Midwest IT Survival

Statistics for 2011

Hard for me to imagine but 2011 represented another year for MidwestITSurvival.com. I thought it would be interesting to share some statistics from 2011 in the same format as I did last year:

(Per Google Analytics)

3,708 Total unique visitors

6,783 Pages viewed

Viewer traffic sources:

I enjoyed that 23% of visitors that come directly here to read articles and the additional 31% that come here from other sites that link people here which was statistically similar to last year.

The top 3 articles in terms of number of unique visitors reading them are:

1. Organizational Structure and Enterprise Architecture [502]
2. Is the Gantt Chart Useless in Agile Projects? [389]
3. Conflict Between Agile and Architecture [287]

A total of 33 articles were published in 2011 with a total of 33 comments submitted to those articles.

All in all, having no goal of X number of comments per article or Y number of unique visitors per month, etc., I continue to be pleased with the blogging experience overall.

In 2011 I changed employers and roles in late February and switched from a general development/delivery role to an enterprise architecture role focusing on information security. Thus, the content of my articles switched about a third into the year from the trials and tribulations of IT delivery in a large IT shop to general security issues facing all IT organizations today. IT delivery challenges tend to be similarly themed across industries and rather easy to generalize to avoid sharing any direct information about one’s employer. On the topic of enterprise security, I found it a bit more difficult to generalize on matters that allowed depth of material presentment while not exposing any specific employer information. Hence, blog posting frequency started strong in the beginning of the year and tailed off towards the end of the year. I am hoping to find more general IT topics to share this year.

On the positive, on certain posts, especially the ones surrounding the 2011 FFIEC Guidance on Internet Banking for Financial Institutions, the comment dialog significantly enhanced the material I was presenting by adding additional industry depth and opinions. I strongly encourage you to check out those articles if you haven’t already and read through the comments.

Here is to 2012 and all the new challenges ahead!