One year of blogging

One year ago (24th of Mars) I wrote my first blog post . This first birthday is just one of three jubilees  I celebrated the last months, I became a member of the gold club , I celebrated my sixtieth birthday and now one year as a blogger. In the light of the other jubilees one year as a blogger is maybe not so much write about.

When I started blogging my intention was to learn and understand what blogging was all about, and this has really been a learning experience. First thing I learned ‘It takes longer time to write posts than I anticipated’. I chose to write about my professional life which the last years have been concentrated around Business Intelligence and extracting data from mainly SAP ERP systems into my Data Warehouse application. Consequently most posts are about those topics. It’s not just to write, you have to test and verify what you write is correct and that is time consuming. Still when I reread post I find errors, it is no easy task to write IT technical articles. I think we all have seen examples that do not work, not even compile. A colleague wrote to me the other day ‘You have a syntax error on line 1...’. You have to pay attention to the most minute details, and that is not something I’m good at, I am a bit offhand and absent-minded (in extreme some would say), and that is not good qualities when writing IT-technical stuff. I have written 69 posts during this year, I think this is impressive since this is no twitter posts (some of them took more than a full day to write).

Another thing I learned and that was as expected, it’s fun to write posts, but I like to write i think this as a prerequisite for blogging. One very surprising and extremely positive finding, blog posts are very suitable for general documentation of applications and programs. I find myself going back to examples in my blog when I forgot a detail.

If you publish you want readers, even if my purpose was not to reach out or market myself I  became more or less obsessed with statistics, I still check every day (more than once) how many are visiting my blog, the number is growing, January was all time high, 556 visits.

Of course you want feedback, but I was not expecting any, and I was more or less right. So far I got one positive feedback, (for which I’m very proud of and very thankful). I got one troll, one who wanted to sell/market a software product and a prank (from a colleague) and that’s all.

I will probably continue to blog, it’s a nice way of document interesting parts of my daily work. I will take on a new mission in short future. and I do not know yet to what extent that mission will lend itself to blog posts. Anyway that I will write a post about when time is due.

           

Annoying statistics

I have been looking at my blog statistics and found a most annoying thing. In my series Job Scheduling with PHP  almost no one  reads  the last and most interesting post Job Scheduling with PHP - 4. The obvious interpretation is you my dear reader do not find the first three parts interesting enough to read the final post. In future I have to improve my writing or write about more interesting stuff. But that is what my blogging exercise is about learn to be a better blogger.

Family blogging

Some days ago I learned I’m not the only one in the family with a blog,  I got a blogging niece Julia. My son told me I figured in a post as ‘her senile uncle that knows it all’. I tried to resist the temptation to look but this morning I tried to find the post. I could not find that post but I found another interesting post, she mention she is hours too early at airports, as there always something going wrong when she or her mother is flying. She thinks this is in her genes. Read the last paragraph of this post. It’s in the family genome. I’m a bit surprised as her mother (my sister) is a well-structured headmaster, I always thought my airport problems  was due to I’m a bit offhand and absent-minded. It feels better knowing it’s in the genes, there is nothing I can do about it.

As Julia’s uncle I have to comment her blog. It is not what I expected. Is this really my niece who graduated from college with absolute top scores? I knew she works as a part time paparazzi and likes to party. But this looks more than part time. And when is she going to start studying at KTH? I’m sure Julia will do fine in future too, she is not only smart, she is also very tough and competitive.

 I suspect Julia is a more successful blogger than I am. I thought I had 1000 visits a week ago but that was not so, I have had 1000 page views since the start. Julia probably have more page views in a day. At next family gathering I should ask her for advice, how to make my blog more attractive.

One thousand visits

Pont de Diable, Hérault river.

When I started blogging  it was just to get firsthand experience of blogging and I decided to write about my professional life only. I have avoided meta blogging, i.e. write about the fact I’m blogging. But now I got 1000 visits on my blog and I think that deserves a post of its own. When I started I really didn’t expect anything I just wrote some posts and that were more or less it. But very early on I became obsessed with the statistics Google served me. Who reads what posts, when and from where. To me one thousand visits  from all over the globe is big. I’m not writing about popular topics and I have not done much to make my blog stand out. And I also realized how hard it is to write good coherent posts, especially in an language which I do not fully master. It is two very different things read and write. I read English more or less fluently, but I do not write nearly as good. My vocabulary is IT and a bit academic and I miss the nuances of words. But I do think my posts are written well enough to be understood. And I find it fun to write these posts. Blogging is a very good experience. I also got one comment for which  I’m very happy, proud and thankful. I also got some comments from people who want to promote commercial software. I have decided not to publish such comments, since I cannot take any responsibility for those products. Free software would be something else though.

I also realized you can use a blog as a documentation system for your software, overviews of software makes good posts. I have referred to some of my posts in my daily work. I can well imagine a good blog is a very effective way for consultants to market themselves. When I hire a consultant first thing I do is to search the internet. What do my own blog tell about me? I have not given that any thoughts, my goal was not to market myself, if that had been the case I would have structured the blog differently and be much more careful with what and how I write. This is also a learning experience, you need to practice blogging to be good at it. The topic I ‘ve chosen for my blog ‘software development’ is not the simplest thing to write about. You need to publish good examples, correct measurements etc. and great attention to details. If I wrote post to market myself I would have put much more efforts to the examples, readability and layout. And there are some posts that not should have been published.

Will I proceed to post here? I think so, but probably less frequent and I do not intend this blog to stay for eternality. I may start other  blogs writing, on other topics, I have other interests beside IT, science, history are things I can imagine myself to write about. People have told me I’m funny in a positive way, in Swedish I can write things people laugh at (in a positive way). It would be a great challenge to try to write humorous posts in English. I have an eye for petty everyday things that go wrong. And I can write about renovating kitchen when everything goes wrong.

I write this post from a small southern French town Gignac just west of Montpellier. I’m not much for traveling these days, my sons persuaded me to come along and we went by car, a bit too long it’s about 2300 km from Stockholm. It is very nice here, not so much tourists. We swim in the river Hérault where the local youngsters jump from the 18 meters high medieval bridge Pont de Diable (the devil's bridge), I saw some guys jumping off a modern 25 meter bridge.  This is dangerous some die, I been told you can get caught in a powerful  undertow, but I suspect the jump in itself can be mortal it looks scary, I would never do it. But I got a friend who would and he would add one or two somersaults just for fun. Today we will do some sightseeing, there is an authentic crusaders village up in the mountains we all like to see. We are a bit sunburnt and should stay away from the sun, so sightseeing is perfect today.

I have noticed it is popular among blogging IT guys to write about local beers  when they travel. This is something I cannot do. I do not drink beer anymore I suspect I get migraine from it. I do not drink red wine or colored liquor either.  It’s the same thing migraine. I only drink Gin, Vodka, white wine including Champagne. It is a tough life I live.

Blogging, Gartner knowledge and Security

Real knowledge.

By reading about or studying a subject you can learn a lot. To become proficient you also have to practice, in fact you have to practice, practice, practice. This is well-known in Human Language learning. In IT this basic truth is sometimes forgotten. Gartner Group is an  advisory firm specializing in writing subject matter articles and reports targeted on IT decision makers. These reports are often initiated and balanced. Let’s say you like to introduce Business Intelligence (BI) to your company but do not know much about BI. Looking at what Gartner has to say about BI, is a good start and here  a problem starts, many readers stop here and make their decisions only on Gartner reports. You think you know the subject, but you only have a superficial overview of the subject  and the market . I call this Gartner Knowledge .  Above I wrote ‘ often initiated and balanced ’, but you can question how objective such reports are. You do not bite the hand that feed you, do you? Gartner knowledge   is something I many times have thought writing about, someday I maybe will.

Anyway when I started blogging  it was mainly to get practical knowledge about blogging. I studied blogging by reading blog posts, and then I wanted to know more, so I created this  blog and wrote some posts.

The first thing I learned about was Spam Sites.

From Google I got statistics about blog hits, i.e. readers of my blog. My main purpose was to learn about blogging, but of course I was very curious about readers and how many actually read my posts. Soon, very soon I had many readers, but almost all were from odd looking sites. I suspected web scanning programs (bots, crawlers, etc.) were the main readers of my blog. After some googling I found these came from spam   sites . Spam site programs create blog hits to create an interest for the site ‘ who is this reader of mine? ’ and luring you  into go there  and expose you to their malware or whatever evil they try to contaminate your computer with. Even worse many sites show ‘ Followers of my blog: ’ with links to frequent readers of the blog, luring your readers  to go to the spam sites.  You should not go to sites you do not trust, even if they are readers of you and you should not link to such sites. This was the first thing I learned when I started blogging.

When I learned about this I talked with some experienced  PC support guys I know, to get first-hand information about real security issues with PCs today. As I suspected old fashioned virus infections are rare these days. Windows (7) is becoming more secure and the virus protections in becoming better making viruses a less threat that is was. The major problem  (for PC support) these days is more cleansing  PCs after their owners has clicked on ‘ You have won a million $, click here to collect… ’ and then you have annoying spam malware in your computer that make you go bonkers.

The second thing I learned.

It is easy to leak or give away information unintentionally when you demonstrate examples. I blog about IT when I show examples I found it is very easy to expose sensitive info. You should take great care only show information necessary for the example you writing about.  I have probably done some blunders when I started, but I hope those are not sensitive or possible to exploit. This is a good learning experience.

The third thing I learned so far.

It seems that by exposing you to the web you are soaked into social networks of various kinds. I’m now a member of linkedIn , with contacts to God knows who. I have started to look at Twitter and Facebook. This is something I probably write another post about in future.

Update

Another thing I learned

When you publish a Google document as a post here, the images goes anywhere, what you see here is far from what I have composed in my Google document.

Me and LinkedIn

Some days ago I  joined LinkedIn. 
I have had mails in the past asking me to join various people and friends on LinkedIn. I didn't know what LinkedIn was "it's like Facebook but for old farts" a younger friend told me. Thank you very much - but yeah then maybe it's for me, I'm not very much for computer social networking, but I'm undeniable an old fart. I actually was pushed in by a colleague and today I edited my LinkedIn profile with a photo. This is of respect to the LinkedIn and other members, present yourself decently so other know who you are.

Without knowing how I'm now connected to four other LinkedInners. I'm a bit thrilled by this new adventure in social networking. If you reader are LinkedIn please feel free to invite me to your 'circle' or whatever it is called. I doubt this will be read by many, so far I suspect the only ones reading my posts here are Google bots, and bots from strange Russian sites.

P.s. I still do not know very much about Facebook, except that everyone except me are there. My sons are there and if I join I might meeting them there and I'm not sure I want that. I think I prefer physical family meetings. But what do I know, I'm just an old fart just entering LinkedIn, my next step in Social networking.