A year in review

A lot of people have stated that 2017 was a rubbish year, I don’t have that same feeling. My year was a very exciting one. My first year in a Technical Marketing role and I was learning the ropes, pushing myself out of some comfort zones but enjoying pretty much every minute.

Here is a look back at what I said for the 2016 version – https://vzilla.co.uk/vzilla-blog/the-year-of-the-vzilla-2016

This type of post for me has come a little bit of a tradition, a summary of my year from vZilla.co.uk stats to my biggest achievements with some community and travel summary as well.

vZilla

2017 was a different year for vZilla.co.uk, because I started the new role back in November 2016 I knew I was going to struggle to find time to contribute to the site as much in 2017.

The first hurdle was moving away from iPage, the site had been managed here since its birth but the feedback I was hearing about WordPress meant I had to explore the migration over. This happened around the April timeframe in 2017. There is no transfer or migration option available so it’s a manual copy and paste which took time itself.

https://vzilla.co.uk/vzilla-blog/migration-of-vzilla

The first measurement I want to share is the number of blog posts for 2017. As I have mentioned already the draw on the new role and the ramping up had some effect on the content that I could get onto the site. 25 posts which is around 2 a month, hopefully this is something I can increase in 2018.

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The next statistics I want to cover are the unique visitors to the site. I was expecting a huge drop off after moving over as some of the migration was not as simple and I had to sacrifice some link configurations but I think we got there in the end.

October was a great month and given the previous unique visitor best in 2016 was November at 1518 visits It was nice to see the uplift in hits.

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Statistics taken from AWStats via iPage hosting.

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Statistics taken from WordPress hosting.

The last figures I wanted to include were the ones from Twitter. Some people have said that their twitter has taken a downward turn and they don’t feel like they are using that as their primary community and content tool, I beg to differ and feel that it’s getting more and more important for my learning and spreading content.

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Some noticeable hikes and peaks hit in the above chart. We first had VeeamON our event in New Orleans in May, Then I had my first VMworld that seemed to generate some traffic and then finally we had October which had the EMEA version of VMworld and also NetApp Insight in Las Vegas.

Averaging 450 tweets, 2500 profile visits and 450 mentions a month which is significantly larger than previous years.

Biggest Achievements

I think it is important to look back on what your biggest achievement was for the year because that’s how you can set goals for the new year. I would also say that at least one of these completely put me out of my comfort zone but looking back I had so much fun doing it.

  1. VeeamON main stage for two of the days for General Session
  2. VMware breakout session both US and EMEA events
  3. Placed 44 in the top Virtualisation blogs – https://vzilla.co.uk/vzilla-blog/vzilla-top-50-vblog

Community

A continued effort to be a part of our great IT community, this is massively helped by presenting at User Groups across the country and world. I am also part of the team that look after the Veeam Vanguards.

NetApp A Team – I continued to evangelise the NetApp technologies, even more so as they align with Veeam and our vision, Veeam will be added to the NetApp Price list early this year which is very excited as an advocate for both vendors. I was fortunate to attend the annual “ETL” event and the NetApp Insight in Las Vegas (although this is an event I would like to forget given the circumstances that week)

Cisco Champion – Another great alliance partner for Veeam so a huge benefit to hear what is coming from Cisco in the data centre space, I was lucky enough to attend both Cisco Live Europe and US. The absolute highlight of my year was getting to attend the Bruno Mars concert put on by Cisco at the US event.

VMware vExperts – Integral to what I have done for the last 15 years in the community, I was again lucky enough to attend my first ever VMworld in both Las Vegas and Barcelona but on top of that I was able to present at both as well as get my session on to the vBrownBag stage.

VMworld US Session

VMworld EMEA Session

vBrownBag Session

Travel and Events

I managed to really clock some miles up in 2017, favourite place was South Africa by far. An amazing place and need to make more time when I am down there hopefully in 2018.

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Here is to another great year in 2018, I hope everyone is busy setting their goals and working on a plan on how they can achieve them. I know I have and hopefully come this time next year I can share those ambitions and goals.

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