Well 2020, and I hope in years to come I can come back here and reflect on some of the positives that the year had for me personally. In a year where globally we were constrained to our home offices, missing major tech conferences across the globe and that well sought out interaction with other introvert type people, the show went on and we were able to at least finish the year at least it seems personally unscathed. However, there is still a long road to get down where we will see mass scale vaccinations rolled out and then who knows what the new normal looks like once that is complete.

The pre warning here, this is not a tech post and it really is a log of my year of 2020 when it comes to data points across sites and social media with some other added in data that I would like to document, it is in no way a brag or a gloat. In fact, if anything these numbers specifically the blog are very low in comparison to most in the community that I know saw a big dip in traffic during the year.

I have been doing these posts since way back in 2014 (see links below) and these are no way a flex but a case of me personally documenting how things have gone for some of the things I am passionate about around my blog site and twitter from a social media platform perspective. This year also saw some additions to the platforms that I use, notably I think the world consumed so much more from YouTube for both entertainment but also education.

2019 – Year in Review

2018 – Year in Review

2017 – Year in Review

2016 – Year in Review

2015 – Year in Review

2014 – Year in Review

Travel

I think for everyone travel was not what they expected it to be in 2020. For someone since 2017 has been travelling over 175,000km per year, 2020 was a little on the quiet side although I still managed to clock up 45,000km and that was mostly due to our Sales Kick Offs being in their respective geographies. First up I went to China, if you think about the timing of this, all in all this could have been a very different story. We were in Shanghai and when I returned, I really didn’t feel myself at all, but we will likely never know if that was COVID related or not. We then headed to Prague for the following week and then onto Atlanta in the US for the final week of the three week Sales Kick Off tour. Then things were quiet until March where I managed to get in a trip to Dubai for an analyst meeting just before the world went into lockdown for pretty much the rest of 2020.

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Twitter stats

I have noted down these stats for many years, Twitter has been my social media outlet to converse with the IT Community, to learn, to help etc. 2020 gave us much more opportunity to engage albeit virtually and socially over the platform. I have documented these numbers since 2015 as you can see below that gives me a good insight into how things are going. Everyone has access to this data via https://analytics.twitter.com/ My theory or take away on these numbers are as long as the numbers are positive compared to the previous year for the most then it is worth the time and effort. I use Twitter still as much if not more than I have ever done, it’s a great resource for information. For me the IT community is thriving there and probably now more than ever it’s a great place to speak to each other and ask questions and contribute.

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Not sure what I did in 2017 to warrant that many profile visits or what I did wrong in 2019 but the trends all point to a continued growth, which I guess is a good thing.

 

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I think this one speaks for itself, the bigger the profile gets, the more following the more impressions and people you reach, so seeing that the last few years have had the bigger part of the pie is no real surprise.

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Google Analytics

When it comes to Google Analytics, I still have no real idea what I am doing. Luckily my colleague and friend vMiss helped me get a lot of this up and running mostly around the search console which enables you to create better focused content, although its still well above my head. There were two things though that I did find interesting when comparing 2020 to 2019 page view data and that’s a close to 100% increase in page views between the two years. Everything else seems pretty normal with people staying on the site for around the 2-3-minute mark which is expected if you are reading one of my posts, its likely that they are reading one and then leaving.

Page views

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Top posts

Another thing worth sharing that I have done so in the past has been around top posts, in particular there was one post that got lots of hits for me as well as questions and feedback. I have listed them below, interesting that the new office setup post came in at number 2 after some great numbers seen over on Reddit, will post that below for reference.

  1. How to mount an NFS Share in Windows Server 2019 = 5167 pageviews
  2. #ProjectFreddie – The Story & Kit List = 1418 pageviews
  3. Veeam Extract Utility – Not New but its now a standalone download = 1351 pageviews
  4. How is COVID-19 #CoronaVirus affecting the IT Industry = 1044 pageviews
  5. Veeam Backup & Replication – VMware Snapshotless recovery points = 862 pageviews

Reddit

Much like YouTube, my days and evenings have very much involved Reddit, there are some amazing things on there. 2020 will be remembered mostly for me building out my new insane office setup. I posted the setup in the early days to Reddit and got an incredible 6.6k upvotes for the setup picture

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I actually had so much fun building this and it was a great project to take my mind away from the madness that was happening around the world. There have been many updates as well since where I have added and removed items to make my daily routine better and more efficient. I am thinking about creating some YouTube content to walk through some of the choices I made. If that would be of interest maybe drop a comment below and let me know as I am a little nervous about doing it albeit it has been what I have spent my YouTube viewing time doing.

YouTube

The year of YouTube, at least for me, I have spent so many hours this year on YouTube watching all sorts of content, a lot of training content around Kubernetes and Cloud, Desk and office tour setups, tech every day and EDC in general content to more recently exploring photography and camera equipment as I embark on another project for 2021. I even watched some strange camping videos where people camp in the strangest of places without being caught.

But the reason for this section was to highlight the other side and that’s the content creation side, I started the YouTube content creation journey because of 2020, it’s a great outlet to be able to share and demo product and solutions that are just different to the traditional blog post.

At the time of writing we are currently at 333 subscribers which has grown quite nicely during the year and we have a lot of content on there covering the Veeam platform and portfolio of products and features and functionality.

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Goals for 2021

I will keep this brief; first goal is family and friends. This is still going to be a testing year until things start to turn the corner so its important to stay as close to your friends and family wherever they are in the world and make sure each and everyone is ok mentally and physically. A long with this I need to concentrate on me a little more as well, exercise and diet need to be addressed. My aim here though is to take a month by month approach and change things up to keep them sustainable.

In terms of more tech related, its going to be take more time for me to learn new things, something I started in the Summer of 2019 was learning new things. This has been ongoing and in fact this is another area I am grateful that 2020 allowed me to do further. I will also be concentrating on the YouTube content as I think its just easier to consume for people these days. I may as I already mentioned take on some new content ideas that I have had for a while so its not just enterprise tech and veeam related but also consumer tech related or mimic the tech videos I am watching.

With that though this is already too long, I wish everyone a Happy New Year and a healthy 2021. Stay Safe and lets keep pushing to get through the other side.

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