Annual report of a tiny, little blog

We’ve watched the year 2009 come and go, therefore I think it is about time to check what this blog has done in the past 12 months. First of all, I have to admit that I spent rather little time in writing blog posts last year compare to previous years. The main reason was many times, I just tweeted a line or two about my thoughts and then no longer repeated those in the blog. However, I guess I did a few good things to my blog …

First is I installed the Thesis theme – it is simply the most versatile WordPress theme in the market right now. And I also implemented a few very good plug-ins : The TweetMeme Retweet Button, the No Self Pings, the Where did they go from here etc. Those really made the blog looks a little bit more professional.

The second good thing I did to my blog was I started to post information about Amazon Kindle 2 and Kindle DX from March last year. I bought the original Kindle 2 US version and then detailed how to purchase it from Amazon, how to set it up, how to use it and how to purchase ebooks … the traffic to the blog then surged:

And finally I put the Amazon affiliation network into good use … I did not actively promote the Amazon website and products, but just link to their Kindle products pages. Surprisingly, I start getting some affiliation fee from Amazon. You know, I never thought I can earn some pocket money from my blog … In addition to the affiliation fee surprise, another thing surprised me a lot is what products the visitors bought after they surfed to the Amazon website. And here are some interesting details:

To this tiny little blog, it is truly amazing !!

This is the story of why we blog …

As blogged in one previous post, I was one of the 50 winners of the Bring Back That Brand New Blogging Event. To enter the contest, I submitted a screen shot of my first blog post back in 2002 and the following winning line was selected by the organizer – “I kinda believe that web blog is the future”. The organizer also compiled those 50 winning lines in a set of presentation slides titled “This is the story of why we blog…”.

Following is my part in the set:

 

Check out the whole set here in an interactive fashion.

Bring back that brand new blogging feeling

Liz Strauss, famous online community builder, blogger and author of the book “The Secret to Writing a Successful and Outstanding Blog”, recently ran a contest on “Bring Back That ‘Brand New’ Blogging Feeling Event” and gave the bloggers around the world a chance to win a premium WordPress Theme from Blog Design Studio and a copy of her ebook.

Only 50 winners in the contest and luckily, I won !!

To enter the contest, here is the image of my first blog post back in 2002 …