Happy New Year and Happy Birthday Agile Community!

by Kelly Waters

Happy New Year everyone! Sorry I've been quiet for a few weeks, I've been away on holiday. I'd like to say it's good to be back, but I must admit the near-zero temperature in London is making me wish I was back in Tobago! If only...

Anyway, now I'm back, it occurred to me that it was only this time last year that I created the Agile Community. I think it's been relatively successful. It's not as busy as I might have liked, but it's certainly not joined the list of the many dead forums on the internet, so I think it's helped quite a lot of people in their adoption of agile. In it's first year, it managed to attract over 600 members and has enabled over 80 discussions on a wide variety of different issues relating to people's implementation of agile methods.

2010 has been a very interesting year for my blog too. At the end of February 2011, I will have been blogging for 4 years. Since I started, my blog has attracted 2 million page views from over half a million unique users. For such a niche topic, I think that's pretty good. In 2010, it has attracted over 500,000 page views and been visited 250,000 times by 150,000 unique users. When I started my blog as a casual experiment back in 2007, I really never imagined it would get that big, so naturally I'm very happy about that.

To be honest, I can't quite believe I've kept it going for so long, but I'm as enthusiastic about it now as I was then, and fully intend to improve my site even further during 2011.

In the meantime, I'd like to thank everyone who has visited my blog and given me the encouragement to keep blogging. I'd also like to thank everyone that has linked to my blog posts - it's only thanks to your links that others find my blog and hopefully find information to help them to successfully adopt agile. If you have a site and haven't linked to me yet, I would be very grateful if you would.

And most of all I would like to thank my sponsors during 2010 - a sincere thank you for their financial support, without which this blog really wouldn't be what it is now. My 2010 sponsors were:

Aldon - Agile Manager
Agilers - tinyPM
Atlassian - JIRA/Greenhopper

AxoSoft

Hopefully I'll be able to get more sponsorship again in 2011, and make even more improvements to my site. My aim, as always, is to help others in the agile community to be as successful as they possibly can be.

So that just leaves me to wish you all a happy, healthy and prosperous new year!

Kelly.