captured sparks

So, my last entry here was 17th August 2008. And that was written just over a month after I said I would post more. Work took over. My full-time job was incredibly busy during the last 3 months of 2008 and the I have been working on a Rails site since October and that is still ongoing. As a result of this combination, I never really had the opportunity to post anything to the blog.

For me, 2008 was a good year. During 2007, my site received 200 visits. In 2008, it received over 1700 visits. This was driven primarily by three articles I wrote on 2 subjects – combining ActiveMerchant and Paypal (something I still receive emails about) and receiving emails with Rails. The visitor numbers have kept up through January 2009 and I hope to post more this year to drive more traffic.

The site I’m working on at the moment is a straight-forward brochure site although I have done a nice implementation with Google Maps to show the nearest stockists for the products sold by the client. This should be finished within the next month, following which I hope to work on a small project of my own. Nothing concrete as yet but have some ideas floating round my head.

Finally, I’ve been spammed massively in the comments. If you left a comment after 16 January, I’m afraid I’ve had to delete it as I couldn’t go through 2000 comments to identify the genuine ones. Sorry again.