Chris Pollach's Blog

I just wanted to acknowledge the tremendous increase in the amount of Blog activity that I have received over the past year. I think (and hope) that this is because many Sybase professionals out there have come to visit my site for latest information on the Sybase scene. Since I started my Blog in August of 2005 I have seen a steady increase in unique visits to my site. This whole Blog experience of course is Reed Shilt's fault. Reed is the development manager for PocketBuilder and started the whole thing off by opening his own Blog within PBDJ, then sending me an invitation to join him in this new venue. At that point in time, Blogging was a whole new experience for me and in fact, I had not even heard the term until I received Reed's email.

Since August of 2005, the unique site visits have increased from the initial 405 into the upper hundreds, a thousand, a few thousand, etc to now in March I was able establish an all time new high-water mark of 14,604 unique visits in 2007! Right after that, Blog-City - which hosts the PBDJ blogs - changed the way they captured and reported on web metrics. So my volumetrics changed downwards significantly to 6,584 visits for example in May. However, since then I have hit a new high of 10,407 unique visits per month in October, 2007. So under the old scheme of statistics this probably translated to 20K+ web hits. So not only have I seen two new record months this year, visitors have made many nice comments and also sent many emails thanking me for my time and effort in recording my thoughts, findings, observations, etc about the Sybase realm. To all of you who have visited the Blog and communicated with me - Ka Sa Ham Needa - Korean for "Thank you very much"!

Another interesting trend that I initially observed was the exponential usage of the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser activity within the first year of my Blog and the rapid decline of popular browsers like Safari, NetScape, Opera, etc. Then, within the past 12 months a tremendous resurgence of the FireFox web browser. I think this backward trend is a factor of the new FireFox version 2.0 release coupled with the new IE 7 release. FireFox 2.0 introduced tabbed web pages, document browser (I use that feature to QA all my PB web entities that I construct), really nice skins, readability, spell checking (which IE7 does not have), etc. On the other hand, IE7 I find personally a disappointment. Although the interface was cleaned up - tabbed browsing had already been done in IE6 via the MSN plug-in, add-in tool bars for searching from Google, etc - IE7 seemed to take these features and down grade them. The layout is not as intuitive as FireFox, IE7 does not have automatic spell checking where FireFox does. FireFox 2.0 is so much faster at painting the screen, switching between tab pages, etc - which to me gives the entire browsing experience allot more pleasure. In fact, I am entering this blog entry in FireFox 2.0.0.11 .

As an interesting observation, the articles that various visitors look into at my Blog site vary quite a bit. I try to cover all the  Sybase products in general - although you may have noticed a keen interest in PowerBuilder and PocketBuilder! In recent months, the focus was on PowerBuilder 11.Net, User Groups, SQLServer 2005 vs ASE 15, Large databases and EAServer plus foundation classes. The top read Blogs were PB 11 by far, but no surprise as this already been a really big release for the PowerBuilder development team. This was also followed by the ISUG "PB 11 Road Tour" which has been another excellent attended set of events! The Blog site has also been very useful for me running the local Ottawa Sybase User Group (OSUG) in communicating local events, meetings, items of interest, etc to the membership. I would strongly recommend that fellow Sybase User Group leaders may want to adopt this venue of communication with their membership as well.

Over the past six months I have been able to also solicit more input from Sybase employees. I believe this has come about as more Sybase staff visit my Blog to see the various points of view, comments left behind by visitors, etc. From this information Sybase staff have started to feed me more information, which in turn I can pass along to my fellow bloggers. That in turn makes the whole information dissemination even more precious. So once again, thank you one and all for your visits, feedback (good or bad), emails of encouragement, etc. I have really enjoyed bringing you my points of view and sharing information about Sybase's great products.

I am now looking forward to breaking the 200K and 1/4 million visit mark in the near future with all your help!