top10post2010

This is the time of the year when people start looking back at the year that is about to end, and drawing conclusions.

I will come to my “personal” considerations in a future post, reviewing my 2010 resolutions, but for the moment I want to share with you my top posts of 2010.

The most popular post of 2010

1. Lucene.Net needs your help (or it will die) – Unfortunately it didn’t help Lucene.net get a new set of contributors (at the time of writing they didn’t comply to the conditions set by the ASF board and the project will most likely be shut down and put in the attic), but it raised the awareness of the problem, and was the inspiration for someone to immediately start forking and going on a more .NET path.

2. Is Silverlight becoming a niche technology? – This post stated my position regarding the whole Silverlight vs HTML5 debate. And I’m glad the official position of Microsoft, despite what most fanboys said, was pretty similar to my idea: Silverlight is for building applications for WP7, Silverlight is for cross-platform desktop applications, Silverlight is for niche media-rich web application and HTML5 is for building web applications.

3. Apple relaxing SDK license agreement: MonoTouch (and Flash?) officially allowed – Apparently not many people noticed when Apple announced it, but in the latest update of the iOS SDK license agreement, Apple opened the market to other development languages like MonoTouch and apparently also Flash. So no more excuses not to jump into the iOS world.

4. Tortoise SVN tip: Repair move – Apparently I was not the only one that didn’t know about this super-useful feature of Tortoise SVN, which “repairs” a file rename or a file move.

5. Lucene.net is powering Subtext 2.5 search – Subtext 2.5 introduced a new Lucene.net based search engine, and this post explains how it is implemented.

Unlike 2008 and 2009, when the top 5 posts were mainly about technologies, this year 3 out of 5 are opinion posts.

The 6-10 positions are occupied by my announcement of relocation from Italy to Belgium, another opinion post about the other hot debate of the last two years, WebForms vs ASP.NET MVC, the Subtext 2.5 release announcement and a list of .NET books to read.

The main figures of my 2010 blogging year

In 2010 I wrote 52 blog posts (53 with this one), which is half of what I wrote in 2009 (when I wrote 110 posts), but the traffic increased a little bit, going from 370k to a bit more then 400k page views. I blogged a little bit less frequently, and not as many technical posts as I would have liked. Probably due to the fact that I had some many things to do with the relocation (settling in a new country in Europe, despite what they say about the open borders, and all the e-government, is a long procedure that takes a lot of energy) that I didn’t have time to do write blogs.

What’s coming in 2011?

As you might have noticed, in the last months I went back to my usual blogging pace, and I hope I can keep the same pace in 2011. Lately I started working on FeedTso, a newsreader for WP7, and in 2011 I’ll probably blog also about my experiences and findings in WP7 development.

So stay tuned and subscribe to my RSS feed to get the latest post.

Just one last final thought, unlike the previous years, this time it was very easy to calculate the top 5 posts, thanks to the new dashboard that we released with Subtext 2.5 which included the famous Ayende’s formula for blog post popularity.