2010 perspective & plans for 2011

With 2010 behind us and a fresh 2011 ahead, I felt it was time for a short look at this website’s achievements and challenges.
This website was started two years ago, with an article on changing Matlab’s Command Prompt colors. In that article and a few that followed I showed how we can use undocumented Matlab features and functions to achieve stuff that nobody thought were possible. That starting article, with its cprintf followup are still some of the most popular articles on this website to this day.
Interest in this website grew steadily, from several hundred weekly visitors at the beginning, to thousands of unique weekly readers today. To date, 77,000 unique readers have read at least one article here, in some 140,000 different visits. RSS and email subscription has also grown at a steady pace, with about a thousand subscribers today.

Steady readership growth (click for details)

The top visit-origin countries were the United States (quite a few of them from MathWorks headquarters itself), Germany, UK, France, India, Canada, Netherlands, Spain, Israel, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden and Australia.
Surprisingly, US visitors only account for about a third of all visits to the website. Apparently Matlab’s use worldwide is more evenly-spread than one would have assumed from the US’s technological dominance. Altogether, readers came from 163 different countries all over the world, including some that surprised me – for example, I did not expect an active Matlab community in Egypt or Vietnam, which came in at #36 and #45 respectively.

Readers from all over the world (click for details)

For the past two years, I have published weekly articles on this website. I have invested many hours of research, testing and preparation of each and every article. Many additional hours were spent answering hundreds of queries that came in as reader comments or emails.
Unfortunately, the financial income from this website has been nearly non-existent. Apparently almost nobody noticed the “Donate” button or the “Hire me” link (many thanks to the few who did).
I plan to continue publishing, but I can no longer justify a weekly article. I will publish at a more leisurely pace from now on, probably once every two weeks or so.
My planned articles for the upcoming weeks include a series of articles about UDD objects by Donn Shull, R2011a (as far as can be done without violating the pre-release NDA), uiinspect, and several additional series on uitable, menu-bar customizations and JIDE components. Additional topics can be found on my TODO page.
Happy 2011 everybody!
– Yair Altman

18 Responses

Fab January 11, 2011 at 00:14 Reply

“Apparently Matlab’s use worldwide is more evenly-spread than one would have assumed from the US’s technological dominance.”
Apparently you just guessed wrong about the US’s technological dominance. 😉
Malcolm Lidierth January 12, 2011 at 07:52 Reply

Thanks for all your efforts Yair. You have created a superb site. Fewer posts will have a silver lining for my employer: I’ll get more work done.
Jason January 12, 2011 at 10:26 Reply

Perhaps add a premium content section?
Aurelien Queffurust January 14, 2011 at 08:17 Reply

Hi Yair,

I have quite the same statistics report.

I started a blog in French for “MATLAB Geek” 2 months ago : http://blog.developpez.com/matlab4geek/

3900 visits at this time:
I have quite the same report, this is my top 20 from Google Analytics:

1. France (maternal language)
2. Tunisia (people can speak French )
3. USA
4. Algeria (people can speak French )
5. Belgium (people can speak French )
6. Morrocco (people can speak French )
7. Colombia
8. Germany
9. Canada
10. Switzerland (people can speak French )
11. UK
12. Netherland
13. Sweden
14. Italy
15. India
16. Turkey
17. Spain
18. Pakistan
19. ISRAEL
20. Egypt
…
31. Australia
…
42. Vietnam

I hope you will keep on writting this blog

Aurélien

Yair Altman January 15, 2011 at 09:00 Reply

@Aurélien – I’ve been following your blog from the very start. In fact, I learned of the availability of the R2011a pre-release from you, a few days before I got the email from MathWorks.

I hope you can keep up the relatively high post frequency. There are too few independent Matlab blogs around…

Good luck!
Yair

Yair Altman January 15, 2011 at 09:02 Reply

@Malcolm – thanks for the kind words

@Jason – thanks for the idea – I’ll think it over
Joe Burgel January 20, 2011 at 21:38 Reply

Yair,

You’ve done a great service to the ML community. Your efforts, although thus far, have not resulted in the requisite gratuity, have never-the-less not gone un-noticed. You’ve made a name for yourself. And that should be considered money in the bank. Your a smart guy and smart guy’s don’t stay poor forever. I have no doubt your day has not yet come. Hang in there and thanks for all you’ve done.

Yair Altman January 20, 2011 at 23:44 Reply

thanks Joe

2012 perspective & plans for 2013 | Undocumented Matlab January 5, 2013 at 10:02 Reply

[…] In the past 2 annual perspectives (2011, 2010) I have shown the readership breakup by country and by city […]

Nicholas (6 days 13 hours ago): Hi Yair, Thanks for the reply. I am on Windows 10. I also forgot to mention that this all works wonderfully out of the editor. It only fails once compiled. So, yes, I have tried a...
Nicholas (6 days 13 hours ago): Hi Yair, Thanks for the reply. I am on Windows 10. I also forgot to mention that this all works wonderfully out of the editor. It only fails once compiled. So, yes, I have tried a...
Yair Altman (6 days 20 hours ago): Nicholas – yes, I used it in a compiled Windows app using R2022b (no update). You didn’t specify the Matlab code location that threw the error so I can’t help...
Nicholas (7 days 17 hours ago): Hi Yair, Have you attempted your displayWebPage utility (or the LightweightHelpPanel in general) within a compiled application? It appears to fail in apps derived from both R2022b...
João Neves (10 days 21 hours ago): I am on matlab 2021a, this still works: url = struct(struct(struct(struct(hF ig).Controller).PlatformHost). CEF).URL; but the html document is empty. Is there still a way to do...
Yair Altman (13 days 20 hours ago): Perhaps the class() function could assist you. Or maybe just wrap different access methods in a try-catch so that if one method fails you could access the data using another...
Jeroen Boschma (13 days 23 hours ago): Never mind, the new UI components have an HTML panel available. Works for me…
Alexandre (14 days 0 hours ago): Hi, Is there a way to test if data dictionnatry entry are signal, simulink parameters, variables … I need to access their value, but the access method depends on the data...
Nicholas (14 days 14 hours ago): In case anyone is looking for more info on the toolbar: I ran into some problems creating a toolbar with the lightweight panel. Previously, the Browser Panel had an addToolbar...
Jeroen Boschma (17 days 21 hours ago): I do not seem to get the scrollbars (horizontal…) working in Matlab 2020b. Snippets of init-code (all based on Yair’s snippets on this site) handles.text_explorer...
Yair Altman (45 days 23 hours ago): m_map is a mapping tool, not even created by MathWorks and not part of the basic Matlab system. I have no idea why you think that the customizations to the builtin bar function...
chengji chen (46 days 5 hours ago): Hi, I have tried the method, but it didn’t work. I plot figure by m_map toolbox, the xticklabel will add to the yticklabel at the left-down corner, so I want to move down...
Yair Altman (53 days 22 hours ago): @Alexander – this is correct. Matlab stopped including sqlite4java in R2021b (it was still included in 21a). You can download the open-source sqlite4java project from...
Alexander Eder (59 days 18 hours ago): Unfortunately Matlab stopped shipping sqlite4java starting with R2021(b?)
K (66 days 5 hours ago): Is there a way to programmatically manage which figure gets placed where? Let’s say I have 5 figures docked, and I split it into 2 x 1, I want to place 3 specific figures on the...

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