Best of 2011: A Mini-memoir.

Welcome 2012! 

The end of 2011 has been a strange one.  We started this magazine in October, so we are only a couple of months old, yet we are starting to chip away at our Alexa and Google Page Rank.  We want to be a successful magazine and co-exist with our contemporaries who are already doing a tremendous job promoting free software and bringing open-source technology journalism to the mainstream masses.

In our short time on planet Internet, we have been featured on Linux Today and OMG! Ubuntu.  Some of those featured articles are in this list.

We have no Josh Topolsky or Joey Sneddon on our staff, and you will probably never find the cool exclusives here that you find on Engadget and the Verge.  You will find, however, a great website with original content.  This is not some cruddy article-mill that makes you click through for nothing.  We want to be the best at what we do, no matter how niche’ it might be.

Here is an overview of the success we’ve had in our 3 months in existence, in order of rank from 10 to 1 per Google Analytics.

Number 10

The Girl With The Penguin Tattoo

The Millennium Trilogy is my favorite series of books.  I wanted to honor the film from the perspective of a Linux user.  This article was inspired by the classic Engadget article found here.

This is a hypothetical presentation of the gear that Lisbeth Salander would have used had she not been a Mac user.

Number 9

Official White Houe Petition To Stop SOPA

This one is a great indicator about how new we are as a magazine and how that relates to very bizarre traffic.  We don’t have any readership, really, so sometimes traffic is about publishing something at just the right time.  SOPA is a big deal, and if it succeeds it threatens the entire web, including this little magazine.  We are by no means a platform with which to defend SOPA, but we are certainly against it, and will promote anything that opposes it.  Thusly, this little news bit still gets traffic.

Number 8

Gnome 2.x, I’ll Miss You

This is one of the first pieces that I ever wrote.  It was originally published in August over on Muktware.  When Swapnil Bhartiya, Editor-in-chief at Muktware, paid me for this piece, I was given the motivation to start The Powerbase.  I now have the rights to that article so I have republished it here, where it still gets traffic.  It’s still mostly relevant.  Oddly enough, the search term that gets most users here is “gnome I miss you”.  So, I guess I’m not the only one who feels this way, huh?

Number 7

Easy Favorites in KDE

This was one of the first articles for The Powerbase.  It’s also our first guide!  This guide was written when KDE 4.7 had first hit the Kubuntu backports PPA (I think) and can work on all versions of KDE 4.x since all it requires is the Folder View widget with panel integration.  Still, a great guide, and I recommend this to anyone using KDE with traditional panels.  Read it now!

Number 6

Installing Handbrake in 11.10, Quick and Dirty

It seems to be our niche’-  right now-  To post easy guides that don’t seem to be anywhere else.  There is no mystery in how to do this, but for those who don’t know how to use PPAs and are new to Ubuntu, these sort of things are essential.  Also, there are STILL no other guides on the Internet that show how to get Handbrake going on Ubuntu 11.10!  There is still no official release for it!  So, we did the legwork, and now you can profit from it.  Happy New Year!

Number 5

Think Penguin’s Penguin Air Review

Our first ever review unit!  If you are a little magazine that dreams big, you have to go after what you want.  We wanted review units from manufacturers, so we asked!  Since this was our first hardware review, we were extra careful to be fair and balanced.  It’s easy to want to be bias towards a product especially when you have made a good contact within an organization.  But that’s not journalism…

Number 4

Ice Cream Sandwich For HP’s Touchpad

This article was purely hypothetical.  Take something that makes sense, and predict that it will happen!  That’s how prophets operate.  So, I opened up the Gimp, threw a screencap of ICS onto a publicity shot of the Touchpad, and this is what was born.  This gets a lot of traffic for one reason;  I am not the only person who has come to this conclusion…  Hits to this page are completely exclusive to the search term “ICS on Touchpad”.  People want this, and I still believe that Cyanogen Mod will be the project to make it happen.

Number 3

Piers Anthony:  An Ogre And A Penguin

This was our shining moment last year.  Our first interview!  We spoke with famed fantasy author Piers Anthony, author of more than 150 novels about Linux.  Piers is a real character, but was for the most part dull in this interview, answering most questions in what seemed like a ‘prepared’ way. We were grateful none-the-less.  Check it out!

Number 2

Google Chrome Getting a Terminal Soon

Yeah, really…  This is pretty minor news, but it seems that we were one of the few sites around the Internet to report on it.  There have not been any major announcements about this from Google, but the evidence doesn’t lie.  I am still utterly mystified that this ranks so close to the top of the list.  It could be that we are one of the few sites on the web that cranks out original graphics for articles no matter how major or minor they are…

Number 1

Light-Scribe in Linux:  Make Gorgeous Discs with Ubuntu

This was also a pretty early article for us.  Nothing happened with it until it was featured on OMG!Ubuntu a month ago.  This article brought a lot of much needed attention to this magazine and still gets a lot of traffic!  Trust me, I’ll be sure to update it when Ubuntu 12.04 comes out.  I will make sure it’s plenty ‘precise’ so that I can please the Pangolin…

Thanks for reading!  2012 is going to be a big year for us, so don’t forget us!

Make sure to circle us on Google +.  It’s the only social networking site we are really active on.  We’ll see you there.