On the old blog here, I wrote 186 entries in 2008 and saw a slow but steady increase in traffic. Overall, I had 199,341 visitors (+29%), 142,268 unique visitors (+42%), and 333,975 pageviews (+33%). I wrote 186 blog entries in 2008 down from 197 in 2007. My blog output was definitely down most markedly in the second half of the year. Most likely reasons for this probably had to do with sheer workload (at work, speaking, and kids at home) and possibly from the Twitter effect. You can check out the most popular posts page if you’re interested in more on the top entries.

As ever, the bulk of my traffic is from Google and related to Java 7. Other important sources of traffic were DZone, JavaLobby, Reddit, StumbleUpon, JavaBlogs, TheServerSide, java.net, Wikipedia, and two important new and growing sources: Stack Overflow, and Twitter.

In addition to the main blog, I also started two link blogs that I update frequently with things that pass my filters. You can check these out on Tumblr for Java 7 and Concurrency. Tumblr rocks for this kind of thing.

I mentioned Twitter earlier – I resisted for a while but fortunately relented in April and took the plunge as @puredanger. Glad I did – Twitter has become an important channel for me in a bidirectional way and is a great way to suck up some useful links without much attention.

I did way more presentations this year than ever before (24 in all), mostly due to joining the No Fluff Just Stuff tour. Probably my two favorite speaking gigs this year though were the unpaid ones at JavaOne and a private talk I did at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. JavaOne was a huge 900 person audience which was both terrifying and exhilarating all at once. Hopefully I’ll be there again this year. The CME talk just clicked well and I had a great time – tip o’ the hat to all the folks there. I’m kicking off 2009 right with a talk on Actor Concurrency at CodeMash next week which should be pretty good.

I did a lot of paid and upaid writing gigs this year too which was all new to me. First, the Definitive Guide to Terracotta was published (of which I wrote a couple chapters), then I wrote some exams on EJB3 for ReviewNet, did a stint as a paid blogger for JavaLobby, and finished the year with a feature article at JavaWorld on Java 7. I had a good time doing this stuff and hope to do some more in 2009 – if you’re looking for articles drop me a line.

Finally, I got involved with several new local groups: St. Louis Spring User’s Group (already defunct), ITEN (supporting St. Louis IT startups), St. Louis Erlounge (also already defunct), and finally I started a new group myself, the St. Louis Lambda Lounge. We’ve had just one meeting of the LL so far but it was slamming and I think we’ve got enough interest that the group will thrive in 2009 (check out the next meeting next Wednesday if you’re interested).