Looking Back at 2017 and Looking Forward to 2018

As I normally try to do this time of year it’s time take a little retrospective on what’s been done over the last year and what I want to accomplish in the coming year.

Last Year

Last year my goals were:

1. Produce 26 new “content” blog posts
2. Double my readership
3. Create my social media footprint
4. New site look

Going through the list this is what happened:

1. I produced 36 posts last year 12 of which where monthly link rollups which gives me a grand total of 24 content posts. Not exactly what I wanted but extremely close.
2. This didn’t happen. For some reason my readership numbers are flat between 2016 and 2017.
3. This did happen. I now have https://twitter.com/thisprogramming and https://www.facebook.com/ThisProgrammingThing/. They don’t have a lot of followers but I’ll have to see what happens next year.
4. This also didn’t happen.

This Year

1. Produce 26 new “content” blog posts
2. Double my readership. Based on Google Analytics.
3. Improve my social media footprint. Specifically, I want to make sure that for every evergreen blog post I create I have a header image and it gets shared on Twitter and Facebook. Hopefully this will improve my social media reach.
4. New site look. For reals.

My focus is really going to be on #1. The plan right now is to spend 4 nights a week spending 30 minutes (or more) on adding content. I know in the summer I’ll be busy (like 2017) so I need to plan for that and have some things in the hopper.