Three Years

We’re coming up on the third anniversary of this blog. In that time, I’ve written a little over 125 posts. In the first year and a half, I updated it fairly regularly, and then for the next year and a half, I barely wrote in it at all. It’s just in the last month since I’ve resurrected it.

By far, my most popular post has been How to Allow Non-Admin Users to Add Printers in Leopard, which accounts for about two-thirds of the traffic to this site. It address a minor problem in Mac OS X 10.5 that will probably concern no more than one in a million people, but when you have a billion or two people in the world connected to the Internet, that still brings a steady stream of traffic to this site each day.

I knew when I posted it that it was going to be useful to some people. To find a solution that worked, I had to piece together information from three different sites – there wasn’t one place you could go to that would give an average user this information.  The ironic thing is that I haven’t used this information since I wrote it. It turns out we didn’t update all the teacher laptops to Leopard after all, so I didn’t have to deal with it. Unfortunately, because of this, I haven’t been able to provide any help to the people who commented on this post. I really don’t know if it’s still a problem or if the fix I provided is still a solution. Sorry!

Sometimes students stumble upon my blog and look at my Clustrmap and ask me how they can get as many people from as many different places to visit their blog. For me, it was just providing information that can’t be found anywhere else. For example, my second most popular post (a distant second) is Making an Interactive QuickTime Movie which presents a unique way to link information from a graphic in Apple’s Keynote and then export it to a QuickTime movie. People who are interested in finding information on that will search Google for it and, since there’s not a lot of people who have posted information on that particular topic, mine will be one of the top results to pop up.

The alternative to that would be write continuously about a hobby or a passion they have and, sooner or later, other people with the same hobby or passion will find the blog and start visiting regularly. I could probably do this on a number of topics, especially with technology and education, but my attention tends to wander to other topics too often.

The strangest thing that happens is when someone brings up my blog. It happens so rarely, it’s a shock. Just about a month ago, a colleague was mentioning my blog to some of the other people in the room and being very complimentary. There was this weird non-reaction – nobody knew what to say, including me! I suppose I should have something in mind to say, though, in case it ever happens again.

In the meantime, thank you to everyone who reads this. I appreciate the kind words … even if it’s hard to tell sometimes.