2016 – Let’s wrap this up

Another year done here at vZilla and I would say a very successful one. Besides all the political melting pot either side of the Atlantic and the horrendous year for celebrity deaths. I personally have had a pretty good year.

I started the year as a Systems Engineer with Veeam where I had started in the March of 2015. Kicking the year off with Cisco Live which was in Berlin and then heading over for the Annual ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) NetApp A Team symposium over in Sunnyvale. That’s when things started to change I have detailed the start and finish of that transition here – http://bit.ly/2e1094p

Fast forward to November 2016, this is when I jumped into the new role with both feet for the last two months of the year. I managed to get some good content out there but nothing like I am going to be producing in 2017.

Statistics

It’s become a bit of a tradition for me to look back over the year and compare things, things like number of blog posts, site visits and any other comparable number I can get hold of and compare.

At the beginning of the year I changed the website statistics engine from Webalizer which looks very dated to AWstats (which also doesn’t look cutting edge) I have also looked at Google Analytics and more recently CloudFlare.

2015 Stats

See what I mean about dated… (Webalizer above) Below are the numbers from 2016.

I like looking at these stats at the end or beginning of the year. It shows when I was focused on the content creation or in fact when I was busy with day job. I can see that overall I didn’t get as many visits compared to last year but I can also see the reason behind that in 2016, July, August and September were my quiet months. Whereas this year for whatever reason I had a quiet spell from March through to July and then for the rest of the year it was very busy. Overall hits are up.

From a content side of things, the top viewed posts came around the time that Veeam made their “Next Big Thing” announcement towards the end of August.

Veeam “The Next Big Thing” Wrap Up – http://bit.ly/2boeEj7

A lot of hits during the month of November where I took part in the #VDM30in30 challenge and managed 10 posts. It was always going to be a big ask having started a new job on the 1st November, I did have a couple more posts that were in draft but time constraints meant they were left in the chamber ready. You can find them posts here – https://www.vzilla.co.uk/vzilla-blog/category/vdm30in30

A big part of my #VDM30in30 posts were around the home lab and in particular my post on my own use case for the home lab – Test, Demo & Training can be found here – https://vzilla.co.uk/vzilla-blog/projecttomorrow-my-own-use-case-test-demo-train

Looking at the number of posts for 2016, I managed 8 more posts than the previous year, the intention for 2017 is to break that 30-post mark, but I really feel strongly about quality over quantity.

My twitter is still where I started my community engagement, I would say that a lot of my success has stemmed from the activity and effort I have put into this social media craze. I would also suggest that this is where I learn the most about our crazy industry.

I am blown away by some of these numbers compared to the year before, seeing 835.8K impressions compared to the previous year’s 498.6K is mind blowing! Also, picking up over 200 more followers, the analytics engine from twitter seem to have a problem with twitter followers during the first few months not sure if anyone else had that issue?

All in all, I am happy with how 2016 went from a work perspective and social media & blogging presence. With the change of roles this is going to mean a much stronger focus on different content and may affect the content that arrives on vZilla but all in all content will be created and shared and hopefully that will help a community member somewhere.

Happy New Year and the best of luck to everyone.