Blogging

Someone ripped my blog off. And it looks better than mine. That’s it. It’s over. Finished. Goodbye.

There I was - teetering on the precipice of getting my own domain name, a hosted blog, Website, anonymous FTP server, message board, Wiki and countless other stuff I would never use. A fully hosted solution (with unlimited bandwidth) on a Linux platform, the bleeding edge versions of mySQL, Apache, PHP and WordPress, a ‘control panel’, SSH and the prospect of sharing my wonderful set of feeds to my adoring public using Gregarius....

I subscribe to a fair number of blogs. Some of those bloggers use Blogger (despite my WordPress evangelism). Some of those Blogger bloggers are technical types who would normally seize any chance to play with newly announced beta software. Curiously, not a single one of them has experimented with the recently announced Blogger beta which includes exciting new developments like ‘Labels’, drag’n’drop page design, private blogs (where you can be assured no-one is reading), multiple authors, additional templates, RSS feeds and ‘instant’ publishing....

Judy Rose has an interesting article on the importance of writing style and Paul Stamatiou also has some excellent tips on structuring blog articles. My writing style has many flaws. At work, I have a irritating tendency to use ‘padding’ words that are completely worthless, superfluous and unnecessary. For example, ‘It was noted that…’. This trait was first brought to my attention by the ruthless peer QA review process which helped to reduce my deliverable documents from 78 pages to a more reasonable 12....

Rugby players spend a lot of time physical training Compared to other form of sports. I have read the Rugby laws mentioned on this site. It’s a gripping sport which targets the grip strength and the active mindedness of a player. American football and rugby league are also primarily collision sports, but their tackles tend to terminate much more quickly. For professional rugby, players are often chosen on the basis of their size and apparent strength and they develop the skill and power over the passage of time....

I heard an interesting interview on Radio 5 yesterday with UK blogger, Tom Reynolds. Tom works for the London Ambulance Service and his blog is a mixture of amusing anecdotes and real-life experiences. I really like Tom’s blog title (‘Random Acts of Reality’), his tagline (‘Trying to kill as few people as possible’), the dry sense of humour (summary of his recent holiday) and his general writing style. Tom started his blog in 2003 which has just been made into a book (‘Blood Sweat and Tea’) which is pretty remarkable....

The first blog I ever saw was this one (this entry to be precise) and to be honest, I just couldn’t see the point whatsoever. Then I stumbled across Tom Kyte’s blog which was relevant, interesting and sparked my interest in reading other technical (Oracle related) blogs. Just over a year ago, I started a blog (on blogger.com). Little did I know it but WordPress.com was launched the day before....

No-one ever asks me: ‘Hey Norman, why don’t you have a blogroll with 457 interesting, thought provoking sites for me to look at ?’. Firstly, while I find the reading lists of others interesting and a useful means of discovering new sources, I don’t particularly want an lengthy blogroll adding yet more clutter to my (sort of) minimalist blog. Secondly, my RSS reading lists are stored on a Netvibes server. I have separate tabs for ‘Oracle’, ‘WordPress’, ‘Sport’, ‘News’, ‘Blogs’, ‘Tech’, ‘Software’ and a small one called ‘UK’....

A trawl across the blogosphere revealed that hardly anyone, with any sense, hosts a blog at Yahoo 360' or Bloglines which is very surprising indeed. Or maybe not.

The ‘Metro’ is a free, lightweight, disposable newspaper, aimed at commuters, which is solely funded by advertising revenues. So lightweight, you can finish it by the time you reach Waterloo but at least it saves you the embarrassment of staring at your neighbour for 27 minutes. Last month, The Metro reported the exciting news that a quarter of all UK internet users maintain a blog. Hurrah ! However, the veracity of this claim is immediately subverted by the statement that ‘59% of bloggers choose to make it public....