So what changed my mind to actually invest some time on here? Well, just for fun, I enabled Google Analytics about a year ago simply out of curiosity after having scraped the site down just to the bare bones content that wasn't embarassing. I had basically done nothing since then. Fast forward to about a month ago, when I was looking for new people to try out Crayon. On a whim I put a small shout-out on the side panel of the site and actually received a few interested users. After checking the traffic graphs, it seemed that after doing nothing with my site for about a year, traffic was thriving and actually GREW by about 25%.
I suppose there's a massive upward trend in tech and programming topics. I had mostly assumed NP was dead outright and had written it off.
Apparently the reality is that I have a large audience. What am I going to do about it? A few things. But mostly the over-arching theme is taking all my small side projects that I've ever done, stick them all together in a big mushy ball, and shamelessly cram it all into NP.
Specifically...
- I've been starting a web comic about programming/startup/tech humor. It currently exists as a giant stack of sketches and storyboards that I was planning on digitizing later this month. Originally I was going to post it on its own site and then later add some tech tutorials to the site and integrate them with the comic, sort of as an experimental approach to making dry material fun. I was also hoping to build up a slight community around it. It's incredibly hard to get traction with something like that, but hey, there's NP!
- I created a programming language for making games and was planning on making an online tinker-space where people could write and share games they hacked together. Also something that's incredibly hard to get traction with from zero, but wait, there's NP!
- I was going to make another tutorial site or series of blog posts based on the C# Crash Course for Java Developers. That post actually gets quite a few hits, and it seems there's quite a market for crash course style programming tutorials for people that already know how to program in another language. It would basically be a matrix where, given any specific programming language, you can quickly learn the basics of another programming language. Again, something that would be too much work if no one would see it, but hey, there's NP!
The first noticeable change is I'll be posting again. If you have any specific requests, feel free to send a message to the NerdParadise twitter account.
Also, I apologize for the starkness of this new design. I wanted to quickly get migrated to the same codebase as my other sites so that it'd be easier to integrate new changes. I'll make it prettier over time.