2009: My Most Popular Posts

2009 has been a landmark year for my blog. According to Google Analytics, I’ve increased my daily pageviews by more than 1000% since January… growth which I hope I can maintain over the next 12 months.

How did I manage to increase my popularity that much in just a year?

The first factor was to search engine optimize the blog – the biggest factor of which was fixing the Wordpress permalinks. Bam! Traffic increased by a huge percentage. The second push was more a result of hard work and personal networking. I try to provide consistent and relevant content for my readers, and those efforts seem to have paid off.

With 2009 coming to an end, I thought it might be fun to see which of my 88+ posts have been the most popular this year. This data is taken with a grain of salt – for the first couple of months this year not many people read my blog.

1. ExtJS 3.0 Themes – When ExtJS released 3.0 earlier this year, they did everyone a favor by changing the way in which skins/themes are created. The only problem? As of today, there’s only a handful of non-default themes available. This is my tutorial to create your own.
2. Parsing XML: jQuery vs ExtJS – I got some crap from the ExtJS community about this post, but it’s a clear-cut analysis of how jQuery and ExtJS handle server responses differently.
3. ExtJS JsonStore – The JsonStore() class is my favorite part of the ExtJS library because it’s so flexible – which makes it useful for just about anything. Check it out.
4. ExtJS vs YUI – Before ExtJS released 3.0, I was toying around with YUI as an AJAX library alternative. While it shouldn’t be a surprise that I prefer ExtJS, here’s a look at why I feel that way.
5. JavaScript Unit Testing in ExtJS – JavaScript developers basically get the shaft when it comes to unit testing. A few AJAX libraries have built-in utilities for unit testing… but ExtJS isn’t one of them. I created a solution to that problem – and it’s now an open source project!

Are you noticing a theme here? My most popular posts all involve ExtJS – which isn’t much of a surprise because most of my referral traffic comes from the ExtJS forums (my post footer contains a link). For anyone out there who cares about search engine optimization, this is a classic example of how social networks provide valuable website traffic.

So it’s clear to me that my popular posts involve ExtJS – but what do you want me to blog about?

Do you want less AJAX? More .NET? More pictures embedded within my posts? Throw me a bone here!