Ten Years of Scripting OS X

The oldest post on this weblog happened ten years ago. It makes me especially proud, that the first post has aged quite well. (The second post, not so much.)

This weblog was (quite obviously) inspired by the weblogs of Greg Neagle, Rich Trouton, Ben Toms, and many others. I wanted to share and give back to the MacAdmins community. I have always enjoyed scripting, in the sense of tinkering and combining tools in useful, or sometimes just funny ways and sharing that seemed like an obvious thing to do.

I wasn’t really planning on honing my writing skills for writing books later. As many of these personal weblogs go, I posted quite irregularly for the first few years. Still, I was often quite excited when a post got dozens of views.

As it turns out, a weblog is also a decent marketing platform for a self-published book (or two, or three, or four). When you are writing a book, there are always a few things that don’t quite “fit in” and that then get turned into a blog post. Once I got into the habit of posting regularly, the viewer numbers and the books sales increased. At some point, my ranking in the weird black magic that is the Google algorithm reached some critical point and the views from searches started pouring in.

Having posts being read and re-shared does give you a bit of a thrill. And I wanted to share that feeling. I started the weekly news summary to have a place where all the great work of fellow MacAdmins (and related experts) is gathered. I got requests to have an email newsletter fairly quickly. We passed 1000 subscribers on the email newsletter in October, and many more read it on the website.

Last week, according to the Jetpack metrics, this site had its millionth unique visitor overall and its 500.000th unique visitor in this calendar year. Yes, that means traffic is more than doubling year over year.

Back when a post would get hundreds of views that was exciting. The traffic now is still exciting, but also a bit humbling. So, thank you all for being here and reading and sharing my posts and books.

There was never a big strategy or plan. But I am very happy how everything worked out. Over the years, writing for the weblog gave me confidence to write and self-publish a book. The books and posts lead to conference presentations, which lead to more posts and books and the newsletter. And the best part is: I got to meet and befriend some pretty great people from all over the world.

And true to the spirit of how the last ten years turned out, I have no plans or strategies for major changes in the near future. I will keep the things that work and try new things as they occur to me. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be a few minor changes happening soon, though.

On to the next ten years!

Published by

ab

Mac Admin, Consultant, and Author

4 thoughts on “Ten Years of Scripting OS X”

  1. Congratulations, Armin! I wish I had discovered this site 10 years ago, it would have saved me countless hours of frustration.

  2. Armin, your blog is a great gift to us Mac admins. I found it after joining the MacAdmins Slack five years ago. We don’t know each other, but you have heard me applaude to your presentation at MacSysAdmin with the crowd. I hope all the best to you, and I’m still reading all your posts. Thank you!

  3. Thank you so much for this blog, your books, all of the confer ence videos, and all of the knowledge that you share. I can’t begin to tell you how much it has enhanced my career and inspires me to always learn as much as I can and continue to grow. Thanks for all you do for the Mac Community. Congratulations on 10 years and we all look forward to the next 10!

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