Site Updates – May 2014 – Visitor Stats and New Domain Registration

When I set this site up in July 2013, I did so to have a place where I could ‘load’ things I’d learnt, found useful or got asked a lot, with others – both within the company I work for, and to those outside it who can also hopefully benefit from it.

You may see that I’ll sometimes go a couple of months without posting anything, and then have a flurry of activity. A couple of reasons for this. One is workload / external commitments – this is first and foremost a hobby / side interest I enjoy doing and between work, family life (I have two young children) and a moving house (twice in the last year, including one country relocation), I don’t always have time to write. Secondly, and more importantly, I sometimes just don’t have anything to say. Most articles as I mentioned are based on personal experiences and what I head people asking about – so if I have nothing new to add, I’m not going to force an update.

That said, over time, traffic has stepped up month to month fairly consistency, and whilst I’m not in it to chase numbers, it’s still motivating to see some good consistent growth over time. May looks set to be the best month to date, and excluding the obvious outlier, February (I’m not too sure what happened there!), it already is.

And visitors are coming from around the globe too. Interestingly, outside USA & UK, the countries visiting the most are Brazil, India & Italy

Perhaps that be somewhat explained by the next fact-let.

Other most popular single article on the site is the somewhat more detailed & advanced ‘Moving data from Teradata to SQL Server‘. And not by a slim margin either – 5x more visits to this article than the second most popular, which is Using ROW_NUMBER to Rank a field without ‘skipping’ numbers in SQL Server & Teradata. And no. 3 is also a SQL orientated article. Given much IT development is now done from the BRIC countries, it does go some way to explain the cause for the visitor trend. As for why an article about moving data between two enterprise datawarehouse platforms is so popular is fairly simple in my view – the very reason I wrote it was because I struggled to find such information in one place. Clearly there is a demand.

So what else is going on?

Well, I’ve now registered the domain SystemSecrets.co.uk (.com was not available). For now, it’ll just re-direct you here but in time I may migrate the site over; I’m undecided at the moment.

I hope you enjoy your time here on System Secrets

David