Update: Note that the thoughts I describe in this post ONLY apply to my blog posts. Three other authors have contributed to this blog.

Today is the one-year anniversary of my first post on this blog. Please do not read my first post, or any of the 136 other posts (not including this one), because you will be sorely disappointed.

A long time ago, I wanted to create a website where I could talk about some interesting tech-related ideas and see if anybody liked those ideas. Eventually, I registered a domain name for this blog and attached it to my web hosting account at Bluehost.

Was I successful?

Yes and no.

I’m a bit of a pessimist, so first I’m going to explain why I think I failed. My goal was to write many high quality blog posts centering around programming. The posts would include actual code examples. I’ve deviated far from my goal. With the difficulties I had with displaying code examples, I talked about other topics, such as blogging. (Although my posts on blogging and social media did get A-List blogger Louis Gray’s attention.)

I also took way too much time to develop certain consistencies, such as the capitalization in the title (Prepositions are not capitalized).

But, I did succeed beyond my wildest dreams.

Although I started the blog in December 2007, I only started tracking statistics in the middle of May 2008. By the end of the (not completely tracked) month, about 134 MB of my bandwidth had been used by non-bot visitors. I thought that this was a good start.

In June, I had used more than a gigabyte of bandwidth. Now, this had really excited me. Because all I post is text and some images, the fact that I had used up a whole gigabyte of bandwidth made me feel giddy.

June made me feel giddy, but July had me shocked. On the first day of July, I had nearly reached the total bandwidth used in the entire month of June. On the second day of July, I had used up eleven more gigabytes of bandwidth. A poorly written blog post of mine hit Digg, Reddit, LinuxToday, TuxMachines, and countless blogs in many languages.

Most of the hundreds of comments (spread across the websites listed above) that my post received were negative. I felt a little disappointed that my most viewed post of all time had to be one that made me look foolish. But then I stopped skimming over the comments and started reading and analyzing them. I discovered that I could learn a lot about the Linux community from the comments, and I decided that in the end, it was good that I had published the post.

In the end, I didn’t accomplish my original goal of having others see my brilliant ideas. Instead, I found the brilliant ideas of everybody else.