Most visited pages for 2006

published: Thu, 11-Jan-2007   |   updated: Sat, 25-Aug-2018

I had an hour or so to spare this evening, so I decided to check which of the pages on this site were the most frequently visited last year. In other words, of my pretty voluminous writings, which pages were the favorite? Some of the results were pretty surprising to me, so I thought I'd share.

The data, unfortunately is incomplete: my hosting service, TDMWeb, switched boyet.com to a server in England from one in Dallas (if memory serves) in March last year and all of my previous stats went into the bit-bucket along with the decommissioned server. Oh well, but still ten months worth of data is worth exploring.

The most visited page is — no surprise here — my home page.

The next most visited is the EZDSL home page. EZDSL is my collection of collection classes for Delphi, something that I shall be updating when Delphi gets generics. Still not too surprising a result.

And third? The page that lists the articles I've written for other sites or publications. This surprised me somewhat: it's an aggregate page of links to other pages on the site, and unfortunately a lot of the links to the outside world, like to CodeFez, are now dead. (CodeFez is itself in cryogenic suspension.) Yet people are still viewing it, so it behooves me to clean it up. Maybe I should reprint those old articles as separate pages. Also with the demise of The Delphi Magazine, the links I have to those articles published by them may get broken too pretty soon. I'll have to keep an eye on it.

Fourth is an article I wrote on calculating the ISO week number for a given date. In fact, if you google for "calculate ISO week number", my page is the top of the list. It's been mentioned in many other sites and articles, and translated into VB and SQL. Looking at it now makes me itch to refactor the code using C#'s extension methods; maybe later.

Next up (at about half the number of hits of the fourth) is my blog post about lock-free queues. (Google rank for "lock free queue": 2). For some reason, of all the posts I've made about lock-free programming, this is the most popular.

And following on its heels is my post about explicit interface implementations in Delphi 8, specifically about how to solve a particular problem I'd run into. To be honest, I don't know if this is any easier in later Delphis for .NET, I only use Delphi for 32-bit Windows programming. Nevertheless, a lot of people are still reading this particular page. (Google position for "explicit interface implementation Delphi" is 2)

Seventh is my article about the closure of The Delphi Magazine, mostly because it was linked to from borland.public.delphi.non-technical, although both Marco Cantu and Bob Swart both linked to it.

In eighth tied position are the three pages (1, 2, 3) I wrote about my experiences with publishing my book using Lulu.

Ninth was my post about how to write a (pretty complete) parser to read CSV files. It caters for such bizarre things as quoted strings containing newlines and commas and has proven very popular. The code was even translated by someone else into Java.

And in tenth position, was the post that talked about my new job as Chief Technology Officer at Developer Express, a position I've been in for ten months now and enjoying very much, I must say.

So there you have it. If I keeled over tomorrow, I'd be known as the man who could write code to calculate ISO week numbers.