Posts from November 2005

So, you have set up the blog, got loads of interesting ideas for articles, robots and spiders are crawling everywhere, Adsense is configured and has already produced a massive return of 0.27USD and you are all set to go. One last problem, what are you actually going to call this blog ?

What's in a name ? Well quite a lot actually. I usually like to read the title and extended description of any blogs I encounter. I think the title alone can tell you quite a lot about the author and the content.

Unfortunately, I am totally devoid of imagination. That's one of the reasons I was never in a band. I simply would never be able to think up song and album titles let alone lyrics. The other reasons are that I can not play any musical instruments, sing or dance.

My imaginative offering for the name of my blog is currently 'Andy C' for the title and 'Blog in Isolation' for the description as it seems quite apt. Originally, this blog started out in life hosted at blogger, under a large black cape of anonymity and was called 'RomanTotaleXVII' because no-one in the world knows what it means (the name is a character from a Fall song).

'Blog in Isolation' is a reference to a wonderful song 'Soul in Isolation' by the most underrated band in Manchester - The Chameleons.

Other candidate titles considered were:

• Andy C's blog (boring but plenty of people use it!)
• The Wonderful And Frightening World... (The Fall)
• Open Up Your Eager Eyes (The Killers)
• Oracle Performance Tuning with Hit Ratio Harry (may yet appear as an article)
• View From A Hill (The Chameleons)
• Pedantry Begins At Home (oblique reference to The Smiths)
• In My Area (The Fall)
• Under The Covers with Norman Brightside (useful opening slide for technical presentations)
• Oracle Oldies Blog (featuring dictionary managed tablespaces, constant reorganisations, manual rollback segments and configuration of sort_area_[retained]_size)
• This is the way, step inside (Joy Division)
• The life and times of a (failed) dot com millionaire
• 77 Barton Road (where Ian Curtis took his life - too morbid)
• The NWRA (The North Will Rise Again - The Fall)

Absolutely anything can be a suitable subject for a blog entry; a Website of interest, OpenSource software, breaking news, a personal anecdote, a witty comment from a colleague, politics, a joke, a holiday, Microsoft, music, gadgets, your teams latest victory, anything.

Just because someone else (an esteemed blogger or maybe even a professional journalist) has written an article on the same subject, don't necessarily let that put you off. Lots of people are searching blogs for a personal view and not that of a journalist. For example, if I am considering the purchase of a digital radio for my car, I would rather hear your views on the same make and model rather than read a two year old review in AutoExpress.

As for technical content, while there might be reams of manuals, a wealth of text books and assorted wizards engaged in long running, complicated discussions with religious fervour that simply overwhelm you, remember that there will always be newcomers struggling in silence to insert their first row into their first table. So, if you have just written a squash ladder in PHP and mySQL, go ahead and share your knowledge.

If you can't think of anything to say, say nothing. Don't be afraid of radio silence. Personally, I don't bother with sites offering solutions for writers block such as '99 subjects to blog about' as I am not really interested in your response to 'If you were an animal, what would you be and why ?' [Although curiously enough I was asked exactly this question at interview once !]

Think about your favourite Web sites and blogs and why they are of particular interest to you. If you love reading about long haired Persian cats, and you have a long haired Persian cat, then write about that as it's likely that this will appeal to a group of people with similar interests.

Don't get discouraged because no-one comments on your blog or nominates you for 'Top 100 Blogs'. Think of all the blogs you have read in the last week with interesting, valuable content where you never had the common courtesy to take the time to say 'Thanks'.

Finally, think carefully about any brilliant ideas that surface while under the influence. Your audience may enjoy it immensely but you might live to regret it.

I used to have a Psion 5. This was a neat little personal organiser in a clam shell case with a mini QWERTY style keyboard. The Psion even had a port of the vi editor available. However, after the novelty wore off, I didnt use it much other than a few short-lived pointless games and as a glorified address book when sending out my Christmas cards.

Years later, I worked with some young, trendy individuals who wore Diesel trousers who taunted me as they all gradually acquired new, shiny Palm PDA's. Of course, I simply couldn't face them with my aged Psion so I went out and bought a Palm Vx.

Inevitably, the initial novelty soon wore off, the young things upgraded to different designer trousers and yet another trendy mobile phone (with camera) and I didn't use my Palm Vx much either apart from as a glorified address book for the annual Christmas card list.

Anyway, over the weekend, I decided to dust off the Palm and see whether it might be useful for capturing ideas for blogs. As the Palm had lain unused for so long, the batteries were totally dead and the device had been reset to its factory status. I performed a synchronisation with Palm Desktop using the Infrared link to check the communications were working.

Then I went to re-install Beyond Contacts from DataViz which synchronises data from Microsoft Outlook with the Palm. All my details were stored in my online profile at DataViz, so I was able to quickly obtain my registration key and upgrade to the latest version for free.

So now I can use the Graffiti application to enter information into the Palm, synchronise to my PC and then into the blog. I wonder if this will be quicker and more convenient than scribbling with a pen onto the back of an envelope. We will see.

Doug Burns recently was kind enough to refer to my little, embryonic blog.

I had been lurking around the Oracle blogs for a while and had commented on a posting on Doug's blog about his wife's positive reaction to the recently launched Teleport service (TV and video on demand)

Now this wasn't purely a trite comment is a desperate attempt to get someone other than the Technorati bot over to my blog. I am a Telewest customer and had previously remarked on the launch of the Teleport service on my own blog.

However, it struck me that if I had been at UKOUG and if I had just happened to be introduced to Doug Burns (an admittedly unlikely but possible scenario), would I have uttered the same words to his face as I posted on his blog ?

Now you're back from Birmingham UKOUG, take your wife out for a meal. If she is getting 'excited' about re-runs of Tuesday night's BBC news and Binge Britain Uncovered on Teleport, she desperately needs it :-)

And, well, to be honest, I am still not sure. I guess it would have depended on whether he was wearing a kilt or not.

Take some time to think of ideas and develop content for the blog. I tend to jot down lots of different ideas for possible brilliant, informative articles for the blog. However, most get discarded as when I subsequently re-read them, I discover that they dont even make sense or interest me. Some ideas are developed and refined over a longer period while other blog entries are more spontaneous.

As you are composing the article, review the text carefully as you go. If the blog editor has a 'Preview' option, use it to review the text again before finally hitting 'Publish'. When the article is published, review it yet again. I almost always still manage to find a nonsensical or rambling sentence on this final pass. I also subscribe to my own feed and read the article in Thunderbird where there is still scope to find the odd typo which is irritating as it means modifying and re-publishing the entry.

Although you are not writing an essay for an English exam, people are more likely to enjoy the content if the article is well structured and readable, spelled correctly and free of careless typos. I prefer to use English and avoid the use of slang or text message speak.

Keep the article short. Maybe I am unusual but I have a very short attention span. If a blog entry is five pages long then I am unlikely to persevere right through to the end unless it really is compulsive reading. Similarly, I tend to break articles into short paragraphs to be easier on the eye.

If the article is long or contains detailed technical content (code examples), consider breaking it into separate, shorter articles (Part 1 of 4) or maybe present the material in a different format (like a conventional Web page or write a book).

Dont. Build it and they will come (probably). Try and focus on the style and content of the blog. Try to keep updating the blog on a regular basis. Make it easy for people to subscribe to the blog by creating an RSS feed - Feedburner is a popular, free choice. If you have succeeded in getting people to visit the blog and, better, maybe even subscribe to it, try to keep new material coming otherwise the blog will surely wither and die together with the interest of the your audience.

It is worth setting up pings so the main blog search engines index your blog. I manually ping Technorati after posting a new article (and check my posting gets indexed in due course) and just let Feedburner automatically ping a few more blog services.

I have also started to include Technorati tags at the end of the article. Initially I was a little reluctant to include tags that are specific to Technorati as it may be superseded in the future by another technology (remember how Altavista got obliterated by Google) but the use of Technorati tags does appears to be standard practice in the blogging community and does help in driving traffic to the site.

Try not to succumb to the temptation to go around adding meaningless comments (e.g. 'Great blog!') to other blogs in a subtle effort to get people to come and visit your blog. Even though, you succeeded in passing the onerous word verification test, this is not much better than spam and some might consider it rude. Instead, try to provide some useful contribution to the topic in question.

Do not put Google Adsense ads on your blog. Ads put me off almost immediately and waste valuable space on the screen. The dot com boom and been and gone. I would love it if you prove me wrong but no-one is going to get rich from a personal blog.

Don't become obsessed by the statistics for your blog. However, this is easier said than done and I find myself spending time, pouring over the Web logs and statistics reports for my blog. Maybe the analysis of the Web statistics (spiders, robots, RSS readers and the occasional human being) what was popular, the growth of the blog over time, spikes, the relative popularity of different referrers etc would be the basis for a interesting article.

London, near England - Wednesday 2 November 2005

The Oracle community was reeling yesterday from the revelation that the universally respected, internationally renown technical expert and long standing Oracle employee, Thomas Kyte, had made a mistake.

The error was discovered by a Senior Oracle DBA based in Solihull in the UK, Mr. N. Brightside who explained:

"I was dearly looking forward to attending the UK Oracle User Group in Birmingham and hoped to get my copy of Tom Kyte's latest book, (Expert Oracle - Database Architecture) signed by Tom personally. However, at the last minute, my manager told me that the end of Q3 was imminent and there was no budget available for the daily 4.50GBP return rail fare. So, I decided to 'work from home' and sit down to savour Tom's excellent book. Imagine my surprise when I found what appeared, at first sight, to be a typographical error on page 38. In a paragraph discussing other relational database systems, Tom incorrectly refers to 'Ingress' instead of 'Ingres'. Then to my horror, a quick search on AskTom revealed that Tom makes this identical misspelling elsewhere. It was not a typo, it was a genuine mistake."

A spokesperson for Apress (the publisher of Kyte's book) commented:

"Thank you for the feedback on Tom Kyte's book. We were unaware of this problem and will update the Errata section accordingly in due course. However, we did note Tom had a tendency to use a mixture of 'Apres', 'Apress' and 'Apresss' in communications while writing the book. We attributed this to the long hours he was working on the book, the tight deadlines or a faulty auto-repeating 'S' key.

When we politely brought this to his attention, he was absolutely mortified and apologised profusely for the inconvenience (additional hard parses, increased latching and CPU utilisation) caused. Thereafter, he would only refer to the company as ':B1 Publishing'."

Tom Kyte was quick to acknowledge the error and said he was only too pleased to correct the problem although he thought all the fuss and extra work involved was rather a 'bind'.

Don Burleson was unavailable for comment but sources reported he was 'absolutely ecstatic at the news'.

When I started this blog, I simply composed the posts in the Blogger editor which was adequate. Until one day, when I lost the complete text of a draft posting due to finger trouble. As I laboriously re-typed my masterpiece, I wished I had a blog editor with the infinite undo, auto-save and all the other features of Emacs.

However, composing the drafts in the Blogger editor was useful as I could edit drafts from anywhere and then publish the blog very easily.

I then looked at Writely and Writeboard which fit the bill but are really intended for collaborative writing on the Web and don't have any integration with Blogger.

The Qumana Blog Editor also looked very interesting as it includes integration with Blogger and built-in support for Technorati tags but still was essentially a cut-down Word lookalike interface.

Then I realised I had the perfect blogging editor sitting right under my nose all the time - Emacs. I can use all of Emacs powerful text editing features and simply save the draft text on my Web server using ange-ftp.

Adding Technorati tags is easy using Marshall Kirkpatrick's BlogTags bookmarklet.

The only thing Emacs is missing is the ability to seamlessly publish to Blogger and another minor irritation is the fact that some whitespace gets jumbled when pasting the text into Blogger.

However, Emacs being Emacs, some kind person has created a Lisp package (weblogger.el) that provides integration with Blogger although I haven't actually tried it yet.

And please don't ask why I don't use the Blogger for Word extension. I can simply think of nothing worse. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemies.

After briefly evaluating Furl, del.icio.us and Blinklist, I finally decided to ditch Furl and spurn the advances of del.ico.us in favour of Blinklist as my preferred one stop shop for all my social bookmarking needs.

Furl was my first experience of 'social bookmarking' but, as I became more comfortable with the idea of tagging Web pages, I found the Furl interface is simply horrible. There are simply too many key clicks required to add a single tag let alone two ! And if you want to add a brand new category, it takes so long that you have almost lost the will to tag the page and forgotten why it was of interest in the first place. It looks like the tagging functionality was added on as an afterthought.

I then experimented with del.ico.us as loads of people seem to rave about it and it appeared to be the longest established technology. After all, 50 million Web 2.0 aficionados and satisfied del.ico.us users can't be wrong, can they ?

However, just imagine that you are a first time user and you encounter the del.ico.us home page for the first time. The initial impression of the home page is absolutely terrible. What is it ? What does it do ? How do you use it ? How do you get help ? Where is the FAQ ? Or the tutorial ? Also, there is the confounded sub-domain - del.ico.us - and the oh so clever pun which I took three weeks to grasp.

After my previous post on social bookmarking, a nice gentleman from Blinklist spammed - sorry commented - on my blog to tell me about the existence of Blinklist so I felt obliged to evaluate Blinklist as well.

Blinklist's interface looks modern and clean, well designed and thought out as though they employ proper Web designers who actually use the system themselves ('eat your own dog food'). Contrast that with the initial page presented by del.ico.us which looks like an undergraduate knocked it up during a lunch hour and a manager said 'Looks good - let's run with it!'

It is true that I had some teething problems with Blinklist; for example when the tag editor kept insisting on SHOUTING AT ME and the odd tag got duplicated. However, I used the feedback form and tried to provide some constructive feedback to the Blinklist development team. Almost immediately, I found myself in direct email contact with a lead developer (well he could be the CEO for all I know) who passed on my suggestions and got them addressed very quickly. Sometimes they appeared to be making releases as quickly as I was providing feedback.

One of the best features of Blinklist is the tagging of pages is really quick and intuitive. Suitable tags are suggested automatically (which are usually adequate) and it is trivial to add as many new tags as you want - quickly. Blinklist also has a facility to import del.ico.us archives which worked fine for me when importing my massive archive of 15 pages. Your mileage may vary if you have 5,000 del.ico.us pages.

Although Blinklist doesn't keep a Web archive of the saved pages (like Furl) this doesn't really bother me as I can use the Internet archive if it really comes to it.

Of course, Blinklist has some disadvantages. I presume that Blinklist are a small startup and they are the new kid on the block in what is already a crowded marketplace. Worse, it is obvious that those clever people at Google labs will inevitably be entering this space (RSS Reader, My Search History) in the not too distant future.

Secondly, Blinklist has a relatively small user base (compared with Furl, del.ico.is, spurl et al) although this is compensated by the more intelligent, discerning type of people using the service and subsequent higher quality of the Blinklist content.