I’ve had over 1.5 million visits and over 2 million page views, I’ve earned nearly $3000 in adsense, and been linked to from W3C and xkcd, and I look to the future of puremango with optimism. But it wasn’t always this way. The journey started with all the counters on zero.

Six years ago today I registered my first domain name as a place to dump my code and generally show off my spare-time projects, silly little pieces of code that had no real business traction and so wouldn’t see the light of day at work. I wrestled with a few cringe-worthy domain names (stuff like PHPPro.com? Leetcoder.com?) before I decided that going abstract was the way forward, and PureMango.co.uk was born.

So I thought it would be interesting to review the lessons learned over the last six years as a blogger. If you’re a blogger just starting out, or you’re thinking of starting a blog, or even if you’ve got a blog that you don’t really keep up with, I hope you’ll be able to learn from my mistakes, and perhaps even be inspired by my moderate success.

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