I can remember last year when I decided to get my act together and create the grounding site. I went through a whole process of looking at blogging engines and finally chose Community Server as it had the features I needed to host a community site. I had a inactive site hosted at WebHost4Life which I took down and replaced the contents with the shell for grounding. I had previously registered the domain name and thought it appropriate to use the name grounding.co.za as to give all the readers a solid grounding on the technology.
I started adding content a few weeks before, with a huge amount of posts on course outlines and some news around the time and some posts I had done previously. On 16 June 2007, I brought the site online and now a year has flown by.
What has happened in the year
I did not expect the site to do as well as it has, and all credit goes to you, our readers, students and friends. Soon after I launched, I approached Trevor and Neil to join me blogging and I sold them the idea, with some nagging they started blogging too, since then we now have 9 talented people blogging with different areas of specialities.
- Neil
- Trevor
- Pieter
- Gail
- Nico
- Barend
- Romiko
- Cara
- Brett
The content of the site has grown tremendously with 981 posts made. The list below is an extraction of the Tag Cloud on the blog site indicating the topics posted on.
.NET Architecture ASP.NET BizTalk C# CES Courses CPS Delphi Design Patterns Dynamics CRM Exchange Grade 12 OCS Office 2007 OOP Opinionated Posts SharePoint SharePoint Designer SQL Server SSIS Training Virtual PC Vista Visual Studio
Statistics
The following statistics are from AWStats
Our membership has grown over the period and has shown, interestingly this does correspond to training courses presented and over the past few months there has been a dip as we all have not trained that much.
The total number of visitors is growing exponentially as the site is becoming more established on the Internet and ranked higher in many of the search engines such as Google and Live.
The number of "pages" has also shown a steep increase as the user visits has increased. Not bad for a 1 year old web site from our little corner of Africa!
Personal lessons learnt
For me personally, blogging has become quite addictive an very enjoyable. I have personally grown in my knowledge due to my blogging, forcing me to dig deeper into a subject matter than I would have done in the past. The blog site has also helped me tremendously with my career and has opened a few doors me. The biggest rush is to chat to someone or read a comment on the site where someone has managed to get value out of something I have posted. The satisfaction of being able to help someone with a problem, point them in the right direction or help with improving their skill is most rewarding.
Silent Sponsors
As the site grew we approached Teligent, the company that creates and markets Community Server to get a better price. They generously gave our community a free licence to the corporate edition of community server, again a big thank you for a great product.
Also, a big thank all the community blogger's for their contributions to the site with a big special thanks to my friends Neil and Trevor for all their help getting the site up and running to where it is today. This site, its content is truly a community effort and collectivity our efforts have shown good results.
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Last words
The site is nothing without you and I would like to thank you for reading and supporting grounding. Please keep visiting, referring your friends and co-workers; making comments and guiding us in what we should write on.
Thank you!