2009 David Walsh Blog Year in Review

Another year has passed and I wanted to share my thoughts on all the posts and events that shaped my blog (and life) during 2009.

Joining the MooTools Team

My biggest achievement during 2009 was becoming a member of the MooTools Core development team. I had been writing MooTools tutorials since my blog had started and apparently that paid off as Aaron Newton asked me to think about contributing to the project in January. Shortly thereafter I was asked by Valerio Proietti to join the team. It was a huge honor and still is. I love my MooTools teammates and contributors as brothers and look forward to continued success with the team. MooTools FTW.

MooTools T-Shirts For The Masses

I was also able to connect with Roddy Richards of the excellent Startup Schwag service to get MooTools shirts to all of their subscribers. It was a huge success and I look forward to working more with Startup Schwag in the future.

Pick Your Poison: I Learned jQuery

I took some time to learn jQuery this year and I'm glad I did. I see it's place in the JavaScript world and feel like I'm a better programmer for it. I look forward to seeing what John and his team put forth in January. No doubt more good stuff -- congrats to the jQuery team on their continued success.

Coding Confidence

I really impressed with some of the plugins I created this year. Not that I thought I wasn't good enough but like every good programmer, I always had that voice telling me "you're missing something." This year I told that voice TO STFU and created a few plugins I always wanted to make: LazyLoad, ContextMenu, Quickboxes, and Dotter. Those are only a few of them -- I really feel as though I stepped my game up in 2009.

Tweet What?

I joined the Twitter craze in 2009 and it opened up a new world to me. Twitter's been a great source of feedback, website traffic, and professional networking. I have over 3,000 followers at this point. I must be, in a word....riveting.

Networking and Relationships

I was able to connect with some fellow developers closely this year. I've had good personal and professional conversations with jQuery's Rey Bango, MooTools Contributor Darren Waddell, Pete Higgins, and many others. Great developers and great people.

Blog Traffic Booming

Blog traffic really exploded this year. Traffic quadrupled and with that came more pressure to write good blog posts. Hopefully I did OK.

Most Popular Posts of 2009

• 7 MooTools Plugins You Should Use on Every Website
• Introducing MooTools ScrollSpy
• Animated AJAX Record Deletion Using jQuery
• Using jQuery and MooTools Together
• Create a Basic Web Service Using PHP, MySQL, XML, and JSON
• 7 Quick CSS Enhancements for Better User Experience
• Using Opacity to Show Focus with jQuery
• Build a Calendar Using PHP, XHTML, and CSS
• Create Snook-Style Navigation Using MooTools
• Duplicate the jQuery Homepage Tooltips Using MooTools

Goals For 2010

• I hope to double traffic over the next year. That seems like a lofty goal but I think I can do it. If nothing else, I can just post nudie pics of Christina Ricci, right?
• Have 30 quality MooTools plugins posted to the MooTools Forge. I hope you do too.
• Write 2-3 more posts for NetTuts.
• Make you and everyone else know how f'ing awesome the MooTools JavaScript framework is.
• Increase the quality of posts. That sounds generic but it's something I always aim to do.

Thank you all for reading! I hope to live up to expectation in 2010!