In which I review the year that was...

It's been a pretty exciting year for me. I've started two podcasts, changed jobs and started reviewing food and drink for Luxury London. Less travel in my new job means that I've been able to spend more of my spare time on my side projects. All in all that's lead to:

 25 podcast episodes, 11 food/drink reviews, 9 blog posts

And I'm hoping there will be many more in 2018.

This Blog

I've managed 14,500 page views this year which is down from previous years. I know that my most popular content is tech related and I do have plans to focus more on writing that kind of content this year. My most popular post is still Word 2010: How to Insert Numbered Equations Properly with over a quarter of my traffic. Now that I'm doing more day to day programming I'm hoping to write about that more.

Podcasts

Hat of Many Things

I started podcasting with my friend Mike in June. We cover a variety of topics drawn randomly from a hat. It's been a fun learning curve for me on the editing side of things and a few issues with OneDrive sync aside it's been fairly easy to keep on top of.

Starting with only 25 subscribers for our first episode we have now acheived around 1700 which I think is pretty good growth for two unknown podcasters. The randomness of the podcast probably acts against us in this regard but we feel as the core concept we can't get rid of that. Our subscriber count has definitely been helped by some of our guests as Magic Mark Adams shared our Masculinity episode with his followers and our excellent board game guests helped us make it onto the iTunes chart in France.

Dr Wilko's

A benefit of purchasing all the gear to start podcasting is that I had the time to make use of a domain name I purchased a few years ago and didn't have a particular use for. Making and drinking a cocktail on a (roughly) weekly basis has been a fun endeavour. Not only have my cocktail making skills improved but I've had the opportunity to host a cocktail evening with other food reviewers and I'm sure there will be more of them in the future.

A side benefit is that via my Facebook page I landed a gig reviewing food and drink for Luxury London.

Reviewing

Since September I've been reviewing for Luxury London. It's been a great experience so far and has helped introduce me to a lot of the dining and drinking options around London. This is particularly good as I'm now working in central London and feel like a true Londoner again for the first since I went off to uni. I'm really looking forward to expanding the rnage of things I get to review in the new year.

Conclusion

It's been a fun year and I'm really looking forward to having new and interesting conversations and trying excellent new cocktials in the New Year.

Tom Out!