The Morning Brew

I couldn’t resist including a number in this post’s title – 255 seems like a nice number to end the year on!

Where it all started…

I find it amazing to think that its 1 year ago that Mike Gunderloy hung up his .NET hat and ceased publishing The Daily Grind and moved on to all things Ruby on his new blog A Fresh cup. I had enjoyed the Daily Grind immensely for the previous few years, and was saddened by it coming to the end, so I decided I had to carry on the tradition.

The first few editions of The Morning Brew were actually called ‘Morning Coffee’, until I discovered that Harry Pierson had a series of posts also called Morning Coffee, so after a quick rethink I settled on the name ‘The Morning Brew’ which stuck (apart from a typo incident in ‘The Mroning Brew #242’ – a mistake I make most mornings when typing the title, so its incredible that it took 242 editions for it to make it out onto the web.

For the early editions of the Brew I struggled a little to find good content, and a business trip to Romania early on in January made those early posts a little harder to manage to get out – yet I still managed to get an edition out every day I intended to (every week day with the exception of UK public holidays and weekends)

Readership has grown steadily over the past year, however along the way there were a few obvious jumps in readership, the first back in the very early days (#14) due to a favourable review by Jay Kimble. Another surge came in July when Scott Hanselman declared on twitter that The Morning Brew was the first blog he read in the morning. Other major spikes in growth were from mentions from
Keyvan Nayyeri and Davy Brion. Many thanks to all these folks and to everyone else who has linked to the Brew this year – without readers I suspect I would have ceased publishing.

It was about February when I started to get some feedback from readers (who I didn’t already know personally) – some were suggestions for links, others were interested in advertising (something I’m still not quite ready for yet) and others were just nice feedback – thanks to anyone who has contacted me so far, and I’d really like to encourage others to drop me a line with any comments, feedback or link suggestions – I can’t promise that they will all get implemented or published, but I’ll certainly consider them.

Brew Stats

Putting The Morning Brew together each morning takes up to 1.5 hours, and is the second thing I do each morning (the first being brewing a strong and large cup of coffee). I currently monitor 401 individual feeds, some of which are aggregate feeds like the blogs.msdn.com feed. According to Google Reader’s Trends feature I read over 10000 posts a month (approx 120000 posts a year), which would seem to fit with the 500 or so posts that I see each morning, selecting the best 10-15 posts for inclusion in that days edition.

Since the Morning Brew began I have been using Ma.gnol.ia to manage the links, with a simple winforms application to grab them from their API and format them into my HTML structure. The rest of this analysis is based upon an export from Magnol.ia taken this morning.

Total Number of Links: 3187
Average Links per post: 12.6

Link Count By Week

The big peak in this graph is PDC week (44), where I had over 130 links in that one week – that was a busy week, putting the brew together took about 4 hours every day that week.

Links By Tag (Log scale)

No surprises here – with the information category clearly having far more posts than any other section.
Link Count By Blog

This one is my attempt to show that The Morning Brew encompasses the log tail of the .NET blogging world, with some popular blogs getting over 100 links over the year, yet also having a huge number of blogs which have only been linked to once.

Total Blogs Linked to: 901
of which 800 recieved less than 5 links over the course of the year.

Top 5 most linked to Aggregated Blogs:

1. blogs.msdn.com(389)
2. weblogs.asp.net(290)
3. The Code Project(204)
4. CodeBetter(290)
5. Los Techies(81)

Top 15 Individual Sites (organisation / person)

1. Oren Eini AKA Ayende (100)
2. Rob Connery (63)
3. Scott Hanselmann (62)
4. Matthew Podwysocki (56)
5. Phil Haack (55)
6. Justin Etheridge (48)
7. Keyvan Nayyeri (43)
8. Greg Duncan (43)
9. Jimmy Bogard (39)
10. Microsoft (36)
11. Code Plex (36)
12. Scott Guthrie AKA ScottGu (31)
13. Rick Strahl (31)
14. Derik Whittaker (30)
15. Brad Abrams 26

Many thanks to *ALL* the authors of content linked to by this site, not just those listed here – without you there would be no Morning Brew

Topics Covered

The Morning Brew’s links are filtered by me, and my interests – the main topics I have been interested in this year are (in no particular order):

• Inversion of Control (IoC) & Dependency Injection (DI)
• Domain Driven Design
• ASP.NET MVC
• The PDC announcements – Azure, Oslo, etc
• Test Driven Design, Unit Testing and Mocking
• NHibernate & other Object Relational Mappers (ORM)
• Design Patterns
• Best Practices
• Web services and REST
• F#

And Finally…

Once again I’d like to thank all the bloggers, researchers, and developers who publish their thoughts and code online, the readership of this Blog for sticking with me, and the array of different coffee’s that have made posting every morning possible!

In keeping with Brew tradition, there will be no Morning Brew tomorrow as it is a UK Public Holiday, so edition #256 will be published on Friday (2nd).

Best Wishes for 2009

A few other 2008 Review Posts (well this is a link blog after all!):

• Jimmy Boggard – Ten things to retire in 2009
• Phil Haack – Not Your Typical Top Ten Of 2008 Post
• Nikhil Kothari – Year End Reading for 2008

10 Comments »