The last post I did on the Nexus S put the number of blog posts here at #50o!  I’m grateful having a place to share knowledge and information with people.  Google has been good to butyoureagirl.com in both traffic and Google Page Rank.  Read below to check out a few stats:

Blog started

May 19th 2008.  Very first blog post Cut Down on Memorizing Your Passwords with Keepass Autotype [Video]

Why I started this blog

Because I write very long email replies to individual people when they ask me questions and my life coach suggested started a blog so I could help many more people.

Goal accomplished?

Heck yes!  Hundreds of thousands of visitors have stopped by.  Most of the content on butyoureagirl is about how to tweak technology to make it work for you.  Everything from step-by-step tutorials to videos, blog posts that took days to write to short little ones I posted in under 10 minutes.  The countless emails and comments from people thanking me for the information has really made it all worth it.  People even sent gifts from my Amazon wishlist.  I’ve made friends from this blog, gained client work and best of all, changed people’s lives.

Post I’m most proud of and why

Norm Coleman Website Crash Exposes Database and Email Lists

This post exposed poor security concerning donation collection for then Senator, Norm Coleman.  Not only was the web application built to store credit card information insecurely but after the site had performance problems, I discovered a backup file in a public directory called “database.tar.gz” in a directory called “db”.  By all indications, this was a backup of the entire database.  This discovery created controversy in both politics and technology when someone sent the database file to Wikileaks who promptly published the names, contact info and partial credit card numbers of campaign contributors.

This sort of thing shows poor planning from the start by storing unencrypted credit card information and the three digit code on the back of cards directly violating PCI compliance standards.  The PCI Security Standards Council have a great PDF summarizing the 12 Data Security Requirements for PCI Compliance.  Reading this you can see that whoever built the website disregarded security from the very beginning.  No amount of money would make me risk the data privacy of others.

Norm Coleman’s office did not acknowledge the security risks of the website or accept responsibility for the “breech”.  I guess that’s what one should expect from political figures: try to make the problem go away as fast as possible and redirect attention (red herring) whenever possible.

I feel the post helped raise awareness about the need for businesses to consider security as an essential part of their planning workflow regardless of location (network, web, customer facing).

Most popular blog post by visitor stats

How To Convert iPhone Voice Memos to MP3 [VIDEO]

I created this video as a one off request from someone’s email question and it has quickly become one of the most popular blog posts here surpassing Cydia To Store Jailbreak Files In The Name Of iPhone Freedom, How to Turn off Avira’s Annoying AntiVir Popups in XP [VIDEO], Google Adsense Abuse for iPhone Jailbreak Software QuickPwn and Redirecting WordPress Pages to External Sites.

Based on this, tutorial how-tos are what draw people to visit the blog.  I of course enjoy creating these!  There just never seems to be enough time for all the good blog post ideas I have.  I’ve started a Google Doc and have over 164 blog ideas listed there.

Who am I?

I’m a 32 year old female geek who is driven to help others understand the world around them.  I started working in technology in 1998.  First real computer gig was working at Geeksquad in 1999 before the Best Buy acquisition.  I went on to do network administration but my real knack is explaining things to people.  I can easily understand how the gears and levers of a certain technology item work as well as translate someone’s needs into a list of requirements and offer them options to meet those needs.

I live in San Francisco now, having moved from Minneapolis in April of this year.  I’m biracial (Black and Jewish).  I own a dog and a cat.  My dog has a blog.  I’m introverted so I prefer one-to-one conversations or a small group vs parties and conferences but I’m learning to adapt in order to further my reach.  Why?  My life goal is to empower the world through technology.  You can learn more on the About page.

How I’ve blogged this year

I’ve struggled with how much to share online.  In the past, I valued being as transparent as possible.  Moving to a new city made me feel a bit vulnerable so I pulled out of Foursquare, for example.

I’ve been to a lot of conferences this year: SXSW, DrupalCon, Web 2.0 Expo, BlogHer, Blogging While Brown,  Wordcamps, Gnomedex, Blogworld, Blogalicious; and spoken at several of them.  Translating my experiences at these conferences has been hard because the events are so stimulating that it becomes overwhelming to retell the stories.  There are just so many!  Thankfully, I always take a lot of notes and tweet during conferences so I can rebuild my viewpoint from those.

Lastly, being judged for what I write has been a struggle.  Since the post last year that landed me on the Rachel Maddow Show, I’ve had this feeling creeping in about people looking at what I wrote and deeming it, “not good enough”.  I talked with other bloggers about this and many encouraged me to write regardless of that feeling.  Instead of typing, I tried verbal dictation using MacSpeech Dictate (Now acquired by Dragon Naturally Speaking and called Dragon Dictate for Mac) and pumped out a blog post full of ideas, concepts and feelings when it came to Black People on Twitter.

I’ve met so many people, had literally thousands of amazing conversations that have not made it onto the blog.  Would you want to hear about them?  Sometimes things that don’t seem so important can be profound once they’re written out and expanded upon.

With the year coming to an end, I’m happy that I know what my obstacle is, that I have supportive people to urge me on and that I feel great when my knowledge helps others.  Here’s looking forward to abundant blogging in 2011!

How you can help

Are you someone who enjoys playing with words?  Do you find editing other people’s words exciting?  Maybe you’re  looking to get work experience for your portfolio for content creation?

One thing I’ve always wanted to do is take many of the emails I’ve written to people and turn them into blog posts.  Of course, when you have hundreds of items tag “blog idea”, it can seem overwhelming.  The steps I see would involve:

• Turning the email into a blog post draft
• Removing any personal information
• Formatting for blog post styling (headers, paragraph rehashing)
• Adding images
• Adding links
• Review

This would be good for someone who already has a blog, most likely in the technology realm and is looking to get more visibility and street cred as a content editor.  You would get credit on each post.  Contact me if this sounds interesting to you.

Future plans for butyoureagirl.com

I will continue to blog here but would like to see myself doing more tutorials and introspection on life as a female geek in technology; specifically in San Francisco.  se for me due to the buzz, number of attendees, preparing to speak