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Here I'm republishing an old blog post of mine originally from July 2017. The article has been slightly improved.
The Eerie Linux blog silently turned 5 years just last month. I thought a while about what kind of anniversary post I should write to celebrate the fifth birthday. I was even thinking of closing the blog on that day or at least announce that I would no longer be able to write posts regularly. I decided against it. While I don't make any promises, I will try to keep the blog going for now.
In the end I decided not just to hold back that birthday post (this one) but do something special instead: Write a full article every five days! It was a lot of work, but June 2017 saw 6 posts each 5 days with over 1,600 words on average (with one just falling short on 2,000). I put a lot of detail into those posts and also included quite some pictures.
It has been a fun experience but also an exhausting one. I have always been pressed for time and even though I tried to create as much material on weekends if the targeted date was during the week. Still I almost never managed to complete a whole article before the day it was due and often had to finish it in the late hours of evening after work. But now it's done and I'm happy about that!
A lot has happened in the last 5 years. When I started the blog in June 2012, I had quite some time on my hands but I wasn't sure if I would always find enough topics to write about. This has changed completely. Free time is pretty scarce these days but there's just so much going on in technology and related areas that I have a very, very long list of things that I'd like to write about - and that list grows faster than I can write and publish articles.
I've also moved houses three times over these years - and still haven't missed a single month completely. Each and every month has had at least one new article and I'm somewhat proud of that because a lot of times it really hasn't been easy.
Since 2013 every year I get most page hits from the US with Germany being second. Ranks 3+ vary.
After thinking about starting a blog for over a year, in mid 2012 I actually did that. I had been using SuSE and Ubuntu Linux on the desktop for a while and wanted to know more about the operating system. And I figured that it would make sense to pick an ambitious but realistic project and write about it as the journey continued.
In my first half-year I wrote 24 (!) posts introducing myself, finding a suitable distro (looking into Gentoo first but then settling for Arch), thoughts on graphical toolkits and so on. The most important articles were part of a series on installing and comparing no less than 20 Linux desktop environments.
The 6 months of 2012 saw just over 1,000 page views and I even got my first "likes" and comments. However I had no idea if I was doing good for a blog of that kind. Considering that it was public and that the whole world could potentially visit the blog, it seemed pretty low. Especially if you consider the many hours that went into writing the posts. "There must be thousands of Linux blogs out there and who should read them all?", I thought. But I went on doing what I was doing because of my own interest in Linux topics. And I also continued to blog about it. If somebody would read and enjoy it: Great. If not - well, it had at least made me write an English text which is quite valuable practice for the non-native speaker.
In retrospective, 2013 was an interesting year. I got the most comments and "likes" that I ever got in a single year. And page hits increased to just over 6,600! You can imagine that I was extremely happy that there actually proved to be some interest in what I was doing. I already had less time now and managed to write 22 posts in the whole year instead of 24 in 6 just months in the year before.
I continued to explore and compare applications build with the Qt and GTK toolkits and these proved to be my most popular articles. But I also decided to take a little peek into the bigger world of *nix and have a shy first look at Hurd and BSD. My focus completely remained on Linux, though (little did I know that this would come to an end in the future!). Then I dug into package building and learned a lot by trying to update an old and no longer supported Linux distro. Finally I got my domain _elderlinux.org_ and made the first step towards my original goal: Building my own Linux distribution (you have to have done that once, right? And if only for learning purposes).
In 2014 things started to decline. The page hits raised slightly to over 6,800 but that was all. I managed to publish 14 posts, but all top ten most popular ones were written in previous years. I didn't notice that back in the day, though. I managed to get a wide variety of topics covered, including my first post on hardware (writing about the new RISC-V platform that I still keep an eye on).
The most important achievement of the year was that I completed my _Arch:E5_ project. My own distribution was Arch-derived but did a lot of things differently. It used the de-blobbed _Linux libre_ kernel, was based on a different libc, replaced systemd with _runit_ and used LLVM/Clang as the default compiler among other things. It also used a more modular repository architecture compared to mainline Arch Linux. I took this project pretty far: In the end I had a nice self-hosted distro that even came with two desktop environments to choose from. I learned a lot by doing this but since nobody else seemed to be interested in it (I didn't reach out on the Arch forums or anything, though, to be honest!), I ended the project, continuing to explore other things.
This was the year things changed. Page hits dropped: With about 6,500 hits only, fewer people visited my blog than even in 2013. I only wrote one post per month (with the exception of April where it was one April fools article and another setting things straight again). Only two posts of this year made it to the top 10 of most popular posts: One about the "Truly Ergonomic Keyboard" (which obviously brought some people to my blog who would probably not be interested in most other articles that I wrote) and another one that was a "FreeBSD tutorial for Linux users" (that received unusual attention thanks to being featured on FreeBSDNews).
I hadn't planned it to be but 2015 was the first year on the blog that was totally dominated by *BSD topics. Since I had started to seriously explore FreeBSD and OpenBSD, this looks like a natural thing. I wrote an April Fools post about Arch Linux's Pacman coming to OpenBSD and then tried to prove that actually works. Then a friend asked me about FreeBSD and I decided to write a little introduction series. And then the year was more or less over.
After the disappointment of declining public interest in my blog I didn't expect much from 2016. Especially as I had been venturing deeper int *BSD territory - and liked it enough to continue writing about it. This was obviously even more niche than Linux and how many people would want to read that stuff, especially from a beginner? I was in for a surprise: the blog got more than 7,100 hits that year with four new posts (all of which were featured on FreeBSDNews) making it into to top 10 this time! I had hoped to reach 7,000 hits in 2014 and after it looked like things weren't going in a good direction, this was a pretty rewarding experience.
I wrote about various *BSD topics: A howto on setting up a dual-boot FreeBSD/OpenBSD with full disk encryption, a little comparison of documentation in Linux and (Free)BSD, a short introduction to Vagrant and a series on getting started with Bacula on FreeBSD. And finally in December an article on using TrueOS for over three months as my daily driver. This post would spark a lot of interest in 2017, making it the top ranked popular post at the time I write this.
In the first half of this year I have already written 14 articles, including two series that _a lot_ of work went into: The adventures of reviving and updating an ancient FreeBSD 4.11 system with Pkgsrc and building a home router with OPNsense/pfSense. And now after only 6.5 months page hits had already climbed up to over 6,700! Recent 3 month have all totalled in more that 1,000, a mark that I had never reached before.
And that's all before FreeBSD News, Lobsters and even DragonFly Digest linked to either my pfSense vs. OPNsense article or even to the whole BSD home router series! That made the stats really skyrocket over the previous two weeks.
It definitely looks like there are quite some other people out there that don't think *BSD is boring!
Daily blog stats 07/2017 (PNG)
Before the great rush I got about 20 to 60 page hits each day. The new record is now 425 hits on Jul 18 after Lobste.rs picked up the pfSense vs. OPNsense comparison!
Weekly blog stats 07/2017 (PNG)
Weekly hits were between 140 and 370 between Jan and Jul. And then there was this week that saw 1,200 page hits - this is as much as the whole month of May this year and that was the absolute monthly record before!
Monthly blog stats 07/2017 (PNG)
Between January 2016 and June 2017, the blog got 440 (January '16) and 1,200 (May '17) hits. And then July happened with over 2,700 hits alone!
Yearly blog stats 07/2017 (PNG)
The best blogging year so far had been 2016 with 7.100 hits - now at the end of July 2017, this blog has already seen over 8.800 hits. I'm pretty confident to reach the magic mark of 10.000 this time (wow!). [Looks like I had no idea that the trend that was just begining here would continue: In the end, 2017 brought just over 32,000 hits!]
Of course I cannot say for sure. But I've found my place in the FreeBSD community and made a comfortable home with GhostBSD. After becoming part of the small team that develops this OS, I've faced quite some challenges and without any doubt there are more to come. But it is a great learning experience and being a (albeit small) part of it feels very rewarding. [In the meantime I left the team again thanks to "too little time".]
And even though time is a very limiting factor I currently don't feel like taking a break any longer! I will definitely continue to explore more BSD and write about it. Next station: Some preparations for an article on using jails on the newly installed OPNsense router (or anywhere else!). Thanks for reading - and see you soon.
