The Morning Brew

Its that time of year again where all good (and not so good) bloggers look back over the past year, and I’m no different.

Website and Feed Traffic

2009 was The Morning Brew’s second year of publication, and it started well. The 2008 year in review post was well received by the community and inbound traffic was noticeable higher around New Years Day as as result of that. For the year of 2009 The Morning Brew saw 142000+ visits to the website, along with a lot more people reading from the comfort of their RSS Reader. The traffic for the year grew as the year progressed, with a few notable jumps in traffic.

The first major traffic jump was in early June, and was linked to Scott Mitchell including The Morning Brew in his MSDN Magazine Toolbox Column for that month. Arround that time The Morning Brew was also mentioned By Scott Hanselman in his Bytes by MSDN video interview which helped make this the biggest surge in traffic this year. The next traffic jump came in mid July when Scott Hanselman mentioned The Morning Brew once again, this time in a Tweet. Scott further honoured The Brew in early September when he included it in his 2009 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows in the Websites section. As you can see from the graph above this has continued to provide inbound traffic ever since.

The final traffic surge of the year was of my own creation, as The Morning Brew turned 500 editions old in mid December. This resulted in a great many people Tweeting and blogging about The Brew, which helped us end on a high just before the Christmas traffic slump.

In the 500th Edition I included instructions for how you can get a ‘Reader of’ or ‘Contributor to’ badge for your blog which will link back here, hopefully increasing traffic further in 2010.

Of the people visiting the website, the most exciting statistics involve the break down of new and returning visitors. From the graph below it can be seen that the largest number of visitors are those who have been here before.

Two other encouraging facts about returning visitors is the frequency of their visits and the number of visits. It would seem that you, dear reader, are very regularly re-visiting the website for your daily hit of .NET News, as seen in the following two breakdowns:

During 2009 Feed Reader traffic grew from a start just below 2000 readers, touching 5000 readers in the final weeks of December. The growth in subscribers is mostly down to natural growth with a few major jumps which fit with the events outlined above.

The Content

This year The Morning Brew has contained (approximately) 3750 links to blog posts and articles. This number is approximate as I only have machine readable record going back to the start February 2009 after the bookmarking site Ma.gnolia suffered a major outage in late January taking all the links used in January with it. This means that the rest of this analysis is based on 11 months of data rather than the full 12.

As regular readers will know, the Links in The Morning Brew are broken into three regular categories, Software, Information and Community, with occasional special sections for major events coverage. The break down of links this year looks something like:

These links are pulled from around 500 RSS subscriptions to blogs and aggregated feeds which I monitor daily. These feeds will have contained just over 120,000 posts over the past 12 months, all of which I’ve seen and considered for inclusion. Once again, the number of distinct blogs which have featured is high, with some 500+ blogging sites linked to this year, and over 1000 distinct blogs linked to this year. Once again, I would like to think that The Morning Brew has captured the ‘long tail’ of the .NET world as show below:

The high spike on the end is made up of a few large blogging sites such as blogs.msdn.com, weblogs.asp.net, CodeBetter.com, LosTechies.com, etc.

This years top 20 most regularly featured bloggers are:

1. Oren Eini AKA Ayende with 116 links
2. Phil Haack with 63 links
3. Davy Brion with 61 links
4. Mark Needham with 52 links
5. Eric Lippert with 51 links
6. Mathew Podwysocki with 48 links
7. Jimmy Boggard with 41 links
8. Brad Abrams with 39 links
9. Scott Hanselman with 39 links
10. Greg Duncan with 36 links
11. Miguel de Icaza with 35 links
12. Scott Guthrie with 31 links
13. K. Scott Allen with 31 links
14. Justin Etheredge with 29 links
15. Eric Nelson with 27 links
16. Jak Charlton with 26 links
17. Jeffrey Palermo with 26 links
18. Rick Strahl with 23 links
19. Rob Conery with 23 links
20. Mike Ormond with 22 links
21. Bertrand Le Roy with 22 links

(OK so there are 21 there, but its only fair since the last two were tied in 22 links)

This year’s Aggregated site leader board looks like:

1. blogs.msdn.com with 732 links
2. weblogs.asp.net with 235 links
3. www.lostechies.com with 172 links
4. geekswithblogs.net with 146 links
5. codebetter.com with 141 links
6. devlicio.us with 115 links
7. www.codeproject.com with 92 links
8. elegantcode.com with 49 links
9. ajaxian.com with 22 links
10. dotnetslackers.com with 22 links

Some of the key topics that have been covered this year include:

On average the number of links included in The Morning Brew every day has increased over the year, with the busiest week being PDC 2009 in November (as shown by the 5 day rolling average – the black line). The two other biggest peaks are 20th October when beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 was released, and 14th April which was after the 4 day Easter Weekend.

The Final Word

All that remains for this year is for me to thank you the readers of The Morning Brew for your continued readership, everyone whose fine technical content has been included in these posts over the past year (don’t forget to get your Contributors badge)- without you folks there would be no Morning Brew.

The Morning Brew will return on Monday 4th January 2010 where we can start this all over again!

Best wishes for 2010!

Other 2009 Review posts:

• Justin Etheredge
• Jan Van Ryswyck
• Simone Chiaretta
• Douglas Starnes
• Scott Mitchell
• Laurent Bugnion
• and finally, a non-.NET related one, Pete Carr, a Local Liverpool Photographer with some stunning images of my home City.

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Software

• jQuery UI 1.8a2 – The jQuery UI team announce the second preview (alpha) release of jQuery UI 1.8. This release adds a new effect (fade), along with restructuring the source file structure to reflect how other jQuery Plugins are structured. There are also numerous small changes outlined in the changelog.

Information

• Much Ado About Monads – State Edition – Matthew Podwysocki, inspired by re-reading Chris Smith’s Programming F# book, takes a look at the state monad considering the use of it in an example web scripting library.
• .NET Developer Basics – Recursive Algorithms – Damon Armstrong takes a nice back to basics look at recursive algorithms, looking at the various types, giving some advice on designing recursive algorithms and illustrating with a worked example for calculating factorials.
• Rich Assertion Messages using CCI (and without expression trees) – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux takes a look at the Common Compiler Infrastructure (CCI) showing how it can provide a nice way of rewriting assemblies at compile time using the CciSharp post compiler to enhance the simple assert.
• Dynamic types and ASP.NET MVC – Hadi Hariri shows how simply you can use dyanmic objects in .NET 4 as the ViewModel in your ASP.NET MVC2, and how with ReSharper you even get intelisense.
• Multiple ModelMetadata Provider support added to ASP.NET MVC Extensibility – Kazi Manzur Rashid discusses his Multiple ModelMetadata Provider implementation which is now included in his System.Web.Mvc.Extensibility library, allowing different modules of your system to use different ModelMetadataProviders and have the application understand all of them.
• Using AutoMapper’s Custom Formatters – ‘Leftend’ takes a quick look at AutoMapper and shows how the custom formatter support allows you to manipulate the data being mapped during the mapping process.
• Why MVC Turbine? – Javier G. Lozano answers Rob Conery’s question about the purpose of his ASP.NET MVC Turbine project, giving a nice explanation of the core features of the library which provide IOC/DI framework support and plumbing for all the common ASP.NET MVC types.
• How To: Turn off Strong Name Validation – Syed Aslam Basha shares the steps involved in removing Srong Name Validation from an assembly using some command line switches of the SN command line tool.
• Dynamic Lambda Expressions Don’t Use Name Lookup Rules – Paul Kimmel looks the relationship between lambda expressions and expression trees, and talks about a rather unhelpful error message which can occur because of the way lambda expressions are language independent
• ASP.NET MVC 2 and why Dynamic Area is not supported – Kazi Manzur Rashid looks into the ASP.NET MVC source code and discovers why it is that Dynamic Areas are not possible in ASP.NET MVC 2 as things stand.

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Software

• 4th Web Client Guidance Drop Available on Codeplex and Proposed UX Design – Blaine Wastell announces the 4th drop release of the Patterns and Practices Web Platform Guidance package. This release addresses some of the technical debt that the team have introduced over time, and updates the validation to take advantage of ASP.NET MVC2 RC functionality
• CoffeeScript: A nice little language that compiles to JavaScript – Ajaxian highlights an experimental language from Jeremy Ashkenas which compiles down to JavaScript, but has a shorter more expressive syntax. The syntax of this language is similar to Ruby / Python. The current release should be considered an alpha release.

Information

• WPF : A Most Useful Threading Component – Sacha Barber shares a WPF component which makes it easier to implement background thread processes in your applications while giving the user feedback about the progress / success of the operations allowing your UI to remain responsive.
• More LINQ with System.Interactive – Exploiting the code = data relationship – Bart De Smet presses on with his series looking at the System.Interactive assembly. This part looks at the Data centric conversions whick take IEnumerable and convert to IEnumerable<Notification> and vice versa. In More LINQ with System.Interactive – More combinators for your Swiss Army Knife Bart continues the series taking a look at the additional combinators which System.Interactive adds to the mix, and shows examples of each in use.
• A WaspKiller Game with Silverlight 3, .NET RIA Services, MVP and MVVM Patterns Part 1 – Xianzhong Zhu begins a series of posts on DotNetSlackers which looks at the construction of a simple game in Silverlight 3 using the .NET Rich Internet Application (RIA) Services and both the Model View Presenter (MVP) and Model View View Model MVVM design patterns, MVP for the front end, and MVVM for the back end.
• Converting an RGB Color To Hex With JavaScript – Phil Haack shares a useful colour conversion function which helps iron out the differences between browsers when dealing with colours, especially useful when writing tests where you need to compare colours.
• Runtime Fault Injection using TestAPI – ‘llester’ takes a look at the TestAPI support for creating runtime exceptions which can be injected into code execution allowing you to test fault code paths, highlighting the syntax and showing an example of it in use.

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