Blogging

Five Years of Blogging

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Today is the fifth anniversary of my first post on this site. As I do every year at this time this post is going to be a look back over the last year as it related to this blog plus some overall information since the five year mark is a big one.

Positives from Blogging

Most of my positive points are the same over the years.

  • Drives my personal learning
  • Opportunity to try technology outside of my day job
  • Helping you all learn new things and/or overcome problems
  • Comments from you all when you find something useful

Challenges from Blogging

Most of the challenges are the same year over year as well.

  • Learning on a deadline
  • Self-applied pressure to post consistently
  • Focusing too much on results (stats, comments, etc.)
    • Much harder this year since the growth of the site has slowed
  • Picking the right topics
  • Time requirements

Top posts of the last year

Top post from the last five years

The next year

This year we have .NET 5 to look forward to which should bring with it client-side Blazor. I haven’t heard much about what else will be in .NET 5, but I’m sure it will be some exciting stuff.

Random Status from the last 5 years

264 posts (meeting the goal of one post per week)
664 comments
1,158,797 spam comments blocked by Akismet
2 hosting companies (Nodehost rocks!)
101 books read (last 3 years)
6 books purchased from referral links
Peek page views in July 2018
Peek yearly page views in 2019

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Failed Post

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This week I set out to write a continuation of the Blazor themed post I have been doing over the last few weeks. I was going to show how to handle OnSubmit instead of OnValidSubmit as I did in the first post on forms and validation.

I spend most of the week on trying to get this to work, but I failed. I couldn’t find a way to get access to the EditForm in the function that handled the submit. I’m sure there is a way to get this work, but I couldn’t get it to work in the timebox that I had for this post.

Hitting a wall on something like this is frustrating, but having to stretch and learn is one of the things I love about being in the development space. The hard part about a failed post like this week is I really need to cut my losses and move on to a new subject.

One of the things people often ask me about is how I manage to keep doing a post a week in the long run. The timebox I mentioned above is a critical component to the reason my system works. While I would love to be able to solve every problem I hit it just isn’t reasonable to do if I want to hit my goal of a post a week.

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Summer Schedule Challenges

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I’m writing just before July 4th, which in the United States is a national holiday. My family is taking advantage of this extra time off to travel to St. Louis for the first time. This is just one example of the many scheduling challenges that the summer season brings to my writing schedule.

Normal Schedule

Typically I am able to get my posts written in the hours before work by getting up an hour or two before I would have to in order to make it to the office on time. My wife gives me a hard time about getting up early, but getting at least one post done a week is something I am very proud of and don’t want to compromise on.

Dealing with the Summer Schedule

The question is how to deal with the changes in time expectations, but still get everything done. This week, for example, I only have 3 work days and will be traveling the rest of the week. The most important thing I have done to handle this situation is having 3 to 4 weeks of post done ahead of time. Knowing that I have a buffer of posts reduced my stress level related to my blog tremendously.

The other way I handle weeks with a lack of time is posts like this which are non-technical and therefore take a lot less time to write. The downside is these type of post don’t get very many reads. On the positive, it allows me some practice in a different writing style. I also hope that even if it isn’t super popular that someone gets some value out of it.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully, someone found something useful in this post. If you do like this type of post I would love to get some feedback on some non-technical topics that you all might be interested in. I don’t see this blog ever changing from primarily technical topics, but it is fun for me to mix it up occasionally.

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Four Years of Blogging

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Monday will be the fourth anniversary of my first post on this blog. If you have been around for a while this post is going to be very similar to the one from last year.

Positives

Most of my positive points are the same as last year, but here they are again in case you are new this year.

  • Driver for learning new things
  • Opportunity to use new/different technology outside of my normal work
  • Helping others learn new concepts
  • Helping others overcome problems
  • Comments from readers letting me know posts were helpful
  • No big hosting issues this year (thank you NodeHost!)

Challenges

Suprise some of the challenges are the same too. The big new one this year is negative responses/comments to some of my posts which has actually been much worse for me to come to terms with than the rest of the challenges I have faced.

  • Negative responses/comments (See this post an example)
  • Learning new things on a deadline
  • Self-applied pressure to meet my goal of a post a week (increasing my stress level)
  • Not focusing on stats, shares, comment, etc.
  • Picking the right things to learn
  • Time requirements taking away from other projects I would like to do

Top posts of the year

I had two repeats this year and the rest are new to the top 5. It is a bit surprising that a post with Angular 2 in the title is still making the top 5.

Resources

ASP.NET Weekly is a weekly digest of all the best ASP.NET related news and blog post run by Jerrie Pelser.

ASP.NET Community Standup is straight from the team at Microsoft who is responsible for ASP.NET Core. These videos are a great way to get the scoop on what is in the works.

NodeHost is my hosting provider. They provide super simple and cheap hosting. If you are looking for a place to host your own blog check them out. Combine them with Cloudflare and Let’s Encrypt and you are all set if you are going to WordPress route.

See my Books, Podcasts and Other Resources post for a more complete list.

The next year

This coming year is going to be a good one with the continued previews and eventual release of .NET Core 3 and related ASP.NET Core 3, Entity Framework Core 3, and support for Winforms/WPF.

I am also open to topic suggestions. Use the comments on this post or drop me an email and I will see what I can do.

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Three Years of Blogging

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This Thursday will be the third anniversary of my first post to this blog. This post is going to be similar to the post I did last year in the form of a retrospective.

Positives

Most of my positive points are the same as last year. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised as these are the reasons I spend my free time working on the blog.

  • Driver for learning new things
  • Opportunity to use new/different technology outside of my normal work
  • Helping others learn new concepts
  • Helping others overcome problems
  • Made my first contributions to open source
  • Comments from readers letting me know posts were helpful
  • No big hosting issues this year (thank you NodeHost!)

Challenges

Again most of the challenges are in line with what they were last year. I guess I should take that as a red flag and focus on solving some of my challenges instead of living with them.

  • Learning new things on a deadline
  • Self-applied pressure to meet my goal of a post a week (increasing my stress level)
  • Not focusing on stats, shares, comment, etc.
  • Picking the right things to learn
  • Time requirements taking away from other projects I would like to do

Top posts of the year

I was a little surprised at the makeup of this list. I expected to have more than a single repeat from last year’s list.

I did a series of posts looking at Identity Server 4 this year that didn’t make the above list individual, but as a total, the series was huge for me last year. If you are interested you can check out all the posts here.

Resources

There are a couple of resources that I want to point out.

ASP.NET Weekly is a weekly digest of all the best ASP.NET related news and blog post run by Jerrie Pelser. Jerrie does a lot of good work in addition to ASP.NET Weekly including a blog and a book.

ASP.NET Community Standup is straight from the team at Microsoft who is responsible for ASP.NET Core. These videos are a great way to get the scoop on what is in the works. Also, note that if you have watched in the past this show has moved from Scott Hanselman’s YouTube channel to .NET Foundation’s channel so update your subscriptions.

John Sonmez’s free blogging course is what finally pushed me over the edge to start blogging. It is a great resource to help get you moving.

NodeHost is my hosting provider. They provide super simple and cheap hosting. If you are looking for a place to host your own blog check them out. Combine them with Cloudflare and Let’s Encrypt and you are all set if you are going to WordPress route.

The next year

As usual, I am looking forward to seeing where ASP.NET Core goes next. Things like SignalR Core, HttpClientFactory, Entity Framework Core improvements are going to be great to explore.

Outside of ASP.NET Core, I am looking at putting out a very basic Xamiran app. Based how that goes you may see a few posts related to Xamiran in the next year.

If there is a topic you would like to see covered leave me a comment and I will add it to my list of things to look at.

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Two Years of Blogging

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Wednesday will mark two years for this blog. This post is going to be a bit of a retrospective on my blogging journey so far.

Positives

A number of positive things have come out of maintaining this blog some of them I expected other were surprises.

  • Driver for learning new things
  • Opportunity to use new/different technology outside of my normal work
  • Helping people learn a new concept or get past a sticking point
  • New connections with people outside of my normal circles
  • Improvements to my written communication skills
  • Improvements in picking up new technology

Challenges

In addition to the above, the following is a list of things that challenged me. Some of them have helped me grow and others continue to give me problems.

  • Learning new things on a deadline
  • Self-applied pressure to meet my goal of a post a week
  • Not focusing on stats, shares, comment, etc.
  • Picking the right things to learn
  • Losing focus

Hosting challenges

I hit quite a few issues with my host this year. The biggest being multiple multi-day downtimes, high site load times, and difficult to implement SSL support.

In an attempt to address the second two problems I started using Cloudflare which worked well, but the lack of SSL support from my host cause some quirky issues.

All this led to me switching to NodeHost last month. That is a referral link that will give you a $5 credit when you sign up. NodeHost does all their hosting on SSDs and has built-in support for Let’s Encrypt which took care of my SSL problems. Getting a site setup initially was harder that on my old host, but it was totally worth the switch and ended up costing less.

Even with the hosting change I still recommend using Cloudflare. By using Cloudflare my host is having to handle around 50% few requests thanks to Cloudflare’s caching.

Top post of the year

It is interesting to look back and see which post have done the best over time. It is surprising to me that my first post is still in the top 5 post for the last year. One of my top posts was featured on ASP.NET community spotlight which always pushes way more traffic.

The next year

From where it stands now I see more than enough things in the ASP.NET Core/Aurelia/Angular areas to learn and they will continue to be my focus over the next year. I am especially excited that ASP.NET Core tooling to be complete and for Visual Studio 2017 to be released this year. I am also really looking forward to the .NET Standard 2 support to be released. With those two items taken care of, I will feel completely comfortable recommending ASP.NET Core it a much wider range of scenarios.

As always I am open to topic suggestions for topics and happy to answer questions. Thank you for the support of the last couple of years.

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