Month: January 2009

If you looked at the January 3rd post, it’s easy to see that WinBreak.com is still growing. But over the last year, it seems as though we have turned a few heads. I was recently notified that I was nominated, and now have officially been accepted into that sacred inner sanctum: the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award. To have this honor is almost unbelievable. As they describe on their website: “A panel that includes MVP team members and product group teams evaluate each nominee’s technical expertise and voluntary community contributions for the past year. The panel considers the quality, quantity, and level of impact of the MVP nominee’s contributions.” My little blog, just now celebrating it’s one year existence? It’s such an honor, I am genuinely still shell shocked!

I’m still waiting on some paperwork, before I can post the official logo of my MVP status on the site, but that is a flag I will proudly fly high. I’ve wondered what it would take to be an MVP since the days of my first website and my freelance 3rd party driver design. Never did I think I would be a recognized as MVP material – I simply wanted to provide a good website, the hard to find information, and help out wherever I could. But this is truly an overwhelming honor.

Being awarded the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award is recognition for something (or things) I did in 2008. But we’re not going to rest on our laurels, now! It’s only just beginning. A whirlwind is going to hit, this year!

It’s all thanks to you, my small but dedicated and ever growing community. In our sophomore year, here at WinBreak, we intend to make a few more contacts, build up a small swag stash, and give you even more reasons to swing by the site! 🙂

In the New Year, everyone likes to give the obligatory stats article. Well, for us, it’s a little different. January 3rd 2008 was the day I launched the Repurposed WinBreak.com. Therefore, sharing my stats with you is sort of a testament to our rookie year as a new community on the web.

From the picture above, it’s clear to see we’re still one of the best kept secrets on the web. Something else also jumps out: the week of July 27th, 2008 was our biggest in the last year. So what was it that drew 14,564hits and 3,610 page views? It was one of my favorite moments in the last year. I didn’t do it for the hits, but it was the kind of article that gives everyone the warm and fuzzy feeling!

Back in 2007, the site was about computer security and didn’t have any kind of dedicated following – I was just able to generate some unique content from time to time and people would pass by the site. The site was running on a completely customized framework, using massive CSS and HTML files. It was taxing on my server, not that it mattered, that the hits were so few and far between. Still, switching to Word Press was fantastic for the server, and this was proved when we nearly quadrupled traffic between 2007 and 2008.

2007 showed 243,417 server requests with an actual 24,732 page views. 2008 garnered 260,586 hits and a satisfactory 86,725 page views. A good number of those hits came from images which were hotlinked from my site. I might have to do something about that in the future, but I don’t mind for now. This is very evident in search queries relating to articles that didn’t bring me much actual traffic.

We can see very clearly one of the articles I must have gotten an early jump on! The top 9 search queries of 2009 were:

1. soul calibur 4 limited edition, 742
2. soul calibur 4 special edition, 331
3. winbreak, 217
4. soul calibur 4 limited, 137
5. soul calibur 4, 106
6. soul caliber 4 limited edition, 88
7. soul caliber 4 special edition, 57
8. limited edition soul calibur 4, 44
9. keep it clean halo, 38

This year has been a completely insane experience, leaving for a new job right when I launched the new website – moving back and getting a different job right around the holiday season in 2008 – and overall just learning about all of the great things that bring the Xbox Live community closer together. Yeah, I tried to go multi console, but I realized today I have sold off almost all of my PS3 games and the Wii hasn’t been hooked up for over a month. I feel at home on the Xbox 360, and have even more news to come in the future to reaffirm that. Stay tuned, and let’s hope we can quadruple the traffic again this year!