TinkerTry's Fourth Birthday, June 1, 2015

It's become an annual tradition for me to take a moment to look back once a year, before I charge forward, with 578 articles published so far.

These past 365 days were good, as were years 3 and 2, but not so much year 1. Those early days were lean days, with very few readers. Glad I stuck with it though, and it gets more fun with time and growth, learning as I go, with more lively comments too.

I've regained new levels of enthusiasm now that the hard work of overhauling the infrastructure and writing tools is behind me. Curious what's been done here? Some hints about over here.

To date, TinkerTry has surpassed 4 million unique page views. Wow! Last year, I learned many lessons from the harsh reality of sizable web hosting fees needed to keep up with traffic. This year, I took a fresh approach, taking drastic measures to double the speed while cutting monthly costs in half. And there's more improvements to come. If you know me by now, you know it'll all be detailed, meanwhile, see What runs the Tinkertry.com site.

The TinkerTry YouTube Channel subscriber count has now gone to 5,763 subscribers. I thank you all very much, for your visits, and your constructive comments. The YouTube comments continue to flourish now that they're based on Google+. As far as discussions, I've responded to 1,567 comments on Disqus in all. As has been the case since site launch back on June 1, 2011, I've kept the comments prominently located to the right of all TinkerTry pages.

I've shared some screenshot below that'll help you get a sense of which of my articles have the most readers. It's rarely something I can predict, and always a surprise. I'll continue to share tales of success with my efficient home lab, with the virtualization theme tying it all together. It's how I keep things affordable and sensible.

Because I've dropped the trailing slashes from my article URLs, the counts seen below are not perfectly accurate, but are a good approximation.

Thank you, my readers and my advertisers, for all your readership and support these past 4 years, integral to TinkerTry's growth.

Ok, that's enough looking back. I now turn my sights on the rest of 2015. I can't wait to get so many of my draft articles out there for you!