When I started my very first website back in 1998, it was a silly one-page with my name and scanned photo. I could only do simple HTML file and uploaded my files to Geocities free account. Then I forced few friends to “visit” my website, barely 10 of them ended up doing so, yet I felt extremely satisfied back then. Because in 1998, most people haven’t even heard about email; the term “blog” didn’t even exist; and Internet connection were only for tiny number of teach-savvy people. I still remembered having to queue for hours just to enter Internet lab in campus, because accessing Internet elsewhere was too expensive and access through mobile devices hasn’t been invented yet. Man, now I feel a little bit old.
Top level domain was something luxurious back then, so when I read about a promo of “free dot com domain”, I quickly registered robertsetiadi.com and use that domain for free. Unfortunately, the free period was only for a year and I didn’t know how to renew the domain without a credit card (didn’t have one back then). In 2000, I purchased another domain name from a company that allowed bank transfer (so I didn’t need credit card).
My website design in 1999 was a strikingly weird orange-green combination. And at that time, I felt like having the best website in the world. I started to add few contents, starting from few articles on N-Queen algorithm, a source code to play with visual programming in Windows, to some photos of my graduation. I learned PHP and wrote my very first of web programming: creating my own guestbook page. Before the era of Web 2.0, web pages were static. All we can do is reading them. No feature to “comment” on pages we like. The only way to “put something” in a website was through this “guestbook”.
In 2000, I changed the website design into something more subtle with blue on white color theme. Over the next few years, I was struggling with finding the right theme for my website. I basically put anything I like inside, including articles and other stuff from my hobbies, or anything I feel like it.
Two years later (2002), I created a discussion forum, powered by phpBB engine. It was an empty forum for a while, until I finally had few regulars there. In 2007 I changed the forum engine to SMF, then in 2008 I closed the forum and removed it from my website. I learned my lesson. All the fancy technology stuff like forum engine, PHP scripts and other web-related tricks are only worth something when we have people actually visiting our website. And seeing that the “latest” post in my discussion forum was from 8 months ago clearly showed that no one actually discussed anything there anymore.
Then I focused more on improving the content of my website rather than the technological gimmick. Few years after Google purchased Blogger.com in 2003, blogging activity started to become more popular. In 2005 I tried to retrieve back the robertsetiadi.com domain, but failed. The current owner of the domain sent me lots of legal documents and contact details of his lawyers if I want to challenge the ownership of the domain. Strange. I didn’t even mention anything about challenging the ownership. I was asking nicely if I can purchase the domain on a reasonable price. Instead of coming up with a number (price), they choose to send those documents, presumably to scare me off so I would start the offer with large amount of money. Well, I was not interested in spending large money for a domain for personal website. So I ignored the email, gave up on robertsetiadi.com domain and decided to register robertsetiadi.net. As you can see, this is the domain that I use until today.
I finally added “blog” section in 2008, but rarely post anything there for the first few months. I didn’t use “standard” blog engine, I coded my blog engine using PHP and MySQL. For my specific needs back in that time, it was more than enough.
In August 2009 started using Google Analytics and finally figured out how many people actually coming to my website: 88 users per day (in average). I considered that a small number, though several friends were trying to convince me that the number is not bad for a personal site. Thanks to their encouragement, I cancelled my intention to close the website.
I continued with adding more contents in the website, hoping that it will somehow attract more people. In 2010 I learned about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) started to do necessary steps to make my website search-engine-friendly. In the same year, I converted the blog section into WordPress, finally giving up with self-development of blog engine and decided that I better use the time to write content rather than to code something that’s already available for free. So from 2010, WordPress was installed in my website, but I still had my static pages as the main content. So blog engine was only one menu in the website structure.
From January 2013, I migrated all contents of my website into WordPress. All contents previously written in static HTML pages were converted into WordPress pages and posts, backdated according to the actual dates of the contents. The following month (Feb), I added the support of HiDPI / Retina Display.
Since this point, I tried to write something at least once a week. I tried to write more articles, blogging style. And the number of posts started to increase rapidly
In January 2014, I added mobile device compatibility to this website. Since my main theme for desktop design didn’t have “responsive” capability, I installed a plugin that will use different theme when the website is accessed through mobile device. Finally, last weekend, I installed a new theme with responsive design, and upgraded my entire website to one universal look across any device. At this point, I had 25 pages and more than 200 posts that I need to make sure they will appear nicely in the new design with new standard of image resolution.
This morning, I checked Google Analytics again and was surprised that this website have around 450 users per day (average of data from the last 30 days). Yes I know it’s still nothing compared to some famous sites, but I’m really glad that years of hard work maintaining this website has finally attracted more people coming.
Most of my visitors are from USA, followed by UK, Indonesia, Australia, Germany, India and Canada.
The most popular browser is Chrome, followed by Safari and Firefox.
Most of the visitors use Windows, followed by Mac OS X, iOS then Android.
70.79% of visitors use desktop computers, 20.43% uses smartphones and 8.77% uses tablets. From the visitors from mobile devices, iPhone and iPad hold the top spots, followed by Windows RT tablets and LG Nexus 5.
Thank you for visiting this website. I will keep posting new articles as much as I can. Hopefully some of them will be useful for you. If you are a regular visitor here, thank you for the continuous support.
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