ThoughtAsylum Review of 2012

12 Jan 2013

Like most bloggers I’m hoping I’ll get a lot more blogging done in 2013. However I thought this would be a good time to cover a few changes and the top items on thoughtasylum.com for 2012.

So first off in 2012 my blogging was extended to some other web sites. This was brought about through a career direction change in 2011 whereby I became a consultant in the SAP sphere. This resulted in me writing some blog posts on the SAP Community Network (SCN) platform. Since I like to ensure I retain some control on my content they have also been published on thoughtasylum.com (and will continue to be - there’s more coming very soon).

I’ve also had one of my SAP related posts published on the ROC web site and I have a few ideas for some more that I hope will be suitable for publishing there.

In late 2012 I migrated the yorkjitsu.org web site to a new platform and as a result have incorporated the facility to post articles to the site. There’s just one post on there at the time of writing, but there are of course more in the pipeline.

So how was 2012 for visits to thoughtasylum.com? Well pretty good, with over 131,000 page views (112,750 unique page views). So here’s a run down of the top 10 most viewed posts.

10. Nokia E71 Exchange Password Reset (~ 2,500 Visits)

I was quite surprised to see this one still so high. I guess there are still quite a few Nokia E71 users out there. The post simply covers a method for resetting the password for an Exchange server. Normally I’d expect a device/software to prompt on an expired password, but not the E71. instead it hides it in many layers of settings.

9. An improved template system for Evernote (~2,500 Visits)

It seems I’m not the only one interested in creating standard note templates for Evernote. This post for creating quick access templates in Windows is still proving rather popular.

8. Colour code notes in Evernote (~2,500 Visits)

This one was a quick tip on how to colour the background of a note in Evernote - kind of says it all in the title really.

7. Using SED on Windows (~3,000 Visits)

I was quite surprised to see this one on the list, but at the same time rather pleased. SED (or stream editor) is a useful tool for manipulating text on the command line and I’ve found it incredibly useful over the past year and a half for filtering for non-trivial errors in large log files. Looks like quite a few others have been interested in this too.

6. Creating a daily journal in Evernote (~3,500 Visits)

As you might guess, I use the details for this post almost every day to quickly create a daily journal in Evernote. The solution given in the post creates the note with a specific tag in a specific notebook and ensures that the dates are defaulted to the current date.

5. Search Evernote from Alfred again (~4,000 Visits)

Alfred is one of my favourite Mac utilities. I’m not a command line junkie, but I often find it faster to run scripts and applications by using Alfred. Combining this with Evernote to run my searches was a no brainer and it seems popular with others too. I’m hoping to find some time in the not too distant future to apply some updates to this extension, but I’m waiting to see if there’s anything new I can take advantage of in the new 2.0 release (due for first beta today actually).

4. Send to Evernote on Mac OS X (~5,000 Visits)

On Windows I have a shortcut in my send-to menu to send files to Evernote (creating a new note with the file attached). The equivalent on the Mac is to use a service. So I created a one to meet my needs. It looks like it meets the needs of quite a fw others too.

3. Evernote watched folders on OS X (~6,000 Visits)

In the Evernote client on Windows you can set up a folder to be watched for files being copied into it. The Evernote software then creates a note and attaches the file automatically. When I started using Evernote on my Mac I really missed this feature and so I wrote some AppleScript (based on the send-to script in #4) to attach to a directory that accomplishes the same task (except truth be told you can tailor the script to add extra tags and the like so it is potentially even more flexible).

2. Search Evernote from Alfred (~10,000 Visits)

Surprisingly the most popular post for searching Evernote from Alfred is the more manual creation one rather than the standard Alfred extension version (see #4 above). Still if it works, it works.

1. Tracking down the iPhone birthday calendar

Honourable mentions must also go to the Evernote templates page with ~10,500 visits and the thoughtasylum.com home page with ~3,000 visits.

So that’s a wrap up of 2012 on thoughtasylum.com. Here’s to 2013!