Blog in Isolation

There is a radiant darkness upon us

Blogging

breath of fresh air

It’s easy to get carried away with all this Web 2.0 nonsense. So while you are trawling the blogosphere, desperately looking for invites to CoComment and seeing whether 30 Boxes does indeed live up to all the hype, pause for a moment and look at two of my favourite blogs that offer a slightly different perspective on Web 2.0.

Go Flock Yourself - Witty, incisive, opinioniated comment. Always worth reading. The blog title alone still brings a smile.

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UK blogs

I wanted to find UK related blogs written by people in the UK as most blog indexes and search engines naturally tend to be heavily weighted towards the US.

Initially, I searched on Technorati for ‘UK’ tags. However, this included lots of photo blogs from tourists visiting London on whale watching holidays and UK ‘political’ news (yawn).

Then I came across britblog.com which is an growing index of UK based blogs which includes blogs listed by region and category in addition to recently added and popular blogs.

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resisting the lure of Joomla

Joomla, Chumbawamba, Oompa Loompa

I really like the presentation of Howard Rogers' site (and the integration of Forums, Blog and now an Oracle Wiki) and have followed, with interest, the evolution of the site in different formats, and enjoyed Howard’s thoughts on various content management technologies over recent months before he finally settled on Joomla.

I am also very impressed by the new look of Niall Litchfield’s orawin.info site which also uses Joomla and is a marked contrast (and improvement) from its predecessor. In fact, I just find myself gazing at the desert landscape for minutes on end.

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seldomly asked questions

People never ask me ‘Just who is this Norman Brightside character ?’

‘Norman Brightside’ is an alias for a fictitious Oracle Database Administrator based in Solihull, near England. Norman briefly flirted with celebrity, last year, when he had the temerity to criticise Tom Kyte.

Norman Brightside is also a bastardisation of Norman Whiteside, a Northern Irish footballer who played for Manchester United in the 80’s and the song ‘Mr. Brightside’ by the popular American beat combo - The Killers.

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Paul Stamatiou, I salute you

Have a look at this blog. Lots of interesting, varied material, frequently updated, nicely presented, excellent use of images, easy to navigate, searchable, well structured and very professional looking. All in all, an excellent blog.

This blog is by Paul Stamatiou, a 19 year old student. A few months ago, I happened across this article on Paul’s blog when I first started blogging but stupidly forgot to bookmark it.

This is undoubtedly one of the best personal blogs I have seen. In fact, I was so impressed I did as he suggested and nominated Paul’s blog for the ‘Best Teen Blog’ award.

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WordPress.com open up user forums

Those busy people at WordPress have opened up a couple of forums for support issues and feedback for users of WordPress.com

This is a brilliant idea as I currently have to use the ‘Feedback’ form for all my brilliant suggestions and reporting minor glitches which was a little lonely and uni-directional.

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issues arising

Doug Burns raises a surprising number of issues in a seemingly throwaway comment about music.

  1. I used to say I only have three passions in life ‘Music, Football and Girls. The only thing that changes is the order.’ :-)

  2. Stuff that is too personal to discuss in a blog. I am startled about certain stuff I have seen posted in blogs. Personal stuff that I would never dream of posting.

  3. Oracle versus Music versus Football. I started this blog after lurking on the Oracle blog community for a while and initially thought I would post occasional enlightening, technical articles which were met with worldwide acclaim. After a while, I realised, those posts would be few and far between.

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detailed analysis of referer logs

Old news is like yesterday’s papers. No-one is interested.

The chart of failed spammers is as good indicator of traffic to your blog as any.

Old gems may totally get ignored depending on timing.

I might have one avid reader.

Lots of people are looking for information about ‘Dixons Tax Free Shopping’, ‘SonicStage 3.3’ (are you listening, Sony ?) and, oddly enough, ‘Paul Scholes + family’.

Google is a popular but sub-optimal search engine for blogs as monthly archives may contain a wide variety of unrelated content (Roy Keane, Antibes, Blog, Chameleons, DAB) which will ultimately confuse people and waste time.

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