July marks the one year anniversary of this website. I didn’t think I’d keep up with it this long, but throughout the past year, crunchlife.com has become a springboard for ideas and a wonderful source of reference. Just as other programmers, I have found that maintaining a blog helps crystallize my thoughts. It also has the added benefit of documenting my fixes and failures for not only myself, but the rest of the community. It has been very gratifying reading everyone’s comments. Keep them coming.

While reminiscing, I thought I’d list my top five most viewed posts.

1. Review: Linksys NAS200 - By and far the most popular post on crunchlife.com. This article has accounted for over 70% of my web traffic from July 2007 to July 2008. I had no idea it would become that popular and if I could duplicate its success on a daily basis I might consider quitting my day job. Not really.
2. IE7’s Inanimate GIF - Explains how to reanimate hidden animated GIFs in IE7 with a little JavaScript.
3. Samba Network Shares with Nautilus in Hardy Heron Part 2 - This time I posted a solution to a problem I was having in mounting SMB shares on my NAS200 using Nautilus in Ubuntu, Hardy Heron. The solution worked well and I’ll be posting a follow-up soon.
4. rake aborted! No such file or directory - /tmp/mysql.sock - Provides a fix for the much hated “rake aborted! No such file or directory - /tmp/mysql.sock” Ruby on Rails error.
5. Temporary Identity Impersonation in ASP.NET - If you’d rather only use ASP.NET Identity Impersonation when you want to then this article can explain how it’s done.

Many projects in the 9-to-5 grind of a programmer seem endless and are not gratifying in the least. Seeking fulfillment, developers often work on side projects. I have found this to be an extremely rewarding way to satisfy my inner programmer and push my career in new directions. So without a doubt, my favorite posts have to do with the stuff we all love – source code.

• Ruby Fractal Library - Just last week I posted a fractal generating library for the Ruby programming language. I’m rather proud of this one. The “zooming” functionality caused a lot of grief, but once it starting rendering the Mandelbrot set all became right with the world.
• Samba Network Shares with Nautilus in Hardy Heron Part 2 - Most old *nix salts will tell you that any problem can be solved with a Bash script. They are right. This script improved my WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) tenfold!
• Genealogy Data for the Future - Not exactly source code, but solving problems with a few small tools can feel nearly as good.

The last twelve months have been great and I’m sure the next will be even better.