It’s been a year since I started my first job as a journalist. It’s been an interesting year, full of highs and lows. Here are some of the highlights: Highlight #1: I got to cover the presidential election! It was an exciting experience to be at the polls on election day and to watch the results come in. Lowlight #1: My computer crashed just days after the election, depriving me of any footage of Donald Trump being sworn in as president. :( Highlight #2: I was able to interview some of my favorite celebrities, including Lena Dunham and Mindy Kaling. It was fun getting their insights on life as celebrities and their thoughts on politics. Lowlight #2: Some of my celebrity interviews went viral and created a lot of backlash from people who didn’t like what they had to say. It was tough dealing with that criticism, but it taught me a lot about how to deal with online trolls. ..
In the Beginning was the Geek
I registered the domain name in September 2006 but we didn’t officially launch until October. I started off by writing some articles about Linux because I figured that nothing is more confusing to non-geeks than linux, until…
…a few months later I got my hands on a copy of Windows Vista and realized: “This is confusing, I bet people are going to need help with this”.
And so began the year of the Geek.
Our Accomplishments
We’ve managed to turn this site into one of the most popular how-to sites within a year, with 1.1 million pageviews / month and ~25,000 subscribers. There have been 658 total posts and around 4,000 comments.
Our goal here is to write articles that are easy enough for non-geeks to understand, but also interesting enough to keep the geeks interested. It’s an extremely tough thing to do, but I think I’ve finally gotten to the point where I only bore half of you half of the time.
How Did We Manage 25,000 Subscribers?
I’ve received emails recently from dozens of site owners asking me what I’m doing right, and here’s my conclusion:
I’m sure there are a number of factors that have contributed to the subscriber count, but I’ve come to believe it’s nothing more than the friendly, smiling Geek face. Just look at it and tell me you can resist subscribing.
I’ve tried to come up with a better explanation: maybe people just like the articles, maybe it’s the clean design, or maybe they just subscribed by accident… but I keep coming back to the smile.
Traffic Jams
It always comes down to the numbers… exactly how well have we done?
Since January 1st of this year we’ve had 3,011,790 visits and 5,711,710 pageviews, although the bulk of the pageviews were just in the last half of that.
For comparison of how well we’re doing now, this is the total picture for the last 30 days:
Couple of details:
Top Page – The most viewed page in the entire site was the Vista Category page, with 464,285 pageviews for the year… that’s just an immense amount of visits to a single page. Traffic Sources – Google sent 1,917,210 visitors to the site, there were 260,678 direct visits, and the rest were split up between a lot of other sources. Browsers – 48% of our visitors are using Firefox, with 46% using Internet Explorer. The numbers have actually trended in IE’s direction now, so more recently it’s 51% Internet explorer.
Forum Stats
I only brought up the forum just two months ago, and while it’s not doing as well as I’d like, it’s an important part of the site that will grow over time.
New Topics – 551 Total Posts – 2259 Pageviews – ~2000 / day
We Must Give Thanks
One of the greatest accomplishments of starting this website is the great friends that I’ve made along the way. The site simply wouldn’t be where it is today without these people.
MysticGeek started helping write guest articles a few months back, and I couldn’t possibly thank him more. Every single morning I get an instant message from him about how excited he is that the subscriber counts jumped again. It’s hard to be friends with him and not feel positive! Daniel is a good friend of mine who’s been unbelievably helpful with his honest critiquing of the projects that I work on. I pretty much run everything by him before I release it, because I know I’ll get his (often harsh) honest opinion. He’s also an extremely good programmer, so I exploit his skills by asking him programming questions all the time. Scott started here by posting a bounty for Active Desktop for Vista, but he’s such a great guy that I ended up making him the official moderator for our Forums, and I’m happy that I can now call him a friend. He’s also the one person that’s bought me something off my wishlist… Gina Trapani & Adam Pash @ Lifehacker have featured our articles every other week or so for the last few months. While I don’t personally know either of them, I’m a huge fan of Lifehacker and it’s an honor to be featured there.
Editor Favorites
There are a ton of articles that we’re really proud of, but I’ve selected some of my favorites, some of which were popular and others that weren’t.
Use Outlook Rules to Prevent “Oh No!” After Sending Emails View Feedburner Subscriber Numbers Even if FeedCount is Not Displayed Disable Flip3D in Windows Vista Bring Misplaced Off-Screen Windows Back to Your Desktop (Keyboard Trick) Restore Missing Items in Windows Vista Control Panel Keyboard Ninja: Insert Tables in Word 2007 Make To-Do Bar in Outlook 2007 Show Only Today’s Tasks Create the Ultimate Firefox Web Development Profile Why Doesn’t Tab Work for Drop-down Controls in Firefox on OS X? Stop Windows Update from Hijacking the Sleep Button
Our Geek Pirate Bounties
The Bounty Program is something that I’m quite proud of… and while it’s on hold at the moment, you can expect huge things from this in the next couple of months as we reorganize.
Bounty Program Success: “Active Desktop” Replacement for Vista Increase Size of Windows Vista Taskbar Previews
Software & Scripts I Threw Together
Being a programmer in my regular day job, I tend to simply write the software that I want, so I started releasing a couple of items for everybody else to enjoy. I plan to release quite a bit more software in the future… hopefully something more useful next time.
WordPress Plugin – The Geek’s Spam Filter Keyboard Ninja: Assign a Hotkey to any Window How-To Geek Software: WordPress Comment Moderation Notifier Geek Software: Use DeliCount to Get Site-wide del. icio. us Bookmark Counts Shell Script to Upload a File to the Same Subdirectory on a Remote Server The How-To Geek Vista Sidebar Gadget Automate Adding Bookmarks to del. icio. us
The Future?
So what’s in store for the How-To Geek in the coming year?
We’re going to change things up, and let you, our great readers, contribute your tips, tricks, and how-tos. More on this in a couple of weeks. I will drink approximately 182 cases of Mountain Dew. I will spend 1000 more hours working on this site. 50,000 subscribers! The return of the Geek Comic. Oh yes.
It’s been a blast… but we must prepare for tomorrow night, pinky.
