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.

Thanks to AtariBoy, we now know what it takes to feature on Top WordPress.com blogs today.

11,706 hits (at least).

Hmm. Way to go. As our American friends say.

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.

Just noticed that those nice people at WordPress.com have added aggregated statistics over 7 and 30 days.

A software company that actually listens to their users and eats their own dog food Interesting concept but I don't think it will ever take off.

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'.

...to resist the 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...

You spend 3 months watching your WordPress statistics bumbling along the horizontal axis close to zero.

Some traffic dribbles in. The graph accelerates into 10s of hits daily. You feel better. You will persist with this blogging experiment for a little longer.

At this rate, it may soon be time to consider a proper blog using WordPress.org and Adsense to make the millions that eluded me during the dot com boom.

Then those pesky developers from WordPress.com alter the Y-axis dynamically, on the fly without even asking so the statistics now start at 40 and the graph looks just the same.

Life is cruel.

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.