Blogging

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....

Ladies and Gentlemen The Slashdot effect The Digg effect The lesser, spotted Kyte effect 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....

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....

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

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....

Some professional (but impecunious) bloggers feel it is very important that there should be a regular, repeating cycle to the frequency of your blog articles to capture the hearts and minds of your tens of readers. Thankfully, I am a mere amateur so I will post when I feel like it and have prolonged periods of radio silence when I feel like it.