On April next year robotpig.net will be 6 years old (!) but the one-year anniversary of its current form will be in a few days. This post is the first part of a small retrospective of this year. In this post we examine the content uploaded in the website. For those new to this website (but curious enough to read this blog!) the main categories (for the moment) are the news, with relatively brief posts, the articles, with extensive multi-page features and the blogs. There is also the forum which is examined separately.---

The image above illustrates the content distribution of this year. As expected the main bulk is the news where with the exception of 'engineering', content is quite evenly distributed. In total there were 118 news posts. The engineering category is a bit auxiliary one. At first I was puzzled if I should include it but looking backwards I think it has its place here. The blogs are in effect the UAVs blog with this being only the second post in the backstage blog.

The articles are quite few for conclusions, 6 articles were uploaded. All of them were updated versions of older ones, although the word update may be an understatement, most of them were re-written with new images, photos and graphs. The robotpig.net website started as a place to host only articles, later the forum in its first iteration was installed and only in its later form the website reached its shape with the news/blogs system.

Looking the stats for these posts there were a lot of good news but also two negative aspects. You can see the first in the graph below:



In the image above the horizontal axis represents the time (from 13 December when the new website was online until late November). The vertical axis represents the number of posts/articles. The left graph features the news sub-categories and the right one the news/blogs/articles.

It is obvious that through the year uploads were much less frequent. This has a threefold explanation.

Firstly, the website may be largely similar in appearance with the one launched almost a year ago but it was (and still is in many ways) a work in progress. There were more than 10 discrete versions and countless minor alterations, improvements, additions and of course bugs. A lot of time was put in the back-end and webdesign/development of the website until it reached a mature state, time that it was mostly in expense of content.

The second reason is one that many regular readers could easily guess. Robotpig.net is almost exclusively a one man project, thus workload fluctuations (and there were a lot in 2010) affect it a lot. Don't forget that everything here is uploaded both in English and Greek and although two languages are a very valuable characteristic it increases the workload. Things are much more stable now, hence the promises in the end of this post.

The last reason is the maturity of the website. I never wanted to have a lot of posts at the expense of content quality. Many blogs or portals constantly follow traffic by uploading posts with only an image or a sentence, robotpig.net isn't like that. Every post should have useful, interesting and original content. The last part is very important. There are always references to sources and credit to the articles and of course to all of the images and photos not taken by us. However this is not enough, we never just copy and reproduce content from other websites. If there is nothing to add we put it on twitter. Everything featured in robotpig is (or at least should) having the added value of opinion, critical view and/or content composition. These values were essential from the start but they mature only through practice. Some of the first posts were too brief and that is –also- the reason there is such a decline in the post number.

The other (and thankfully last) negative of this retrospective was the forum under-performance. Even though when we first introduce a forum section it was a very important part of the website (and it had quite a lot of activity back then) in the latest website iteration its role isn't as crucial. However with 2-3 exceptions it is mostly inactive. Online communities should reach a critical mass of active members in order to become self-sustainable and although in the old website our forum was on the verge of that critical mass, the time before the re-launch eliminated that activity. The two languages also may complicate things.
If you like our work (and by reading this post the odds are you do!), you can become a part of this ‘critical mass’ by participating in our forum.

In the next parts of this small retrospective there will be a small presentation of the most popular topics and visitor statistics.

As a conclusion, the most important thing of this year's work is the commitment for the future. It may still be largely a one-man project but robotpig from now on will feature regular posts, more articles and other features that are under development. Stay tuned!

One year retrospective (III) - the visitors
One year retrospective (II) - greatest hits