I've been doing this as a somewhat regularly updated blog for just over half a year now, and the results have been extremely satisfying: I get about ~2500 direct unique visitors on an average day (increasing 2-6x when something ends up being a meme-of-the-day on sites like Reddit or Digg, and of course many read via aggregators), search engine referrals are up to 200 or so a day, and viewing the "who's on" list is a laundry list of influential corporations and locations across the globe.

It does feed my ego a little bit seeing visitors from various governments, the CIA, nuclear research labs, just about every large financial company, and visitors from every end of the globe. My numbers aren't huge, but it's a perfect composite of influential and knowledgeable readers.

The most popular entries thus far are as follows (I'm providing the static version links where possible):

Effectively Integrating Into Software Development Teams
Optimal Software Development Processes and Practices
Spelling Matters
Everyone Is Above Average - The Overpopulated Top 2%

I've tried to minimize the number of entries (outside of the personal category, though this anniversary one being an exception) to keep the noise as low as possible -- if you're using a reader it won't constantly pretend there's new content when I'm just adding a peanut gallery comment about someone else's blog -- though on the flip side that means that I've delayed various .NET and SQL entries until they're "perfect". 

Perhaps I might have to find a compromise somewhere in between.

Getting back into the flow after the holiday break.

In addition to branded software, yafla also provides consulting and custom software development (in the Greater Toronto Area), which has kept me extremely busy over the past while. That's an area of the business that I haven't really written about (primarily because I keep client project and platform details strictly confidential), however I have a case study where the client is interested in getting their name out there, and the need - and from it the solution - are really interesting and noteworthy, so I might start working it in.

As an aside - both the survey component and yaflaColor are currently broken (as of this writing). Both have been updated to .NET 2.0, and for some reason my third-party host has an issue where helper assemblies are being locked by an outside process, possibly due to synchronization issues with the NAS. This should be resolved shortly. I've let them sit broken for the day simply because they're non-critical and it lets the 3rd party solve the problems on their end.

I've added several entertaining surveys to go along with entries on here over the past couple of weeks, and have gotten a great response, however some users have questioned why they immediately get the results for the survey without the ability to pick a choice themselves.

This can happen for several reasons-

• The survey is no longer active. I have start and stop times on the surveys, which allows me to age out surveys and cache the results. I am thinking of ways to add a nice "Survey Closed" notice on them.
• You already answered and have the "I answered" cookie on your machine
• You picked "View Results". Reload the page and you'll get the options again where applicable
• Someone else answered, and the system is correlating them with you because of shared traits (such as the IP address of a shared mega proxy). Even if you don't have the user or answer cookies in your browser, the system may still decide that you must have flushed your cookie cache, and that you've actually already answered. Trying to identify people on the net is a difficult, flawed process, so there will be mistakes.

I've removed the Google Adsense ads (they might still appear in some historic entries because of the way Radio Userland updates content - unless I change something affecting the page it won't upstream for just a template change. NOTE: They also appear in the "greatest hits" static collection). I removed them because they're ugly and distracting*, and they offered such a marginal return. I also didn't like that they could be taken as promoting a bias, in a small way implying deference and submission to Google. 

You might ask "Well then why did you add them in the first place?" Good question, and thanks for asking! Let's just say that I don't have total faith in the Do No Evil creed that Google publicly espouses. I can't help but think that Google has a financial incentive to boost the search ranking of pages that host Adsense content (it's brilliant really - You go to Google and do your search, awash in Adsense, all to shuttle off to sites filled with Adsense. It's an Adsense world, baby!). I like these pages to have some search significance, so this concerned me. Add the fact that Google needs to quickly index pages hosting Adsense ads (to allow for contextually keyed ads), offering another possible advantage of hosting their ads. Alas, I'm going to trust the impartiality of Google's search algorithms...

* Isn't it remarkable how Google snuck in as the underdog in search, and then slowly started integrating text ads. "They're different," the masses cried. "They're unobtrusive and low bandwidth!" Yet here we are today and Google is now serving up loads of full-graphic ads, all views tracked by the Google Brain (the same one that knows what you search for, your email account if you use gmail, and so on), and yet the Google honeymoon continues. I think Google has achieved some enormous technical achievements, and some of their products are extraordinary (Google Maps is a fantastic use of existing technology, making the competition look like garbage), but I just don't buy into the mythology that Google is somehow exempt from the forces that drive every other corporation.