Today brings us once again to the close of another year, and as has become the tradition of The Morning Brew itโ€™s time to take a look back at some statistics for the year.

This year was a particularly significant year in The Morning Brew’s history, with the marking of the 1000th edition in early December. Due to work commitments (and me not pulling my finger out) the anniversary edition was not quite the glorious celebration I’d hoped for. I’ll try and do a bit better in a little over 2 weeks time when I hit 1024 (or 10000000000 in binary) – a number I’m sure the programmers in us all will feel is a more fitting one to celebrate.

Website and Feed traffic

Once again the year has seen steady growth in visitor numbers, both to the website and as subscribers to the RSS feed as can be seen from these two graphs.

2011 Visitors

2011 Subscribers

Visitor number jumped a few times during the year, generally in response influential members of the community tweeting about The Morning Brew (I’d link to the tweets but it seems that Twitter is ‘Down For Maintenance’ at the moment!) The other significant jump was in response to the 1000th edition where the post attracted a record 33 (very much appreciated) comments.

The Content

This year The Morning Brew has featured 3700+ links from almost 1000 different blogs, with the links spread over the three standard categories, Information, Software and Community. In addition, a couple of times this year Special additional categories have been drafted in for things like the January release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm Framework, Orchard, WebMatrix, the Developer Developer Developer 9 Conference in the UK, The Silverlight 5 beta release in April, Windows Phone 7.1 Mango in May, Windows 8 and Kinect SDK announcements in June, the //Build conference and all its announcements in September.

2011 Links by Section

This year’s top domains were:

  1. blogs.msdn.com – 942 links
  2. weblogs.asp.net – 236 links
  3. geekswithblogs.net – 170 links
  4. lostechies.com – 132 links
  5. coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com – 114 links
  6. www.codeproject.com – 99 links
  7. www.hanselman.com – 69 links
  8. www.nxtgenug.net – 62 links
  9. haacked.com – 62 links
  10. devlicio.us – 54 links

This year’s individual blog chart looks like:

  1. Greg Duncan – 114 Links
  2. Scott Hanselman – 69 Links
  3. Phil Haack – 62 Links
  4. Eric Lippert – 58 Links
  5. Mike Taulty – 48 Links
  6. Ayende – 41 Links
  7. Derick Bailey – 35 Links
  8. James Micheal Hare – 34 Links
  9. K. Scott Allen – 31 Links
  10. Jeff Blankenburg – 28 Links
  11. Scott Guthrie – 27 Links
  12. Pete Brown – 27 Links
  13. Mike Hadlow – 25 Links
  14. Dan Wahlin – 24 Links
  15. Jon Galloway – 23 Links
  16. Derek Greer – 21 Links
  17. Mike Ormond – 20 Links
  18. Ricardo Peres – 20 Links
  19. Laurent Bugnion – 19 Links
  20. Jimmy Bogard – 19 Links

In Conclusion

I’ve kept this year’s wrap up short, as I’m aware that with the 100th edition, the planned 1024th edition celebrations, and this post there will have been quite a bit of ‘retrospective’ this in a short space of time. I’d like to finish the year off by thanking all of the bloggers who’s content has been featured in The Morning Brew this year – without you guys writing great stuff I’d have very little to link to, it is much appreciated. I’d also like to thank the loyal readers – your passion for learning and interest in the content keeps me going.

My very best wishes for 2012 to you all

Chris