When I first came to University lots of people (like Rob Miles) were trying to get undergraduates to start blogging. On the 6th of March 2012 I registered this domain and started blogging, getting myself added to the awesome Hull Compsci blogs syndicate. That was two years ago and a lot has changed so I thought I would write a summary post.
My first blog was a Wordpress one, but I felt that Wordpress was trying to be too much and I just wanted something a bit more lightweight. So, inspired by svbtle I created and released Simple which powers this blog. A least a few other people use it for their blogs as well which is kind of cool depite me not giving the project much attention recently.
I primarily use GitHub to share all my open source code. Over the last year I’ve made 379 contributions to both my own repositories and others that I use, and somehow gathered 48 followers. My most popular repository is Simple which has 481 stars and 96(!) forks, followed by my Django Debug toolbar panel with 191 stars.
I’ve put a few projects on the Python package index as well, and a couple seem to be used a fair bit: The Debug toolbar panel had 3690 downloads in the last month and my HtmlToWord library had 3812 (which I find weird because unlike the other package I can’t locate a single project other than mine that actually uses it).
In the last two years this blog has had 67,184 visitors with a peak of over 1,000 concurrent viewers, which is pretty neat. Simple handled every request speedily with no errors.
The most popular posts are:
According to Google Webmaster tools some of my popular posts have quite high google rankings for some queries:
I use Google Analytics for my website stats and it also tracks things like browser usage, operating system and screen resolution.
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I found a 4 “grave” security issues in some software that got issued their own CVE numbers (which is awesome!): osvdb.org/creditees/11331-tom-forbes. Slightly before I started this blog I also presented a research paper at the BlackHat security conference which was the most scary hour of my life. I haven’t really blogged about it but I intend to in the coming weeks.
I’m pretty happy with the last two years and I’m both excited for the future and a bit sad that my time at Hull is coming to a close.