Blog status report 2014

The occasion of my fiftieth post is a good milestone to pause and look back on the two years since I started blogging about open-source routing and network simulation. I will review the blog’s performance statistics and reflect on why I started this blog and what I want to do next.

The chart above shows the blog traffic over the past two years, starting in August 2012. In the first year I thought I would reach only a small audience but, as I posted more content, more users found my blog. In the past twelve months, 29,500 unique users visited this blog. Traffic grew steadily almost every month in the past year.

Users from almost every country on Earth have visited this blog. The map below illustrates the number of users in each country who have visited the blog during the past twelve months, with shades of blue representing the number of users.

I considered writing a technical blog after listening to the audiobook Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuck, read by the author. The audiobook was very inspirational and made me understand that writing a blog could be a positive experience.

The next book I read was Technical Blogging by Antonio Cangiano. This book was a practical how-to manual that described the tools and services that most technical bloggers will want to use. It also discussed potential problems, such as spam comments, and the services that can resolve most of these problems.

Between these two books, I obtained the motivation and the practical knowledge I needed. Vaynerchuk’s book made me feel like I should write a blog, and Cangiano’s book made me feel like I could write a blog.

Next, I had to decide if there was a topic about which I was passionate enough to sustain a blog.

I decided to write about open-source routing because I work in the field of telecommunications and I thought that it would be fun to explore open-source software that supports networking functionality. Additionally, I would need to use network simulation tools to evaluate open-source networking software so I also decided to write about open-source network simulators.

As I look through my older posts, I see that I have written mostly about simulators. When I started this blog, I found that there was very little useful information about open-source network simulators on the web. I wanted to create an authoritative list of open-source network simulators, which would be a unique resource for researchers with interests similar to mine. I also found that the basic technologies used to implement network simulators on Linux are also related with my other research projects on cloud computing and software-defined networking. As commercial datacenters expand the use of standard x86 servers to implement a virtualized networking infrastructure, the tools and technologies used by open-source network simulators become more even more interesting.

In the future, I intend to write more about software defined networking and cloud computing platform management technologies, as they relate to networking. I also will continue to write about open-source networking functions such as switching, routing, security, authentication, and network management using open source software. I am also interested in studying how — or if — a software-based virtualized network implemented on Linux computers can assure quality of service for applications using that network.

Thank you for visiting my blog. The experience of writing about technology has been personally rewarding and I really appreciate the users who have contributed to this blog with their comments.