The last day of 2015 is almost two weeks ago, time is going fast, that’s for sure. Around this time you see a lot of year reviews, awards for that year are being held, … . Me? I’m going to review what happened on dimitr.im as well.

A lot more visitors

2015 certainly wasn’t the most active year on my side, with “only” 19 new articles. However, it was the most acitve year on your side, with almost three times as many visitors as in 2014, which was already a top year for me. Thanks for that!

I don’t expect this number to rise a lot more in 2016, it’s becoming quite clear that the amount of visitors per month is stagnating.

Performance tweaks

A lot more visitors means that the infrastructure may have to be tweaked as well. While we’re certainly not the biggest site or having traffic issues, you can always improve. By compressing static resources and caching, we made it possible to almost double the page load speed for the average visitor.

We’re also using Cloudflare now, though for most visitors this should not be noticable except that page load might be faster.

New theme

With the ad revenue from December 2014 - October 2015 we were able to guarantee that this website will be hosted for another 3 years, and a new theme was bought as well. This modular theme allowed us to improve the home page and allowed us to please the mobile users as well. The amount of mobile visitors did not increase, but the average time they spent on this website increased with almost 40% since the launch of this theme.

What will 2016 bring?

While I wrote a lot of new tutorials since 2012, passing the 100 articles boundary in 2014, the first few weeks/months of 2016 will be spent with rewriting old tutorials. While initially I said I did not plan on doing that, I changed my mind.

I always try to keep up-to-date with the recent technologies and in 2015 I blogged about Spring boot. A lot of my early tutorials however were written in 2012, some of them using Spring 2.5. Last week I (re-)launched my first Spring web-app blogpost, translating them to English and using more up-to-date code as well. Several of my old tutorials are already in draft, almost completely rewritten and being released over the next few weeks. The tutorials that will be rewritten are:

There will also be a few new tutorials as well:

The goal of these tutorials is to cover the basics of web applications. After this tutorial-series is completed, I’m considering going even further into the world of microservices, covering several aspects of Spring cloud. Stay tuned!