Keyvan Nayyeri

A short while after hitting the 1000th post milestone, today my blog turns four to somehow become one of the mature blogs on the community! It’s really hard to believe that fours years are gone. I feel it was a few weeks ago when I began blogging here!

Prior to the events happened in Iran, I was thinking about celebrating this milestone by ordering a cake and having a small party, but these phenomena are sad enough to stop me from anything like that!

I have a tradition to go over the past year of blogging and talk about my future plans when my blog becomes older every year. Unlike the past couple of years (2007 and 2008), I don’t think there is much to say for this year as it’s been the lowest year of activity on my blog.

During the past year many things happened to me in the personal and professional life that should have affected this blog as well. First I ended my conscript, then tried to recover myself and my life from that long period of difficult life. I had been able to keep my blog up with at least 20 posts per months until the end of the service, but right after that and due to some reasons, I suddenly lost that record and my blogging activity hit its lowest rate in the latest months.

Facing with some unexpected tasks that ate my time such as the additional revision of the book, the general influence of Twitter on blogging, and apparently losing my old motivation for blogging, were all some reasons for this change in my blogging style.

On the other hand, I had a positive change to publish more detailed technical posts that received more acclaim by the community, so I don’t think that a linear statistical model based on the number of posts can completely reflect the quality and value of the blog.

However, here is a short overview of what happened around Nayyeri.NET during the past 12 months. By the way, it’s the shortest list that I’ve had to now. Not many upgrades and changes in the software and look and feel of the blog.

• Attacked by hackers (August 9, 2008): Last year some ASP.NET blogs and websites received huge number of SQL injection attacks that I discussed in the post. Nayyeri.NET was also one of those blogs, but none of those attacks could take the blog down even for one second. Finally, I blocked those attacks by installing UrlScan.
• Upgraded to Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 (September 19, 2008): I moved my blog from a Windows Server 2003 VPS with shared SQL Server 2005 database to a dedicated Windows Server 2008 with SQL Server 2008 database on MaximumASP to improve the quality and security.
• Moved off the FeedBurner (October 15, 2008): After using FeedBurner and its MyBrand service for a long while, I felt that there are major problems with the service since Google started to move the feeds. So, I returned back to my own feed and recovered my addresses.
• Upgraded to Graffiti 1.2 (December 20, 2008): As Telligent released the new version of Graffiti CMS, I upgraded the blog to the latest build.
• Best posts 2008 (December 31, 2008): In the last day of 2008 I picked the best 25 posts that I had written in that year.
• Updated blog theme to Envision (February 5, 2009): I changed the look and feel of the blog by importing another Styleshout free template called Envision to Graffiti CMS. However, after a while I recovered the Underground theme because Envision wasn’t very compatible with source code samples in my posts.
• Published the 1000th post (May 10, 2009): After a very long time of blogging, I published the 1000th post on my blog which was a milestone for technical blogs like mine.

Talking about the future is difficult, especially this year, because there are many things going to happen to me which can change everything around my community activities including my blogging, but I can be certain that unfortunately I don’t think that my blogging activity will be better for the next coming year. There is also a high chance that I change the type of content that I publish here.

Also I’ve been thinking about switching from Graffiti to my own blogging engine or something community-driven specifically something written with ASP.NET MVC. As you know, Telligent has been experiencing some problems in the crisis and after many lay-offs, they also haven’t had an update on Graffiti CMS for a long while. I haven’t been able to find the time to choose my new engine and convert my data, but I try to do that as soon as possible.