The first 5 Years of Blog.Webernetz.net

Today my blog celebrates its 5th birthday as I published my Master Thesis about IPv6 Security on the 6th of May, 2013. Wow. When I started back then I did not expect that I will blog almost once a week for that many years and that the blog gets that many readers. ;)

With this blogpost I’ll give you some insights about the stats of the blog and some plans for the future. Furthermore I am highly interested in comments from you. What do you think about the blog in general? What is good, what could I improve? Where do you agree or disagree. Please write some comments to give me some feedback. Thanks a lot!

Stats & Other Notes

First some stats: In average I have about 1500 views per day, while they are split to 1800 views during working days and about 700 during the weekend days. The vast majority comes in via search engines, namely Google. Concrete example: on April 24th, 2018, the blog had 1890 views, while 1182 came in through Google, which is about 62 %.

For some reasons, my blog views are slightly decreasing (or at least not increasing) since last year, though I am still blogging almost once a week. The following chart shows the average views per day, sorted by months over the complete 5 years. While the blog got more readers from 2013 to 2016, the count stayed almost the same for the last two years:

I don’t know exactly why, but I have a clue: One of my most read articles is the “CLI Commands for Troubleshooting Palo Alto Firewalls” post. Among others, this post was listed by Google at the second or third place when searching for anything about Palo Alto Networks firewalls. However, during the last years, Palo Alto itself succeeded in placing its own articles in front of Google, moving mine to number 5-7, which in turn brings less views. Well, that’s okay for me, though a bit disappointing in summary that the stats are decreasing though publishing regularly.

Some more notes concerning this and that:

  • The blog has 242 published posts, which is 0.9 posts per week or a blogpost every 1.07 weeks.
  • The blog has not that many followers who are reading every post. When publishing a new post, I have about 50-100 readers during the first days. I think that’s realistic since I am blogging about many different topics and vendors. The blog is read by IT admins searching for a specific solutions, rather than classical followers.
  • I am mostly publishing between Tuesday and Thursday to have new posts within the week rather than at the beginning or the end.
  • Starting with 2017 I tried to blog only every second week. But I did not yet succeed. ;)
  • I had a couple of highlights during the last years, such as:
  • In summary there are 1354 comments posted, while 339 are answers from me.
  • Since about two years I am using pictures from Flickr licensed via CC for my featured images. I really like them. What do you think?
  • I deleted the Facebook page for my blog as well as the Facebook share buttons at all. You can follow the blog via email (right-hand side), RSS or Twitter (me or only blog).
  • An additional Twitter bot tweets a random blogpost every 25 hours:

Future

What’s planned for the future? I am still writing blogposts out of my daily business, that is: about problems and configurations for firewalls (Forti and Palo), IPv6, DNSSEC, and networks/security at all. I currently have about 20 drafts in WordPress and about 50 more ideas for blogposts. Enough for the next years.

Furthermore I am currently writing on a huge blogpost series about NTP, the network time protocol. To my mind it’s one of those underestimated protocols, since it is configured everywhere but often without thinking about it and its security implications. I am really looking forward to it. Will start in Q4 2018.

Final sentence: Thanks for reading. ;) I am really happy that my blog is growing over the years. Looking forward to the next 5 years.

Featured image “Chocolate Torte” by Adam Walker Cleaveland is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

11 thoughts on “The first 5 Years of Blog.Webernetz.net

  1. Danke für deine Arbeit! Ich bin wohl auch über den PAN CLI Artikel auf deinen Blog gestossen und danach geblieben.
    Ich freue mich schon auf die NTP Beiträge.

  2. Herzlichen Glückwunsch und auf mindestens weitere 5 Jahre.
    Ich lese gern deine Artikel da mich die Technik interessiert.

  3. Hallo,

    ich lese hier auch gerne und lasse mich von der Bastelsektion inspirieren.

    Eine frage hätte ich aber. Ist es absicht dass seit einigen Wochen im RSS-Feed nur noch die gekürzte Artikelversion erscheint?

  4. Hallo zusammen. Danke euch für eure Rückmeldungen. ;) Freut mich, dass ihr den Blog lest. Es ist immer mal schön ein paar Namen zu sehen und nicht nur anonyme Views.

    Bzgl. dem RSS-Feed: Den gab es noch nie im Volltext, sondern immer nur mit den ersten Zeilen. Das ist die Standardeinstellung von WordPress. Es soll ja primär zur Info dienen, dass ein neuer Blogpost da ist. Im RSS Feed kann man ohnehin die Code-Listings und so nicht wirklich gut lesen, wodurch ein Klick auf den eigentlichen Blog ohnehin praktisch ist.

    1. Hm, okay, da hast du wohl recht. Dann hatte ich das wohl mal umgestellt. ;) Ich werde es aber vorerst dennoch bei der gekürzten Version im Feed belassen. Sorry…

  5. Herzlichen Glückwunsch, wenn auch etwas verspätet ;-)
    Vor allem die Artikel zu Palo Alto gefallen mir immer sehr gut. Werde evtl. zukünftig auch mal was in meinem Blog darüber schreiben, aber vorerst muss ich noch ein paar andere Dinge erledigen.

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