The Top Performing Articles of 2010

When I spent three months in 2007 and 2008 re-building this site from the ground up, I really hoped that it would provide a way for me to contribute back to areas of expertise that I was passionate about. Looking back toward the end of 2010 the site has been doing better than it ever did in past iterations. For a few years I have been hell bent on doing things differently, which contributed to the horrible yellow pastel background color of this site up until last week. I purged all aspects of the yellow and replaced it with white and added two new random top banners. One is the Captain of Industry I worked on a few years ago and the other is the RC Interceptors early prototype. To get on with it, I wanted to highlight the top visited articles on the site and provide some commentary. The following are the top five visited pages on this site this month:


1. The Project page on the Optocoupler
2. The Red5 Development Tutorial
3. The Latency and Bandwidth Simulation Tutorial
4. The Project Page
5. The GPS Navigation Robot Project Page

These pages have historically been the most popular for the last few months. The articles above are based on research and experience that took me two weeks to years of experience to write. Most of them were written over the course of a week or a weekend.

The Optocoupler or Optoisolator Article

Im not sure why this has risen to the top of all the articles. If you search for Optocoupler Tutorial it shows up as the top in Google, which is probably a large contributor. I meant for this to just be an explanation of my experiences with the 4N25 not a tutorial on it. In any case I hope people have been able to figure out how to work with it based on the simple circuit diagrams.

The Red5 Tutorial

This one has risen up in the Google searches over time too. I think a lot of newbies with Red5 get frustrated with this article when they are just trying to figure out how to work with it. I keep a constant eye on the Red5 mailing list and wrote this tutorial because I have worked with it for four years now and still believe this is your most platform agnostic way to get it to work. It's not an easy platform to work with, but will teach you a lot if you are patient with it. Red5 is the reason I became involved with Flash and I have it to thank for my current job and probably interest in Java.

The Bandwidth and Latency Tutorial

This one I am really proud of. I spent a long time figuring out the specifics of the methodology I explain in this article and writing and capturing the details of it. I know its not as complete as it could be, but I think I described the easiest methodology at the time of writing of doing this complex simulation. I'm really happy to see it rise to the top.

The Project Page

I have no idea why this one is ranking up there. I hope people find some of the items I have worked on interesting or inspiring. I truly appreciate comments.

The GPS Robot Navigation Page

This project is the only one that transitioned over from the previous version of the site and I'm proud it has done well. The reason I published the source code and attempted to write this article, despite it being on a simple two wheel cheap robot was because of how hard this project was for me. Even finding papers on how to do simple GPS navigation as an undergraduate were near impossible. It really depends a lot on the drive train of the robot you are using. I believe this is simple knowledge that is passed down from experts to students in prestigious technical universities. I hope it has helped a few people despite being pretty rudimentary from a Java perspective. I really had fun doing this project. To do the advanced algorithm I came back to college early from spring break and measured all the drive train angles on the robot using a protractor.

So that is the run of the articles. I hope as time progresses I can produce ever better material for people passionate about learning the subjects I am writing about. I wish you all the best of luck on your projects as 2010 comes to a close and thank you for your support. It really means a lot to me when you read and comment on the articles on this site. Thank you.