Posted by Steve on Fri 29 Dec 2006 at 08:36
Now that we're at the end of the year it seems like a good time to celebrate our second anniversary! It is a little hard to believe at times, but this site has now been in existance for just over two years. During that time a great number of visitors have commented, contributed articles and polls and made this site what it is today. A big thank you to everybody who has contributed.
Whilst technically this site has already been running for more than two years I made the first anniversary post exactly a year ago today, because I wasn't keeping track of the dates correctly, so I hereby declare that the 29th of December will be the official "site birthday"
During the course of 2006 we managed to have just over 160 new articles published, which works out at approximately one update every three days. Not bad going at all, although slightly down on 2005 which managed to have 254 articles posted in total. If you'd like to write about something new articles are welcome - just submit them!
During the year there were several significant changes to the site facilities:
- Article Tags
One of the most useful changes to the site was the addition of a tag facility; allowing registered users to place tags upon articles which have been published.
All the tags which have been used are displayed upon the global tag cloud to allow easy searching and discovery of related articles.
The tagging facility was also one of the first updates to the site which allowed increased participation by users.
- Bookmarks
Each registered now has the ability to maintain a bookmark list, allowing them to remember their favourite articles, polls, and weblog entries.
- Notifications
This year also introduced a new user-messaging facility which can be used to send messages to site-users. Right now this is primarily used to allow registered users to receive notifications of new comments being posted, either by message or email at their choice.
- RSS Feeds
In addition to the available article feeds we now have feeds which may be subscribed to for watching comments on particular articles, polls, and weblog entries.
There are even RSS feeds of articles containing a particular tag.
- Weblog Updates
The user weblog facilities have improved greatly, allowing much more control and having their own RSS feeds.
There have been many more minor changes behind the scenes, which you can checkout in the site codebase if you're curious but those are the most significant ones.
Last year the biggest news in the Debian community was the release of Sarge. Sadly it appears that we'll not see Etch this year, but we did have many useful articles on other subjects.
My personal favourite articles from this year were those relating to Xen, and the introduction to LVM. I'd be interesting in hearing which pieces our users enjoyed and appreciated the most for future reference.
Our year ends with just over 6100 users, which is double what we had at the end of the previous year. Each registered user who posted even a single comment has helped made this site what it is today. So a big thank you to each and every one of you.
Heres to 2007!
This article can be found online at the Debian Administration website at the following bookmarkable URL:
This article is copyright 2006 Steve - please ask for permission to republish or translate.