Posts in category "blogging"

Its 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.

Squash - Phil Sim also has some interesting, thought provoking views from Down Under, albeit with slightly less profanity. I have to say I find myself agreeing with Phil's recent assessment of 30 Boxes.

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.

Britblog also has an interesting map displaying the distribution of blogs across the UK.

Ladies and Gentlemen

1. The Slashdot effect
2. The Digg effect
3. The lesser, spotted Kyte effect
4. The incredibly secure Pete Finnigan effect

Please welcome, the latest addition to the effect family, the Doug Burns effect, which has increased traffic to this blog to new, world record highs and, even as you are reading this, is relentlessly propelling this humble blog towards 'Top WordPress.com blogs today'.

lure of WordPress.com - an (experimental) import utility to ease your migration from Blogger. See you on the other side.

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.

I now find myself struggling to resist a very strong temptation to install Apache, PHP, mySQL and then Joomla on my PC at home just because it would be an interesting exercise.

This activity would also satisfy all the necessary pre-requisites for installing and playing with WordPress.org which is also very tempting.

However, I must be strong and resist. I know what will happen. I will encounter a few problems, solve them by reading the documentation, FAQ, finally get it all working and enjoy a brief period of satisfaction.

Then, knowing that I was able to do it and it worked, I will almost immediately lose interest and fail to really experiment with Joomla and WordPress at all.

I know this because last year, I thought it would be a brilliant idea to get all my vinyl records out of the loft, transfer them to digital format and then dispose of them.

I bought a cable from Tandy to hook up my record player to the PC. I connected it incorrectly and nearly blew my tiny, tinny PC speakers. I then investigated what software packages I would need to convert the large WAV files to MP3 format and label each individual track in ID3 format.

I settled on Audacity which did the job perfectly well and was another high quality, free, OpenSource software package.

Then I converted just one side of one LP - The Wonderful and Frightening World by The Fall. In fact, I didn't even do one side. I just did one song (Lay of the Land) which took a few iterations but finally, I had an MP3 version of the song.

Then, as soon as I knew it could be done, despite investing all this time, I almost instantly lost complete interest in the whole exercise.

I never even converted another song, let alone attacked the pile of singles and LP's. I am slightly worried that this indicates a personality trait that is a cause for concern (i.e. I am a perpetual starter but not a finisher).

The downloads are underway...

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.

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.

Paul is looking for a job this summer. Somehow, I don't think he will have any trouble getting fixed up.

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.

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.

The other Oracle bloggers cover that stuff far better than I ever could. Also, I would make idiotic mistakes and have people correcting me all the time. I think I can spend my time more profitably reading and learning from others. To be honest, the technical niceties of PL/SQL 'bulk collect', bind variables and 10046 trace analysis can be a little dry when that is your day job. I probably care more and have more to say about music, football (blogging, software etc).

1. Another quandry about ' blogging etiquette '. I commented on Howard Rogers' view on the importance of calendar functionality in a blog. He answered my questions fully and politely (but I still hold a contrary view). Now do I take my followup to email or continue to comment on his blog article when most people probably aren't interested ?

2. Indeed, should this lengthy post be a comment to Doug's comment, a private email to Doug or a post in its own right ?

3. Diction. When I read my own blog, I see long, rambling, interminable sentences. This concerns me. Especially as I write a lot of technical reports as part of my job for paying customers and I also play a major role in the content of my kids' homework. I - sorry, my son - recently got a B+ for a scintillating project on San Francisco. I swear it should have been an 'A++'.

Old news is like yesterdays 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.

Not many people will comment. Even fewer will link.