CNX Software is 10 Years Old – Top 10 Posts of the Last Decade

Around 10 years ago, I decided it might be a good idea to have an online presence. At the time, I just thought I would write from time to time, and I had no idea it would eventually become my main activity. My very first post was on February 14, 2010 about software development tools such as CVS and Bugzilla. That means today is the 10th anniversary of CNX Software website!

So I thought it might be fun to look at the most popular posts of the last ten years. I only installed Google Analytics sometimes in 2011, but it should not affect the results since I did not have many readers at the time, and the post that really started to bring more visitors, and made me switch from a $1 monthly hosting plan to a VPS, was “74 USD AllWinner A10 Android 4.0 Mini PC” published in May 2012.

CNX Software AnniversarySo with any further delay, here are the top ten posts since CNX Software was created in reverse order, and based on the number of views reported by Google Analytics:

  1. Intel Atom Z3735F vs Atom x5-Z8300 Benchmarks Comparison (August 2015) – People pondered whether to upgrade their Bay Trail powered mini PC or tablet to Cherry Trail-based hardware, and come here to check out benchmarks.
  2. Amlogic S905 vs Amlogic S912 Benchmarks Comparison (September 2016) – Processor comparisons may indeed bring some traffic, and this post is the same as above, except it was for TV boxes based on Amlogic S905 vs S912.
  3. How to Upgrade Firmware in Amlogic S802 Devices (April 2014) – Android TV boxes were first launched in 2012, and in the first few years, there was no such thing as proper OTA firmware updates, so people had to upgrade their firmware manually by either copying files to a MicroSD card, and even less user-friendly installing USB Burning tool in a Windows machine. This post explains how to do just that.
  4. How To Use Putty with an SSH Private Key Generated by OpenSSH (July 2012) – Short tutorial explaining how to use a Linux SSH key with Putty in Windows.
  5. Getting Started with NodeMCU Board Powered by ESP8266 WiSoC (October 2015) – Tutorial showing how to use ESP8266 powered NodeMCU board with Lua language
  6. WM8850-MID Tablet Firmware Files and Root Instructions (November 2012) – I purchased a tablet based on WonderMedia WM8850 Cortex-A9 processor in 2012, and I explained how to flash the firmware and root the device.
  7. MXQ S85 Android TV Box (Amlogic S805) Review (October 2014) – I received lots of TV boxes from China between 2013 and 2017, until the government decided that TV box imports should be regulated. So a lot of my traffic came from TV box reviews at the time, including my review about MXQ S85 TV box.
  8. DriverAssistant – Simplified Method to Install Rockchip USB Drivers in Windows XP/7/8/10 (November 2013) – Another Windows tutorial, this time explaining how to install the drivers needed to upgrade the firmware in Rockchip TV boxes.
  9. GPUs Comparison: ARM Mali vs Vivante GCxxx vs PowerVR SGX vs Nvidia Geforce ULP (January 2013) – There are many embedded GPU designed for Arm SoC, and I attempted to compare the features and performance of some of the most popular GPU at the time.
  10. Review of M8 Android Kitkat TV Box Powered by Amlogic S802 SoC (April 2014) – The top post of the last ten year is TV box review from a device based on Amlogic S802. I wonder if it got popular because M8 was also the model name of an HTC smartphone.

All the most popular posts were written between 2012 and 2016, and for some reason, none of the more recent posts come close. Most of the posts above have very little traffic now, and traffic is spread out over a large number of posts. Reviews don’t seem to bring as much traffic as in the post based on the top ten posts of 2019, possibly because Google now brings YouTube reviews at the top of web searches.

Anyway, it’s been a fun 10 years, and I hope to continue for many more years. Thanks to everyone who visited the site, especially regular readers and commenters!

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33 Comments
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Willy
Willy
4 years ago

Happy birthday CNX 😉

trebor
4 years ago

Happy Cake Day, and keep up the excellent information you pump out to the world.
For you…(´・ω・)っ由

4 years ago

Happy birthday 生日快乐!

obarthelemy
obarthelemy
4 years ago

Congrats on your success, and thanks for lots of interesting info !

lionwang
4 years ago

Happy birthday CNX, very good website.

dimtass
dimtass
4 years ago

Happy anniversary Jean-Luc.
Do you know what it would be interesting?
Since the last 10 years you are following technology very close, it would be nice to write a post about which you think are the technology momentums of the past decade and why.

blu
blu
4 years ago

Happy birthday, CNX, and here’s to 10 more!

Lalith
Lalith
4 years ago

Happy Birthday ..

You’ve done a great job, Jean-Luc

Igor Pecovnik
4 years ago

Congratulation!

Daniel
Daniel
4 years ago

Happy anniversary! I always enjoy reading your posts

fhfs
4 years ago

Congrats, Thanks for the Great job you have been doing.

Brad Linder
4 years ago

Happy Birthday! FWIW, Liliputing turns 12 this year. Our traffic peaked around 2013 – 2016 before dipping somewhat (Due to changes in Google’s algorithms? Changing consumer interests? Increased competition? Who knows?) But enough people are still interested in little computers that it remains my full-time day job. And reviews have never brought in enough page views/ad revenue to justify the amount of time I spend on them… but they’re still worth doing from time to time because they help keep me familiar with the latest tech and I think they provide some value to folks who do bother to read… Read more »

Jon Smirl
4 years ago

Looking at this list, might be good to do more tutorial articles. They are popular have have long legs via Google which will draw new readers to your site.

Willy
Willy
4 years ago

Jon, this is an excellent idea! When I see the number of people around me who seem “impressed” to see what I can do with my tiny machines, it simply proves they don’t know where to start from, and we’ve all gone through this. Explaining how to setup a toolchain, configure mainline u-boot for your board, build a mainline kernel with minimal features, load it over TFTP and/or serial to try to boot from RAM, or put it on micro-SD and boot via extlinux.conf, set up a basic initrd to have your first shell, etc… All of this seems magic… Read more »

Willy
Willy
4 years ago

And that makes me think that it would be a great opportunity to centralize links to known resources by board , vendor, or SoC family. Most of them are already discovered by Jean-Luc or by commenters here, so that would just be an organized collection of links to OS images, toolchains, kernels, DTS, u-boot, firmware, DDR code etc.

This way it would be even more tempting to buy a cheap TV box matching available images and try to flash it and try to place your favorite OS on it.

Ved Vernekar
Ved Vernekar
4 years ago

Congratulations!

maurer
maurer
4 years ago

happy 10y! I really hope you’ll continue to write 10×10 more years 🙂
you and your team are very talented technology bloggers !
keep up the good work
you’re my no #1 tech blog

Jadam
Jadam
4 years ago

Happy anniversary to my favourite website 🙂

back2future
back2future
4 years ago

Referring to a specialist site (https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/01/rockchip-rk3566-rk3588-rv1109-socs-coming-in-2020-based-on-rockchip-processor-roadmap/) rk3588 should be getting an inspiring device, thx 🙂

Slowstream
Slowstream
4 years ago

Always one of my daily reading before going to bed. Congratulations for your tenth anniversary!!

Tom Cubie
4 years ago

Congratulation!

10 years! Time flies. Lots of memories.

Alexey Roslyakov
4 years ago

Congratulations!
I think I started to read CNX since 2012. Great resource!
Kapun mak kap.

John Smith
John Smith
4 years ago

Out of curiosity could you share stats on how many page views the top post got?

Congrats on 10 years, love the website 🙂

Michael Noel
Michael Noel
4 years ago

Congratulation! Well done Jean-Luk! 🙂 10 years of touch tech! Maybe more points to firmware resources will be a complementary asset! I guess! 🙂 Miki

sander
sander
4 years ago

Happy birthday, CNX. “All the most popular posts were written between 2012 and 2016” … that was also my most active time here on this forum. So maybe I can find out why I’m now less here on this forum … ? Let’s see … The original Raspi was released in 20212, so that was the start of cheap, popular, mainstream SBCs, with ARM, and thus a revolution: running Linux on a 30 EUR ARM board … that gave thrill. That revolution has calmed down IMHO. FWIW: May 20212 was when you and I had a beer on that small… Read more »

Willy
Willy
4 years ago

> The original Raspi was released in 20212, so that was the start of cheap, popular, mainstream SBCs, with ARM

Well, the BeagleBoard then BeagleBone were already there and already started to set a new standard. Admittedy they were more expensive ($89) even if they were of way higher quality, stability, performance, feature set and software support by then. The BeagleBone Black (or BBB) arrived one year after the first RPi at half the price of its big brother. I think it was extremely successful but probably not as much as RPi.

freemanzwin
freemanzwin
4 years ago

Happy birthday, CNX !!!

FransM
FransM
4 years ago

Congrats!
Looking forward to the next 10 years.

Abner Olivieri
4 years ago

Happy anniversary! Thank you for the great content over the years 🙂

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