I wasn’t going to make a special effort for the one hundredth post on my blog, I was intending to let it slip by without much of a mention…But I couldn’t help myself. I have maintained a SQL themed website since 2007 without much luck in term of hits and visitors. When I started out in 2007 I bought some hosting that included a content management system, but that was clunky and at best difficult to use. In three years of it running and writing for that site I probably churned about 50 articles/posts…tops. Late last year (2009) after following along and reading some of the well known bloggers out there like Steve Jones (Blog|Twitter) and Brent Ozar (Blog|Twitter) and just before attending the SQLBITS conference at the Celtic Manor (home of the 2010 Ryder Cup) I decided to start blogging. My reason being, I was writing for my website and now on my blog mainly for my own benefit. I find writing helps me learn and remember technology much better than reading alone, it forces you to think about a subject and test and experiment and use the technology so you know what you are writing is accurate…in short it makes you do the work. You learn from the work you do, writing makes you understand and remember more clearly than reading and practicing and using alone. You always have documentation on hand, that you wrote, for future reference. It also stands as a good example of what you know and what technical skills you have. I saw people like Steve and Brent churn out more posts in a week on their respective blogs than I would be able to do in a month on my website. So I started a blog and incorporated it into the website, (they actually share a domain name) and I started writing on the blog. I have been doing it for a year and I have hit my one hundredth post. I feel like I have learnt a lot in the last year!

But it doesn’t stop here, my blog has had some minor success, when I started it, obviously visitors numbers were non-existent very small, but through some help, from people like Steve and Brent who syndicated my blog on their very large and very successful SQL Server websites and some sound SEO advice from my good friend Mandeep Kaler my visitor numbers grew, slowly, but they grew. I then found out about #TSQL2SDAY the monthly blog party, the brain child of Adam Mechanic (Blog|Twitter), and I started writing in a few of those, I found these improved my exposure to the other bloggers in SQL Land and again my visitor numbers crept up. I checked Google Analytics today for the first time how many unique visitors have been to my blog this past year…I’m about 800 unique visitors shy of 10,000! WOW! I was shocked and I still am, I didn’t know that so many people had been to my blog and I hope that those people got something useful from it.

I recently saw an an announcement on SQLSERVERPEDIA,  that they were to hold a blogger awards to coincide  with the PASS summit. The fact I’m not attending the PASS summit, even though I would love too meant I didn’t pay as much attention to these awards, I saw post from various well-known bloggers, promoting their nomination but I have been busy and not had time to catch up on my reading, until today I saw a post today by Grant Fritchley that mentioned he was up for nomination for his post on Powershell, I liked Grant’s post on powershell, so I thought I would pop along to the sqlserverpedia.com website, have a look at the nominations and probably, in all likelihood vote for Grant. I clicked the link, the page loaded and the first entry I saw was a post called “Policy Based Management - Disable Autoclose” I thought to myself, I wrote a post with a similar title not so long ago, I then looked at the bio and the author and I was shocked to find that it was actually my post up for nomination. I’m sorry Grant I didn’t vote for you in that category, although I’m way behind you in the count so I don’t think I will prove much competition for you.

Having shamelessly voted for myself in “Automation and Management” I then, after I got over the initial excitement of being nominated, thought I would check out some of the other categories, I did vote for Grant in the “Series” category though for his series “An Introduction to Indexes” series I looked at the the “New to SqlServerPedia” category and to my shock and amazement I found that I was nominated there too!!! Again though I’m lagging way behind the rest of field , not that that bother me at all, I wasn’t even expecting a nomination, I have been shocked to have been nominated, not once but twice!

That said, people are on the campaign trail and I don’t want to lose by a country mile so if you like to vote for me or my post then you can do so:

New to SqlServerPedia
Automation and Management

I’ll be honest, these nominations have been a fantastic way for to round off my first year blogging properly and my one hundredth post, so standby for the next one hundred.