2011 perspective & plans for 2012

With 2011 behind us and a fresh 2012 ahead, it is time again for a short look at this website’s achievements so far, and plans for the future.
I started this blog three years ago, with an article on changing Matlab’s Command Prompt colors, shortly followed by an article on my cprintf utility, which to this day is still the most popular article on this website. cprintf is also one of my top-downloaded utilities, second only to findjobj, and closely followed by officedoc and uiinspect.
In 2011, I published 47 articles, including:

• Donn Shull’s series on UDD
• a few posts about integrating 3rd-party Java libraries in Matlab (JFreeChart, JGraph, JBoost)
• a mini-series about things that can be done to figure windows (minimization/maximization, disabling, transparency, blurring, docking)
• some articles about internal built-in Matlab GUI controls (plot-selection, color-selection, tri-state checkbox)
• a few posts dealing with performance, which is one of my favorite topics
• quite a few articles about miscellaneous undocumented Matlab topics, ranging from GUI (uitable sorting, multi-line tooltips), graphics (plot data-tips, axes zoom), I/O (reading non-Latin files, formatting numbers), external interfaces (running VB code), etc.
• last but certainly not least, posts related to my work over the past six years – my book about Matlab-Java programming

Hopefully there was enough material and diversity in there to satisfy different audiences. Judging by the traffic on the site, this appears to be the case indeed. Interest in this website still grows steadily, continuing the trend from the first two years. To date, 164,000 unique readers have read at least one article here (two on average), in over 300,000 different visits – more than doubling the figures from last year. In fact, the lowest traffic point of the year, which is customarily around Christmas/New-Year, has had about the same level of traffic this year as the highest-traffic weeks of 2010 (the other dip you see in 2011 is due to a week-long site-overhaul in March):

RSS and email subscription has also grown at a steady pace. I’m quite proud of the fact that there are more readers/subscribers to this blog than any other Matlab-related blog, excluding perhaps Loren’s. Having felt the pressure and difficulty in writing a fresh weekly post for the past three years, I truly admire Loren’s six years of continuous high-quality blogging.
The top countries from which you readers visit this site remains unchanged from last year’s post. So this year I will show a different angle, of the top cities visiting in 2011: Munich, London, Tel Aviv, Moscow, New York, Paris, Bangalore, Berlin, Zurich and Toronto.
Natick (MA, USA), home of the MathWorks HQ and some 30,000 other inhabitants, has dropped to 12th place in 2011, although it still maintains the #3 position in all-time visits (since this blog was started). Apparently, as this website gets wider recognition by Matlab users, the relative percentage of MathWorkers interested in this blog decreases, although in absolute numbers I can see that MathWorks visits have remained more-or-less constant.

In 2012 I plan to continue posting about undocumented aspects of Matlab. Specific plans include the much-overdue articles on uiinspect and its close relative checkClass, as well as additional articles on internal built-in controls. I hope to cross out many items in my TODO list.
There will also be more articles by guest bloggers – I have a growing list of such guest bloggers, of which I am extremely pleased, and some of the promised articles are very interesting. I encourage anyone who has an idea for an article to contact me by email (altmany at gmail, or use the link at the top-right of this page).
Happy 2012 everybody!
– Yair Altman

<pre lang="matlab">
a = magic(3);
disp(sum(a))
</pre>