The last 12 months have been quite interesting for most.

• 2009 saw the deaths of larger-than-life personalities, among them: King of Pop Michael Jackson, ’70s icon Farah Fawcett, Patrick Swayze (actor in Dirty Dancing and Ghost) , David Carradine (actor in Kung-fu and Kill Bill-series) , Karl Malden (Streets of San Francisco), Les Paul (inventor of the solid-body electric guitar), Wayne Allwine (the voice of Micky Mouse), Larry Gelbart (creator of TV-series M*A*S*H), Bea Arthur (Dorothy in The Golden Girls), John Hughes (writer/director of The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) and Brittany Murphy
• 2009 saw science in the news, among it: The Outbreak of Swine Flu (H1N1), the solar eclipse, the Perseids meteor shower in August, the reborn Conficker worm causing havoc again, $1.1bn repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope as the complete space shuttle fleet (Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour) where placed into orbit, global warming and a spur of tusnamis (such as the one in September in Samoa), Bermuda Triangle (with the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 from Rio),
• Internet start-ups and market-darlings continued their fame – FaceBook, Twitter, Hulu, Bing, LinkedIn. Remarkably (and unnoticed), Rosetta Stone’s company stock shot up by 40% as unemployed folks are looking to add skills to their CVs and the U.S. government trying to teach soldiers military terms in Arabic and the Amazon Kindle.
• 2009 also brought sudden fame to people, such as: Susan Boyle (the frumpy spinster becoming famous in Britain’s Most Talented), the “Octomom” Nadya Suleman, Carrie Prejean’s response about gay marriage during the Miss USA pageant and “Balloon Boy” Falcon Heene.
• The Academy Awards are a triumph for Slumdog Millionaire, which wins eight Oscars,
• Businessman Bernard Madoff pleads guilty to bilking investors out of $65 billion in a Ponzi scheme
• The Large Hadron Collider is restarted after a 14-month delay caused by squirrels stealing the particles
• In sports, roughly 40 percent of the U.S. bimbo population announces that it has at one time or another hiked the Appalachian Trail with Tiger Woods.
• The International Space Station is taken over by Somali pirates.

On my blog I wrote this year 148 articles which attracted 68,000 unique visitors in the last 12 months (about 7,000 new visitors each month), used 2TB of traffic, received on average 300 unique page-views per day (ranking me in the Top-50 South African websites) and made me an (awesome) USD 120,00 in Google advertising revenue.

Among the most popular articles were:

1. My CV / job file: This was really the main reason why I started my blog. I wanted to get a high enough ranking on Google to have my CV visible. A Google search for “cv websphere architect” still ranks me as #1. I have launched my CV online 3 years ago and have received 52,600 hits to it (60 views per day; scroll to the bottom of the CV to view). I never had to job-hunt, as I would typically get 5-10 queries per month.
2. OS X: Time Machine backup to Synology DS107+: How to configure your Synology NAS (or any NAS for that matter) to work with Mac’s OS X TimeMachine. This has been a valuable feature in my life, and saved me plenty of time in restoring from backup.
3. Marlboro License Department rocks: I posted a personal experience about this in 2008 and I still get a high count of visits. I received so many emails/comments asking me for directions, that I eventually updated the article with GPS-coordinates. Since GPS-coordinates have not been sufficient, I post now also a link to Google Maps.
4. South African HTC Dream Hacked: This was intended to point more experienced users in the right direction to flash a custom firmware onto the G1 (or HTC Dream). This article alone attracted 2,000 hits within the first 12 hours of posting. Still one of the best phones I owned so far.
5. Android: Too Many Pattern Attempts. Phone is locked: One of the most helpful articles for me. Android has a cool pattern locking feature, but with all the clowns in the office, my phone was locked in no time. With GPS and WILAN disabled, there is no way to unlock the phone, other than doing a hard-reset and loosing all data. The instructions (for a rooted phone) reset the lock and unlock the phone.
6. Jailbait: It’s obvious – sex sells.