Blogging

Joomla, Twitter, Drupal and ftp

• Joomla! 1.5 has been released and installed over here.
• Drupal 6 hasn’t been released but that didn’t stop me upgrading this blog to 6 RC2.
• I never thought I would say this but I think I am starting to get Twitter. Blame Tim Hall.
• FTP - Siebel had an FTP site for exchanging files with customers. Oracle has an FTP site for exchanging files with customers. Unsurprisingly, Oracle are standardising on the latter. I simply can’t believe how much time I have wasted spent helping intelligent people crossing this chasm.
• The Europa Hotel in Belfast was the ‘most bombed hotel in Europe.’

Drupal 6 RC2 near miss

Siebel customers (and employees alike) all over the world are busy enjoying Metalink3 which has recently replaced SupportWeb.

Everyone (well me, mainly) is taking great delight in taunting Oracle DBA types with incredulous cries of ‘Sorry - did you say you’re still on legacy Metalink2 ?’

A number of readers, impressed with this bleeding edge technology and dying for more, have emailed me asking why this humble Siebel blog hasn’t yet been updated to Drupal 6.0 RC2.

Adsense milestone

It is just over six months since I first placed banner ads on this blog and, much to my surprise, the accumulated income has just reached $100 (which triggers the first payment from Google).

As the introduction of Adsense was purely an exercise to learn how the system works and experiment with different placements and formats, I have decided to donate all proceeds to a worthy charity.

what's the blogging frequency ?

Answered by our roving reporter, Kenneth.

Posts by month. Draw your own conclusions.

blog housekeeping

• Upgraded to WordPress 2.3.2
• Plaintxt theme upgraded to v4.0. The main change is tag support which I don’t currently use.
• Reinstated the ‘Related Posts’ plugin because I couldn’t understand why people looking for information on Virgin Media/V+ don’t scan other relevant posts. Already seeing a benefit.
• Added useful plugin to support embedded YouTube videos to liven up my monochrome posts.

fringe benefit of SezWho

Occasionally, people take the time to comment on this blog which is always welcome.

However, the vast majority of comments however are not so thinly veiled advertisements by spammers. Unfortunately, due to recent problems with Spam Karma, I have had to revert to Akismet to block this torrent of pharmaceutical, financial, pornographic and vacuum cleaner spam.

This means I have a few more comments held in moderation for judgement. The family convene every night with a cup of Horlicks to sit in judgement on the assorted comments. Norma kindly takes the minutes and Norman Junior twitters the whole event (live).

comparison of coComment, co.comments and commentful

I subscribe to multiple blogs (163 to be precise) and Google Reader makes tracking all of those sites trivial. Reader’s keyboard shortcuts mean scanning for new content and reading blog articles is also easy and quick.

Occasionally, I also leave comments on a much smaller subset of those blogs in addition to blogs I may encounter but may not necessarily subscribe to.

After posting your comment, it is imperative to be able to follow any subsequent discussions in case someone violently (dis)agrees with you or simply to hear other people’s viewpoint on the same subject.

SezWho comment ratings system

Just installed SezWho on this blog. At least, it imported all existing comments (unlike Disqus). I would like to change the red colour to blend in with the theme but haven’t worked out how.

Now just rate each other nicely or you will be sent to bed without any tea and the plug-in will be removed. Any feedback, just shout or comment.

Another interesting service but, again, the problem is that it needs to be installed on the majority of blogs/wikis/forums in the world to be truly useful. I think marketeers call it ’traction’. Pity the support email supplied is totally broken but still.

Top 10 UK blogs

I am still in shock at not being shortlisted for the ‘Best UK Blog’ but I decided to swallow my pride and enjoy a few hours enjoying the high quality content of the 10 finalists:

• Ian Dale’s Diary - A tagline of ‘Commentary, analysis and gossip from the heart of Westminster’ completely turned me off and I closed the Firefox tab before I was subjected to any more torture.
• Guy Fawkes - Hoping for top tips to blow up the Houses of Parliament but just got more politics. Yawn.
• Neil Clark - The winner apparently. Anti-war hack with a lot of posts urging readers to vote for him.
• EU Referendum - Simply couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm to click through.
• Pub Philosopher - Promising title but yet more (right wing) politics. May as well buy the Daily Mail.
• The Devil’s Kitchen - Considered outpourings on the wit and wisdom of David Cameron. No thanks.
• Baggage Reclaim - Much better. A blog recording amusing anecdotes from an anonymous baggage handler at LHR. Oh no - wait a minute - it’s just a blog about dating and ‘relationships’.
• Nourishing Obscurity - Promising title but this excerpt completely lost me: ‘I see that the current crop of parents lost their moral compass long ago and this is the first generation to grow up “moral-code-lite”.
• Bright Meadow - Soft porn alert ‘She loved how the amber glinted off his bones’. I daren’t read any more. Particularly as I am on a formal warning from my employer.
• Kickette - At last. A discerning blog all about football. Only this one is about celebrity footballers (Fat Frank), their tiresome girlfriends and pictures of Ronaldo with his shirt off.

I was so depressed that I decided to kill myself compile my own list of the definitive, real, undisputed ‘Top 10 UK (and Irish) blogs’ in strict alphabetic order:

Tumblr V3

Tumblr update is imminent. First impressions are excellent.

Timestamps. Archives. Tags. Channels. Markdown. No comments though.