Welcome to post #182 of our Portage Bay Solutions blog! Our blog launched ten years ago on this date and is something we enjoy creating in order to continue with our own learning and knowledge and to help our Claris FileMaker community stay engaged and curious as well. We’ve covered topics such as navigating portals like a spreadsheet, ransomware awareness, our appreciation for PauseOnError, and our preference for pasta puttanesca. The past year has seen more than 2,500 downloads of our free add-ons & demos (which number over twenty and counting!) And in the last six years our number of unique visitors has grown over 3,000%, from 800 people per year to more than 26,000.
Thank YOU for following along and participating with us.
SLOW, STEADY PROGRESS KEEPS US GOING
Slow, steady progress is better than fast, daily excuses.
Robin Sharma
The steady progress of our blog is encouraging and tells us that the things we are interested in are valuable to you as well. We’ve learned a lot from diving into a topic, exploring its possibilities, finding its edges, and discovering workarounds, tips, and improvements. There is a lot more to learn and we will continue doing so. And while we’d like you to stick around longer and absorb some of our other articles, a bounce rate of 73% for a blog is pretty common. It can mean you found the details you needed right when you needed them and then continued on to expand your learning. Check out our sidebar ➙, though, while you’re here ➙ and peruse some other categories ➙. You’ll find some great knowledge with interspersed bits of fun.
TIDBIT: 90% of our readers last year used desktop, 9% used mobile, and 1% used a tablet.
ENJOY OUR FREE ADD-ONS & DEMOS
We have over twenty free add-ons & demos available, with more to come! We have a dedicated internal process focused on planning and posting relevant content for FileMaker developers and enthusiasts. We try to think about four months ahead and our goal is to provide about four demos each year. Subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when new topics are up. And if you have a topic you’d like us to explore, we’d love to hear your suggestions!
GEEK TRIVIA ABOUT THE BEGINNING OF THINGS CALLED BLOGS:
The term weblog was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, enthusiast of the Minivac 601 and creator of the Robot Wisdom weblog. A couple of years later Peter Merholz jokingly split the word into “we blog” and things took off from there. Instead of the early days of Usenet, GEnie, and CompuServe, people were able to communicate more broadly and across a wider range of topics.
One of the first blogs was on the Ty, Inc., website in 1995, with their Online Diary where entries were maintained by featured Beanie Babies. Along came online tools such as Open Diary, LiveJournal, and Pitas.com. And then Blogger.com launched in 1999. Today there are over 600 million blogs worldwide, with almost 6,000 blog posts published every minute. That’s sort of staggering!
DOES IT FEEL LIKE TEN YEARS HAVE GONE BY?
These ten things were happening in 2012. What were you up to then? What are your predictions for 2032?
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First weekend of Coachella wrapped.
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The Avengers & The Hunger Games movies premiered in LA.
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The unfinished One World Trade Center overtook the Empire State building as the tallest building in New York.
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Greece secured its debt-restructuring deal with private lenders.
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Encyclopedia Brittanica announced it would no longer publish printed versions of its encyclopedia.
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Filmmaker James Cameron became the third person to visit Challenger Deep, the deepest point on Earth.
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The 2012 Armageddon was disproved by the discovery of a missing Mayan calendar piece.
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A SpaceX Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to dock at the International Space Station.
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Grumpy Cat – with her given name of Tardar Sauce – was born in Morristown, Arizona.
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Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan got married.
TEN COMPANIES THAT DIDN’T EXIST TEN YEARS AGO
TEN FLEDGLING OR YET-TO-BE CAREERS IN THE YEAR 2012
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Driverless Car Engineer
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Social Media Influencer
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Podcast Producer
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Telemedicine Physician
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Uber/Lyft Driver
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Drone Operator
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Budtender
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Contact Tracer
WE’RE STICKING AROUND!
Through all of the changes life brings Portage Bay Solutions has been blogging for ten years and developing custom software for thirty. We’d love to share our experience with you by answering your questions or talking with you about creating software that can save you and your staff time and allow you to focus your energies on what you do best. Send your thoughts and questions our way! You can also schedule a complimentary consultation through our Calendly link.
And please feel welcome to join our twice monthly Office Hours where we answer your FileMaker questions and assist with ideas you’re working on.
