IIS Workstation: Successful 1st Anniversary

Recently, I successfully completed 1 year of my blog IIS Workstation. It was the year of recession, year of financial crisis, year of elections, year of new relations, year of global disturbances; but for me it was the year of learning. I think I have learned more than ever by contributing to one and all through this blog. I also became an IIS MVP during this year so can't complain. :-)

I was just going through the site analytics to celebrate by contributions to the community and realized it would be even greater if I shared it with you. For, without my readers I would not have learned so much. Following is a snapshot of my blog details:

Analysis Period: 13 months
Total Page views: 37,646
% New visits: 90.06%

Traffic Sources:
Search Engines: 85.84%
Referring Sites: 7.33%

Geographies:
Site Viewed in: 163 countries
Top 3 Countries in order of views: United States of America, India, United Kingdom

Search:
Top Keywords on Google:
difference between iis 6 and 7 - Rank 1 (checked on July 4th 2009)
how to open iis admin - Rank 1 (checked on July 4th 2009)
difference between iis application and virtual directory - Rank 1 (checked on July 4th 2009)
substatus code - Rank 1 (checked on July 4th 2009)
iis admin could not start - Rank 1 (checked on July 4th 2009)

Top 5 Pages (Most viewed):
Difference between Virtual Directory and an Application in IIS
How To: Create a Website using IIS 6 - Level 100
Troubleshooting: Could not start the IIS Admin Service on Local Computer
Troubleshooting: IIS 6 Status and Substatus codes
IIS Workstation

Hope this year turns out to be good news as well for me. Have fun and keep watching this place for more info!

Oh and Thanks! :)

Sessions: Tech Ed on the Road, HydTechies

I recently took a couple of sessions on IIS 7 & 7.5 as part of Hyderabad Techies and "Tech-Ed on the Road" revival campaign here in Hyderabad, India. It was great to see the enthusiasm people had for different Microsoft technologies. We had sessions ranging from ASP.NET - Windows Azure and IIS - to SQL Server 2008.

I was responsible for delivering sessions on IIS 7.5 which is going to ship along with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. I think I was kind of lucky in that sense, because there is always so much to speak on IIS. There is so much that is running on the web these days and you love it when lots of it is running on IIS.

I knew the best way to spread the word on IIS, is to show what makes IIS the way it is. Then lets leave it to the people to decide what they want... shouldn't we? Anyways, I started from level 100, so that I could show the basic architectural changes in IIS 6 and IIS 7. Detailed explanation can be found in my previous post on differences between IIS 6 and IIS 7 and IIS: changes from 6 to 7.

Moving on I showed the advancements in IIS UI, IIS security and IIS extensions and how they help both the Admins and the developers. IIS extension are these out of band modules which are released by the IIS PG and the community making use of the great extensibility modules available.

It was great to see how much people loved the idea of including a module and the ease of it's installation which originally dint come with the product.

As promised, details on the IIS extensions and download location can be found at http://www.iis.net/extensions. All the information on the Microsoft web application gallery and platform can be found here.

Check out this cool blog on IIS history to see and learn how IIS has evolved. It also answers the 1st question I always face when speaking on IIS... "How to download IIS" ... :)

Have fun... !!!