Looking Back: 2008 Part 1

Over the next few days, I’m looking at the most popular articles from this site and my previous news website during 2008. I’ll be doing it in three parts.

Popularity is measured by page views from local access logs, but some articles were actually more popular in the months after they were first posted, so it’s not completely accurate, but let’s be forgiving over the holidays, OK?

January

I must have been writing rubbish because nothing got that popular at the start of the year, but some of my older pages continued to be popular throughout 2008:-

Online Banking with GNU/Linux, Firefox-based browsers or Free Software (started in 2007) – I really should move that list to another address because I think it’s going to be around for a while.
alt.satellite.tv.europe Frequently Asked Questions (first posted in 2006) – again, could do with a better home.
Annoying blog comment misfeatures: letter images – until people recognise the limitations of “CAPTCHA”, this is probably going to be a popular page.

February

SPI Meeting Wed 27 Feb 1900Z irc.oftc.net/#spi – I think this started my regular meeting announcements, which has been a surprisingly popular series and has expanded into a whole category of SPI articles here.
The Myth Of Deregulation – this was meant to be a marginal rant. Its popularity (and the subsequent comments – some of which were unpublishable or their authors requested removal) surprised me and so I started writing more about social enterprise, cooperatives-sw member businesses and how they interact with GNU/Linux software and web development.

March

Annoying Judge Resurrects Software Patents in the UK – notable only for pointing out that Symbian is not a UK company. It was probably news to some software developers, which is probably why it made my popular articles list.
Debian Project Leader IRC Debate or it might have been Random recent threads from planet debian – for the first part of the year, I’m looking at what page spiked on which day, but I posted twice a few days apart, so I can’t tell which article on the page was popular.

April

UK mobile micropublishing choices? – for the trip that motivated that article, I used twitter, but I’m actually updating identi.ca over XMPP from my mobile now.
Better Free Software Organisations? – I’ve read the Yunus book mentioned in the comments on the Advogato repost of this article and I’ve a review which will appear on this site later. It includes a bit of a flaming of the simplistic and IMO factually-incorrect dismissal of cooperative businesses, so I wonder if it will get a few responses from Yunus-fans.
Explaining web site improvements: what’s important to you? It seems that April was a good time for asking questions: this is a third popular question-based article. The website discussed has now been approved and ordered from TTLLP, but the work is not yet scheduled.

That’s the first few months of 2008 done. I’ll post the next few months in a couple of days. Hope you’re enjoying the holidays if you’re having them. I’m sure I am 😉