The first quarter of 2008 has been a terrific start of the year for “You Want IT When?”  The site continues to attract new visitors every month at an increasing rate.  One article, in particular, enjoyed tremendous popularity when a popular member of dzone bookmarked the article “A Strategy for Building Stable Applications.”  Consequently, the article enjoyed tremendous popularity for the month of March, pushing it to the top read article for the entire quarter.

Statistics

The top 10 articles for the first quarter of 2008 are as follows:

1. “A Strategy for Building Stable Applications“
2. “Reflection Unrealistic Schedules“
3. “Danger Agile Practices at Work“
4. “Part 1: How to Manage an Unrealistic Schedule“
5. “No Pain, No Gain“
6. “An Objective Method for Navigating Your Project“
7. “Refactoring Isn’t A Design Methodology“
8. “Agile Isn’t a Process“
9. “Outsourcing Debate – Two Guys Talk it Out“
10.  ”Certifications, Who Needs Them?“

The top 10 countries visiting “You Want It When?” for the first quarter of 2008 are as follows: 

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

Thoughts 

Eight months ago in July 2007 this blog was launched.  I read somewhere on a blog that most bloggers stop within the first three months.  It is eight months now, and I’m still blogging, so I guess that I’m doing okay.  I must admit, though, that it’s difficult authoring an essay once a week.  When I first started, I was averaging 2 essays a week, and I was hoping to continue at that pace.  I suspect if I had continued at that aggressive pace (aggressive for me) I would have likely stopped by now.  Watching the visitor metrics increase is motivating, and it keeps me going.  Engaging in dialog with the site visitors is also enjoyable and motivating.  For those of you who have contributed comments, thank you; I value and appreciate that you have taken the time to share your thoughts. 

I’m planning to customize the site, and I recently downloaded and installed MySQL, Apache, and PHP on my Windows Vista computer and my Windows XP computer.  The installation completed reasonably smooth, though not without problems.  The XP installation completed without any installation problems.  On XP I had a few configuration problems: Apache Web Server was unable to resolve the virtual URLs that WordPress generates for postings, and the PHP libraries for interfacing with MySQL were not installed.  On Vista, there was some patching that was needed to get things working. Fortunately, none of these issues was too difficult to solve, and I only spent a few hours rather than spend over an entire day completing the installation.  Thanks to Google searches, finding the solutions to these problems was easy and saved a great deal of time.

When I complete the theme, I plan to make it available for download for those of you who are interested.  I have plans to develop some WordPress plugins, and when they are completed, I will make them available for download as well.   

In Closing

Thanks for visiting, and especially thanks for commenting.  Please keep reading, tell your friends about “You Want IT When?”, and 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.