January was a good month at You Want It When?  It had the largest increase in unique visitors in a single month.  Unique visitors for the month of January grew ~75% over the month of December.  The site still doesn’t have a Google page rank yet.  The traffic stats seem to warrant it, but apparently there are other more important criteria.   If anyone has any insights into this, I’d love to hear from you.

I’m using the statistics from my hosting service this month rather than from Google Analytics.  There are differences between the two analytic engines that I’d like to understand better.  The top 10 are basically the same, but in a different order.  I’m guessing this has to do with Java script being disabled on the visiting clients that accounts for some of this, and the rest has to do with Google filtering out crawlers and bots, but I’m not entirely sure.  I figured the best view to present is the unedited view, so here it is.

 The top 10 articles for the month of January are as follows:

1. “Reflection Unrealistic Schedules“
2. “An Objective Method for Navigating Your Project“
3. “The Paradox of Right“
4. “Refactoring Isn’t a Design Methodology“
5. “No Pain, No Gain“
6. “Outsourcing Debate – Two Guys Talk it Out“
7. “Part 2: How to Manage an Unrealistic Schedule“
8. “Part 1: How to Manage an Unrealistic Schedule“
9. “Danger Agile Practices at Work“
10. “Why Software Process Adoption Fails“

The top 10 countries visiting “You Want It When?” for the month of January are as follows:

1. United States
2. Great Britain
3. Netherlands
4. Canada
5. Japan
6. Australia
7. Egypt
8. Germany
9. Taiwan
10. South Africa

I was doing a web search on some of the search keywords that readers are finding this site by.  When I searched on one phrase, I happened to stumble on an article titled “Agile Isn’t” at http://www.technocrat.com/.  After reading the first few sentence, I said to myself, “Oh no, another programmer who found another process he loves to hate.”   You’ve probably worked with a few of those types who just hate process, any process.  He also happened to be a Microsoft hater, which also turned me off at first.  I’m just not one of those types that find Microsoft can do no right.   Within the first few sentences, this author pressed all my hot buttons.

But as I read more, I found his critique of Agile to be along the lines of someone who actually embraces process, but not bad ones.    While I’m sure to disagree with him on a few of his positions, he has some worthwhile positions to add to the process debate.  Give it a read, and you may find yourself nodding your head in support, and you may even laugh a bit.

I’ve been working on my next article.  I was hoping to post it this week, but the ideas haven’t settled down yet. There are still too many ideas on the subject competing for attention, and as a result, the article hasn’t hit the right tone.  The working title is “Agile Isn’t a Process.”  Hopefully the ideas have settled down by next week, and it’ll be ready for publishing. 

Please keep reading, tell your friends about “You Want it When?”, and please share your thoughts.  Email me if would at “bill(at)yuwantitwhen(dot)com”  to share your thoughts, critical or positive commentary or even topics that you would like me to cover in future articles.