My second year of blogging

I’m now at two years of never missing a week. I can’t believe that. This is post 213, which means I’m averaging slightly OVER 2 posts a week. I did not plan on that. I really meant to do only one post a week. I guess since I quit my day job, I’ve just been having too much fun posting and thinking about ArchiCAD. We all love recap posts that include stats, right? Here are some: My best week of visits sits just a few shy of 2,500. And the best month is now a little over 7,600 visits. Back in Year One I broke the 1,000 visits/week threshold. Since late January of this year I haven’t had a week below 1,000 visits (a typical week is now about 1,250). In Year Two I broke the 1,000 visits in one DAY mark! That was a nice treat. Oh, and I also started a Youtube Channel that now has 10 videos, 170+ subscribers and over 16,000 views. That’s cool.

What else happened over the last two years?

I originally started this blog to give myself something to talk about when I called architects in Minnesota and told them I was their local ArchiCAD reseller. I felt that I needed something more than ‘Hi! I’m an architect too. And I use ArchiCAD on residential projects. Let me tell you why you need to be using ArchiCAD and BIM.’ It quickly outgrew that modest goal. Shoegnome continues to evolve and expand. Since July 2010 I’ve given lectures, been a panelist on a webinar, written articles and at least one guest blog post, trained people locally in Minnesota (and soon in Massachusetts), taught others via Skype and ichat, gotten to know a bunch of Graphisoft staff (both online and in person), become friends with ArchiCAD users all over the globe, gotten a few people interested in hiring me as an architect, done a lot of freelance work… the list of cool opportunities goes on and on, and continues to grow. My favorite side effect of all this is the number of people I’ve helped get jobs through the network I’ve developed and the opportunities I’ve become aware of. I used to know the exact number, but I’ve lost count. Let’s just say it’s impressively large for how shitty the economy and the architecture market has been these last two years.

The list of people I owe a Thank You to is getting VERY long…

I owe a big thanks to Bori Vigh who runs the ArchiCAD facebook page; she does a fantastic job of helping spread the word about my blog. Thank you Bori! And in fact a big thanks to everyone at Graphisoft. It’s be so great to get such an outpouring of moral support from the whole Graphisoft team. That support has definitely helped open doors and create interesting opportunities. But the biggest thanks goes to all my readers. This blog would be nothing without the almost 40,000 people who have visited the site around 75,000 times and viewed close to 130,000 pages since July 2010. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. There’s not enough ways to say it. So I’ll do my best to show it everyday and every time I post.

How about some ArchiCAD learning?

Just like in Post 103, which celebrated my first year of blogging, I want to leave you with some sort of ArchiCAD wisdom or knowledge. So read this tip from the ArchicadWiki on how to remove triangulation from imported SketchUp, Cinema 4D and 3D Studio Objects. The tip will also work for other imported file formats. We’ve all struggled with ugly imported objects. The process described here using the Morph tool should solve (most of) those issues.

On to Year Three!

I promised a lot of things when I quit my day job in February. I’ll promise even more now.
You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.

One of my three Muses helping me test out some modeling techniques.