking for. Create content which has hopefully value for someone. Don’t let marketing take over your blog because they realize that your posts gets more attention than theirs. Don’t be tempted by research that blogs about shoes, hand bags and make-up are the most successful ones in the world: stay on the engineering side!!!!!!
3. Manage your time. Reserve week-end time and night-time for writing. Good if you don’t need much sleep ;-). Drink lot’s of Espresso coffee shots, black as your engineering soul: No milk and no sugar, that only will affect your body shape!
4. Post on a regular base, e.g. on a weekly base. Usually I work on several draft posts. Some I can finish in half an hour, on some I’m working on over the period of several weeks. Keep a set of draft posts in your backhand if you are blocked or have too much other stuff going on.
5. Use it as information source: You get asked the same question by your coworker/students all the time? Point them to an article you wrote! You know that you had that problem in the past, but not sure any more how you solved it? Google your own articles :-). Your neighbours smell the smoke and wants to get invited? Invite them (of course!) and point him to the recipe in your blog!
6. Be organized: the hard thing with posting articles that after a while some might be outdated (new software and tools, …). That is really the hardest part to catch up (and I’m lacy in that topic). What is a good idea to start from the beginning is to properly tag the articles. Additionally, I recommend to start with an organized list of topics in a Compendium.
7. Care about privacy and confidentiality. You can post things about your wife only if you are sure that a) she is not interested in what you are blogging about (technology, geeky stuff) or b) if she does not speak that language (English, but why she always understands things she is not supposed to understand???). Then you are safe. At least almost. Or most of the time. Maybe only sometimes. Oh well… I hope she does not read this one….

Thanks for Reading, and Happy Blogging 🙂

PS: Send me more cookies and coffee 🙂