My Activity Report For 2015

Earlier this year (July), I wrote about my first year of blogging and the stats around it and I feel it was important because it was my first year.

This time I’m going to write about my activity in 2015 and report the stats around it. The plan is to do this every year and possibly inspire other developers to start blogs of their own.

This post will be broken up in several parts because it isn’t just one thing that I’ve done for the year. I’ll break it up into the following:

1. My written WordPress blog (you’re on it now)
2. My YouTube channel for video blogs
3. Courses I published
4. The conferences and events that I’ve spoken at for the year

Time to head down the list.

My Written WordPress Blog

The blog still is my most popular source of information. I get a ton of positive feedback on it which I find very satisfying, so thank you to everyone leaving a compliment.

This year brings my blog to a total of 192 entries. They were all on mixed subjects such as Ionic Framework, Node.js, Apache, NativeScript, and ReactJS.

For the 2015 year I managed to get 1,653,001 views and 4,716 comments. I personally find this pretty incredible. If I compare the final count to my July count, I managed to get 866,058 views between July and the end of the year. Not bad!

Here is a screenshot of this years traffic according to JetPack for WordPress:

I am still using a Digital Ocean VPS to host my WordPress. The specs for my particular Droplet are as follows:

• 2GB RAM Memory
• 2 Core CPU
• 40GB Hard Drive
• 3TB Transfer

It was a rocky year for my server. I’ve had to make many performance tweaks to my Digital Ocean Droplet to accommodate all the traffic in addition to upgrading to a more powerful virtual machine. At the time of writing this, the specs above are costing me $20.00 per month, plus 20% for backups.

My YouTube Channel for Video Blogs

I started making YouTube videos quite a bit of time after I started blogging. However, my stats for the 2015 year on YouTube have been pretty good.

My channel received 348,864 views and 1,617 likes. I wish the number of likes was larger, but I’m very happy there were more than the amount of dislikes.

To date, I’ve published 104 videos. These videos compliment my WordPress blog, so they were on the topic of Ionic Framework, Node.js, and similar.

A screenshot of my YouTube stats can be seen here:

I have not yet acquired any fancy recording hardware for my videos, but I’ve gotten several requests to find a microphone to improve my sound quality. I have a microphone on my Amazon Wishlist, but I’m trying to keep personal costs low so I haven’t purchased it.

Courses I Published

2015 was the first year that I started making courses. The first course I ever made was Ionic Framework 101 and it was published to udemy.com. As of right now this beginner level course has 105 enrolled.

I didn’t just make one course though. I also crafted a beginner level course called NativeScript 101 that focuses on application development for Android and iOS using Telerik’s NativeScript language. It has had 56 enrolled in 2015.

Both courses can be seen from the courses section of my blog.

The Conferences & Events I’ve Spoken At

Before May of 2015, I hadn’t ever spoken at an event, so my list starts later in the year.

• SoCal Code Camp San Diego
• The San Francisco Ionic Framework Meetup
• Phoenix Mobile Festival
• Couchbase Live New York
• ConnectJS
• AnDevCon Santa Clara

These, for the most part, were conferences or events not hosted in a Couchbase office. Sure I did plenty of Couchbase hosted Meetups, but the above were adventures on the outside (still for Couchbase though).

Conclusion

I appreciate all the loyal fans of my blog and all the people who have made it to my presentations or demonstrations. To help support my content distribution efforts, please consider donating towards my server expenses. You can donate via PayPal or Square Cash.

If you are planning to start your own blog or web server and would like to use Digital Ocean or Bluehost, please sign up via one of the affiliate links I included throughout this article so we both get some credit.

Nic Raboy

Nic Raboy is an advocate of modern web and mobile development technologies. He has experience in C#, JavaScript, Golang and a variety of frameworks such as Angular, NativeScript, and Unity. Nic writes about his development experiences related to making web and mobile development easier to understand.