All 28 Issues of Testing Experience Magazine

The table is built from the complete list of URLs that other websites link on this domain. For each issue it gives the original file names in both naming schemes, the summed referring domains across every shape of those names (http and https, with and without www, root and issues folder, with and without campaign tags), and the theme as cited, which is left blank where no citing page or anchor establishes one. Sixteen issues have too little link history for an evidence-based record page; they appear here with their counts and their file names redirect to this table.

Two naming schemes are in play. From 2008 to mid-2010 the publisher named files by quarter within the year: 01_08 is the first file of 2008 (issue 1, March), 02_09 the second of 2009 (issue 6, June), 02_10 the second of 2010 (issue 10, June). From issue 11 (September 2010) the files carry the issue number, month and year: 11_09_10, 12_12_10 and so on to 28_12_14. When the back catalogue was moved into an issues folder, the early files were renamed to the new scheme, so most 2008 to 2010 issues have two names.

Referring-domain counts are a proxy for how much an issue was shared, not for its quality. Issue 12 (open source tools, 19 domains), issue 4 (21 domains) and issue 1 (21 domains across six file names) lead; the 2014 issues have two to four each, which is what a magazine in its final year and a file that was live for only a few years before the site lapsed would be expected to collect.

Reading the two naming schemes, with a worked conversion. Take the old-scheme name testingexperience03_09.pdf. The two digits before the underscore are the position of the file within the year and the two after are the year: the third file of 2009. The magazine was quarterly, so the third file is the September issue, and September 2009 is issue 7 (issues 1 to 4 are 2008, 5 to 8 are 2009). Its new-scheme name is therefore issues/testingexperience07_09_09.pdf: issue 07, month 09, year 09. The conversion runs the other way too: issues/testingexperience10_06_10.pdf is issue 10, June 2010, and because issue 10 is the second file of 2010 its old name was testingexperience02_10.pdf. The formula is issue number equals 4 times (year minus 2008) plus position, where position is 1, 2, 3 or 4 for March, June, September or December. One exception is preserved as found: issue 11's mirrored name is 11_06_10, a June date for a September issue, which is the publisher's error and is redirected like the rest.

Why the counts cluster on the built issues. Twelve issues have record pages, and the same twelve hold 172 of the 258 referring-domain counts in the table, about two thirds. The counts are per file, so one blog that linked five issues appears five times, and the clustering has four causes. The record pages were built where the evidence was, so the selection follows the counts by construction. The 2008 to 2011 files were online for eight or more years before the site lapsed and were indexed from the start of the link index in 2013, while the 2014 files had five years at most. One authoritative citation attracts copies: the biography-page mirrors on issue 16, the syndicated press release on issue 23 and the Spanish post on issue 4 each turned one source into three to five domains. And an issue announced outside the testing community, as issue 6 was on security lists and issue 12 was on forums in six languages, collects links from sites that never linked any other issue. Issue 28 is the exception that shows the rule: four domains, but two of them named citations, which is why it has a record page and issue 24 with nine domains does not.

How to cite an issue. Cite the magazine, the issue number and date, the original file name, and an Internet Archive capture where one exists, because the publisher's URL no longer serves the file and this site does not either. A format that works in a reference list: Testing Experience, issue 12, December 2010, originally published at www.testingexperience.com/testingexperience12_12_10.pdf; archived copy via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, with the capture date you retrieved. Add an article title and author only if you hold the issue and can see them; the record pages on this site do not establish tables of contents and should not be cited as if they did. Cite a record page for what it is, the link record of the file, at its stable address, for example /magazine/issue-12-december-2010/. The sources listed on each record page are the Internet Archive captures of the original homepage nearest to the issue's date, which show what the site itself said about the issue at the time.