Even though the actual anniversary was a little over two months ago, I see no reason not to talk about it and do some celebrating. I am absolutely amazed by how many people viewed my blog this past year. Below I've included the numbers for both this past year and the year before, for comparison’s sake. You should go and check those out. Don't worry, I'll wait.

Done? Good. I am really excited about these numbers. You might have noticed that my readership multiplied by almost 10 in one year. It's especially cool to see that over 20% of my readers are returning visitors.

I'm also really excited for this year, as I have a few ideas that I can't wait to turn into posts. Look for posts discussing Git pre-commit hooks, applying formal logic to practical programming, and more effective methods of Python error checking. Good things are coming.

Most Popular Posts For Last Year:
pxe-network boot virtualbox -pt 2 : Much like last year, I'm really surprised that this post made it into the top five. Mostly because I just appended some things that the original author didn't include. I guess a lot of people are still trying to figure this problem out.

Project Euler : Problem 5 : Sixteen comments. The coolest thing regarding this post was learning about the lowest common multiple math function.

Project Euler : Problem 4: THIRTY-SIX comments! I really have nothing more to say to that. Alright, I lied. I will also say the comment from Gary Campbell with the very efficient operations for getting a sum of a list was a real winner.

Project Euler : Problem 6: I believe this is the first time that agf (as he/she comments here) started posting comments on my blog. Luckily for me he/she hasn't stopped.

Using curl and a user agent string for web scraping: I guess webscraping is a hot topic in this day and age. I'm a little surprised by this, but am happy to be able to provide some help for people trying to figure it out.

Highlights:
Getting the comment from Dirkjan Ochtman , the maintainer of the couchdb-python project, was particularly cool. It really gave me a sense of being connected to a project, lead me to hang out on the mailing list for the better part of a year, and even helped out with trouble shooting a bug.

It was so awesome seeing all of the Project Euler answers readers posted in different languages. Thanks for sharing everyone! It’s interesting to me that I get more comments and discussion interaction from readers for getting a wrong answer than getting the right one. Does anyone have any ideas of why that might be?

Things learned:
I got a wild hair to change hosting providers. Though it was a hellish process, I learned a lot. Next time I switch, (if I ever do again) those lessons will make it a lot easier.

People really seemed to like seeing the Project Euler stuff in multiple languages. I think that readers also enjoyed seeing the performance numbers for the languages as well.

I've never forgotten that I started this blog as a bit of a lark, and it's just awesome to see that other people are starting to check it out and enjoy it as much as I do. Happy Birthday Scrollingtext.org.

After about a month of fighting with ISP's and registrars the blog has returned. I haven't stopped writing during this time and I plan on posting a new post next week. Once all the DNS servers are done propigating my server's IP around the interwebs of course.

I hope everyone has been well and I look forward to your comments as I continue to expand the content of this blog.

I'm sorry for the delay in writing. Unfortunately I am not updating the site with another blog post. I am giving everyone a quick heads up that I am changing web hosts and the site might be having issues over the next few days. You have been warned.

First off, let me apologize for not writing in a long time, I haven’t forgotten about my blogging duties. Life has just forced a slight change of course for me a couple of months ago. Although I am still learning and growing, what I have been learning has been of a more personal nature. And since this blog is a tech blog I really don’t feel completely comfortable putting my personal developments right next to my technical ones, but I’m gonna take a break from my comfort zone to talk a little bit about something not so technical anyway.

Inspiration isn’t really a technical topic, but no less important when it comes to doing technical things. We in the technical field are quite lucky, we (generally) learn about our love for all things binary at a younger age, and pick our careers based on this love. But as the cliche goes, “Familiarity breeds contempt.”, one day we wake up dreading the idea of going to work, hating our job, and are (probably) none to happy about life either. The activity that we use to spend hours of our off work time doing, because we loved doing it, now begins to feel more like an obligation or a chore. People call this burnout, and the usual solution is to take a vacation. For most cases of burnout that works, but what about the cases where a vacation doesn’t get you out of that funk? That is when you need a moment of inspiration to allow you to rediscover why you picked your computer career in the first place.

Although this hasn’t happened to me in my career (yet), this did happen to me concerning this blog. The changes in my life that I eluded to earlier have had a direct effect on my writing, both extra curricular programming and blog writing, which I enjoy. I needed a moment of inspiration to help me break through my writer’s block and get back to coding and posting. That moment came to me a little while ago when I got an email form a reader named Dylan who wrote,
"I'm a kid that's trying to learn coding. I have started down my path of Python. I found your site because I have been using Python to solve the problems. Your code is really good and has helped me out a lot. So I thought I would give you a shout out and a thanks.

Sincerely, Dylan"

This simple little email has given me the inspiration I needed to remind myself of why I started blogging in the first place. For me it’s about sharing with others the things I learned. So that hopefully someone else out there will benefit from my time spent figuring something out.

So long story short, when you get to do what you love for a living or a lot in general, sometimes you forget that you loved it. That is when you need a shot of inspiration to remind you why you why you loved something in the first place and I hope you get it when you need it.

Since this is the holiday season, I doubt I’ll post again this year. So I wish you all the happiest of holidays, whatever you celebrate, and a better year for you next year.