Before the holidays I had a few things swirl around in my head that were important for me going forwards. I like taking time to mull it over in my mind, in that background process, and see where I could improve. Whilst the dates of “getting started” moved a little I am happy that I can now see a way forward and keep pushing with my goal (last two weeks were a complete write-off).

Last year was good, with a few speed bumps, although a net positive in general when I look at how the year ended. It also brought perspective on resilience to changes outside of my ultimate control and also where I should be focusing next.

I did too many things even though I find it healthy to explore different ideas and projects. Ultimately I believe I dropped the ball on a few others like moving to “Updates only” on my blog here — keeping the personal out.

Anyway, now to focusing on what matters.

Tinylytics

Last Sunday Tinylytics hit a combined lifetime count of 10,000,000 hits across all sites. 10 million!

I’ve had so many great emails and mentions from a fair few folks using it and saying they are really happy with it — whilst keeping on top of change requests and bug reports.

Tinylytics is my most successful project to date and I’ve got to be honest, I feel that I let that slip a little over the past few months. Instead I decided to concentrate on other side quests even though the tea leaves were all in favour to keep going and make it better — keep things moving.

And that will be my focus for the coming year and hopefully beyond. I’ll be making it my full-time-when-not-freelancing project and concentrating on the list of items that I’d like to integrate and add.

First step I’d like to do is to actually rewrite the uptime monitoring and finally mark that as complete. It’s a little heavy and has been at the back of my mind.

Before the holidays I spent some time to work on improving the speed of calling up your stats and also try and tidy up the actual details page which had some success— I only need to expand on that now (yes, I actually wrote that stuff down). On top of that, as you’ve probably seen, I managed to fix a long standing timezone issue with stats just being wrong depending on the way you fell on the international date line.

In addition to that, another one of those neglected issues, was that email reports just went missing. Totally unprofessional and that didn’t sit right after it being an issue since the start. I’m happy those are now fixed. All it took was a good 30 minutes of quality code time and good music.

If you look at the the updates site you can probably guess at which time I thought to myself: “I need to concentrate on this more”.

Here is to the next 10 million!

Other stuff

I wanted to make this post mainly about Tinylytics, however you might be wondering what’s with the other projects now that I decided to make it full-time. They’re not going anywhere — they are still getting developed as normal. They work great so far and I’ve been keeping up with requests as and when they come in. That won’t change and each project will get the TLC when creativity strikes. Heck I have a list as long as my arm for new ideas — I just can’t escape it — just my ultimate priorities are shifting slightly.

I’d also like to revamp my own site and build my own CMS (I have some experience with that) that suits my very own needs. I’ve felt that I am writing at a lot of different places although this blog is where it all started — and I’d like to bring it back to here as the source of... me.

There is obviously room for writing change logs and update posts for each of my projects but I do like having an outlet of sneak peeks and some other takes on what I’m building without being too formal about it.

I guess perhaps that this is the year where I actually truly just build more for myself without trying to add a subscription to it.

Thanks for reading.

✌️❤️

— Vincent