The first full year of the D blog is now in the rear view. Last year around this time, I posted some statistics from the seven months of 2016 that the blog was in business. This time, looking back on 2017, we’ve got a full twelve to draw on.

The fun stuff

From my perspective, 2017 was a fun year for managing the blog. The only negatives for me are that I didn’t get as many Project Highlights as I would have liked and I never started the series on DUB that I had envisioned. But there were some new features that I quite enjoyed working on:

• the GC series came about in response some posts in the D forums. The next post in the series should have come at the end of December, but I’ve had to put it off for just a bit. I’m not done with the series yet. I’m also still looking for more contributors willing to share their strategies and libraries for working with, around, and without the GC.
• I started a new series on interfacing D with C. I’ll be continuing on with that in the coming months, eventually writing about the other direction (interfacing C with D), and pushing out a few words about -betterC mode.
• at DConf 2017, the Funkwerk crew agreed to cooperate with me in putting out a series of posts from their perspective of using D in production. This is the first of what I hope will become a regular series highlighting companies working with D in production, the projects they’re building, and the tools they use.
• as a reaction to the pain that comes when I cut content out of posts that feel too long, I decided to create a new domain for “extended posts”: dblog-ext.info, and a corresponding page of links here at the blog. The separate domain and the simple layout are both to make it clear that it’s not part of the official blog. I don’t know if it will be permanent, but I intend to keep it alive for a while yet until to see if more people actually make use of it. I now encourage anyone writing guest posts not to feel constrained by word count. If the post is too long, we can split it into multiple posts or, where there’s not enough content for that, make an extended post for it when it makes sense to do so.

The stats

We saw 44 new posts added to the blog in 2017. Across the entire blog, including the front page, there were a total of 132,985 page views from 96,101 visitors who left 117 comments.

The top five referrers:

The top five countries:

Several posts included links to D projects at GitHub. Counting projects, profiles, organizations, and specific file links, the top five most-clicked were:

1. voxelman
2. dlangui
3. DerelictOrg
4. DIP 1005
5. yomm11(Open multi-methods for C++)

The top five posts of 2017:

All time (as of a few minutes before the timestamp on this post), there are 70 posts (aside from this one) that have had 187,946 views from 136,850 visitors. The top five most-viewed posts of all time :

In 2018…

This year, look for the GC series and the D & C series to continue. I’m hoping to recruit a couple of semi-regular guest posters to help me up the post count a little bit. At the moment, I’m pretty much at peak output and could use the help. I’m on constant lookout for projects to highlight, and plan to bring at least one more company highlight this year (Funkwerk’s series will be wrapping up this month). I hope to bring some DConf 2018-themed posts in the runup to this year’s conference.

Finally, as always, if you have something D to write about, whether it’s your project, a language feature, a tutorial, an algorithm… anything about programming in D, please let me know!