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1 Year of Blogging

I was looking back at my very first post and yes, it is as lame as your average first post. I say hello and that great things are to come…sound like the lie I used to swindle my wife…hehehehe. I think I’ve at least helped one person, which is what I set out to do…this year, I plan to help two and possibly 2.5 people. What’s happened in this year of blogging…noting really springs to mind, because it is melted at the moment. Perhaps I will update this post before it published, but I doubt it. 😛

I did come back to this post to update…I’m full of surprises. I set out to make at least two posts a week, and I have. I publish an article Mondays and Wednesdays without fail…which is quite good for me.

What am I most proud of from this blog…I’m really glad of the friends I have made 🙂 I honestly made some REAL friends, which I didn’t expect. Thanks to Rob, Andrew, Ian, JJ, Stan, Jimmy, Yeager, Rick, Normis, Holden and the rest of my usual readers that my brain can’t think of this late at night…hehe.

My consulting has picked up, which I’m quite proud of. I get to educate, help others and I get paid…sounds like a dream job to me…hehe. Someone told me I’m building up the “Greg Sowell” brand. I told him I’m going to be releasing my new line of “Greg Sowell’s hemroid cream” soon…heh.

Thanks to my new sponsors BalticNetworks.com and CablesAndKits.com. I never imagined I would actually have sponsors, but there you go.

My site averages close to 500 visits during the week, which still astonishes me. I remember when I got excited the day I had 10 readers…hehehe. My Mikrotik videos are doing well. The intro to MTK video has over 800 downloads on the PDF! I NEVER imagined it would be that popular. Due the QoS I had to implement on the videos, I found that I have at least one person watching a video at just about any point during the day. I’m struggling to find time to finish the slides for my next video “Mikrotik Routing”. I’m covering static, RIP, OSPF and BGP. I’ve gotten about halfway through OSPF. I’m putting a lot of detail into the OSPF/BGP sections…I want people to fundamentally understand how the protocols function. I should have it done within the next month. Then who knows…perhaps I will torture myself by doing a QoS video…hehe. Now THAT would take forrrrreeeeeevvvvveeeeerrrrrrrr.

Honestly, when I started this thing, I had no idea what it would be or where I would go with it. It kind of reminds me how my cousin would draw when we were kids. She would closer her eyes and scribble with her pencil. She would then take a look at the scribblings and see what it resembled. She would then finish the drawing from there using the initial scribble as inspiration. I guess I kind of started scribbling and eventually settled on Mikrotik education…hehe. Thanks guys…see you next Monday and Wednesday. 🙂

Comments

9 responses to “1 Year of Blogging”

  1. Mohamed Hany Avatar
    Mohamed Hany

    Congratz for your new sponsors! This’s indeed a good sign of doing a great efforts in your job 🙂

    Well, i was wondering about a little thing.. Being a hardcore Cisco guy youself, what catched your eyes in Mikrotik? What do you think it can provide more/better than Cisco gear?.. In fewer words, why Mikrotik?

  2. Tim Payne Avatar
    Tim Payne

    Well spoken thoughts Greg. I for one constantly review your site hoping to be the beneficiary of some new knowledge. As I have recently entered the official age of a senior citizen, I find that staying alive and having the ability and contribute can be summed up as simple self improvement and “pay it forward”. Never stop learning, never stop sharing. I hope you continue exploiting your gift.

    -tp

  3. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Mohamed,

    Lets see…why Mikrotik. I’ve come from two large corporations and these guys were 100% Cisco. I started doing work for smaller companies and WISPs. These guys need performance and features, but they don’t have the cash to spend. It seems with networking you have a 3 legged stool. The legs are comprised of price, performance, reliability. You can generally choose only two of these. Cisco/Juniper/Extreme, you can only choose performance and reliability…price generally isn’t an option. If you are talking about older referb, you can get good switching options with all of these legs. On the routing side Cisco gear, even referb, isn’t going to give you performance for a cheap price. Mikrotik can give you cheap routing with performance and pretty good reliability. I have noted that even now there is still a bug in the MTK ROS that lets around .1 % of packets to bridge through the device, which can be very very BAD(STP BPDUs being bridged through the device!). For the most part, this isn’t too big of an issue, which is why I still run them and recommend others.

    That was a bit of a rant…heh. If I’m doing BGP on my borders, I’m going to run Cisco, or if I need to terminate something sonet, I’ll run Cisco. I like my core to be Cisco, because I KNOW it will be solid, absolutely. I run MTK everywhere else, because I can get crazy performance with ease of configuration for virtually no money.

  4. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Tim,

    I appreciate the kind words sir. 🙂

    I’ll keep paying it forward…until my wife makes me stop working to watch American Idol with her…hehehe 😛

  5. Tim Payne Avatar
    Tim Payne

    Greg :
    Tim,
    I appreciate the kind words sir.
    I’ll keep paying it forward…until my wife makes me stop working to watch American Idol with her…hehehe

    My wife keeps trying to do the same… As “Red Green” would say,”I’m pullin’ for ya” “We’re all in this together” 🙂

  6. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Tim,

    I applaud your courage, and I promise not to tell your wife what you said…hehehe

  7. omegatron Avatar
    omegatron

    Congrats man!

    I’ve barely been able to maintain a blog for over a month before I get busy/distracted elsewhere haha.

    Keep up the incredibly useful and informative posts.

  8. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Ahh to be young and have the attention span of a humming bird…hehehehe

  9. J.J. Avatar
    J.J.

    “Greg Sowell Brand” I will buy that creme you gotta link to your ebay store? lol

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