10-year Anniversary

Exactly 10 years ago today, I published the first article here on my blog. The idea was born in 2010 during a customer training in Switzerland. The announced extensions of IEC 61131-3 were lively discussed at the dinner. I had promised the participants that evening to show a small example on this topic at the end of the training. At that time, Edition 3 of IEC 61131-3 had not yet been released, but CODESYS had its first beta versions, so that the participants could familiarize themselves with the language extensions. So later in the hotel room I started to keep my promise and prepared a small example.

Pleased about the interest in the new features of IEC 61131-3, I later sat at the gate in the airport and was able to think a little bit about the last days. I asked myself again and again whether and how I could pass on the example to all others who are interested. Since I was following certain blogs regularly at that time, and I still do, the idea had come up to run a blog as well.

At the same time, Microsoft offered an appropriate platform to run your own blog without having to deal with the technical details yourself. With the Live Writer, Microsoft also provided a free editor with which texts could be created very easily and loaded directly onto the weblog publication system. At the time, I wanted to save myself the effort of administering the blogging software on a web host. I preferred to invest the time in the content of the articles.

After a few considerations and a number of discussions, I published ‘test articles’ on C# and .NET. After these exercises and the experiences from the training, I created and published the first articles on IEC 61131-3. I also noticed that by writing the articles my knowledge on the respective topic was deepened and consolidated. Additionally to the IEC 61131-3, I also wanted to deal with topics related to .NET and therefore I started a series on MEF and the TPL. But I also realized that I had to set priorities.

In the meantime Microsoft stopped its blog service, but offered a migration to WordPress. There is also the possibility to host the blog for free. The statistics functions are very helpful. These provide information about the number of hits of each article. It is also lists the country from which the articles are retrieved. Fortunately, I saw the number of hits increase each year:

In 2014, I also made a decision to publish the articles not only in German but also in English. So in the last 10 years, about 70 posts have been published, 20 of which are in English. Most of the hits still come from the German-speaking countries. Here are the top 5 from 2019:

	Germany	44.7 %
	Switzerland	6.5 %
	United States	6.3 %
	Netherlands	4.3 %
	Austria	4.1 %

Asian countries and India are hardly represented so far. Either the access to WordPress is limited or the search engines there rate my site differently.

After all these years, I decided to switch to a paid service at WordPress. One reason is the free choice of an own URL. Instead of https://wordpress.StefanHenneken.com my blog is now accessible via https://StefanHenneken.net. Furthermore, advertising is turned off, which I didn’t always find suitable, and on which I had no influence at all. On this occasion, I also slightly changed the design of the sites.

I will continue to publish posts on IEC 61131-3 in German and English. In the medium term, however, new topics may be included.

At this point, I would like to thank all readers. I am always glad about a comment or if my page is recommended via LinkedIn, Xing, or whatever other means. My thanks also go to the people who have helped with the creation of the texts through comments, suggestions for improvement or proofreading.