Andrew Ferrier

I installed the popularity contest plugin some time ago to count the popularity of posts on this blog. Unfortunately, up till now it hadn’t been counting page views, which significantly skewed the statistics. I recently discovered, however, that there was a bug in the WP-ShortStat plugin which caused it not to register hits (due to a regression in WordPress). I applied a similar fix to popularity-contest.php version 1.1 and it now works. It looks like a different fix has already been applied to the version in Trac to fix the problem.

Apologies for the lack of posts recently on WebSphere ESB. I’m currently out of the office and out of ‘work’ mode, so I’m not writing many posts on that topic. I’ll be getting back to it in a week or two, though, so please stay tuned. Incidentally, if you’re not already aware, you can subscribe to RSS feeds for just a specific topic on this blog, such as SOA & ESB (feed here) – in fact, you can do this with any WordPress Blog. Just go to the category archive (select from the list on the right-hand side), then append ‘/feed’ to the URL.

- Your friendly editor

As this is my 100th posting to this blog, I’ve decided to do a run-down of the five most popular postings so far:

1. Tesco Show What Innovation Is
2. Shaving and Carry-on
3. What is an ESB?
4. WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere ESB
5. Blog Commenting is Weak

These rankings are provided by the WordPress Popularity Contest plugin, which calculates them based on a weighted average of views, comments, etc. It’s almost endlessly tweakable – I’m trying to resist the temptation to fiddle. I don’t think the above numbers are particularly accurate right now, so they’re just a bit of fun, but hopefully the statistics will settle as the new plugin starts to record information.

Am I missing something, or is blog commenting still immature? I read about 80 blogs currently, and do it mostly through an RSS reader (Thunderbird), as it’s the only way to keep up with that volume. It’s straightforward to keep up with the posts themselves – they appear in a separate list for each blog, typically sorted by time posted (at least that’s the way Thunderbird presents them).

Commenting, on the other hand, is a different matter. On my own blog it’s not too bad: if someone posts a comment about one of my posts, or in reply to comments I’ve made, I get notified by email, because I’m the owner of the blog, and WordPress (which seems pretty close to the state-of-the-art in blogging software) sends an email to tell me that’s happened. Even on my own blog, though, there is no notion of hierarchy to comments: they just appear in a stream (in other words, there is no notion of ‘replying’ stored with a comment). This can make pulling out longer threads of conversation tricky.

If I make a comment on someone else’s blog, though, I get no notification at all. Many blogs provide no way of keeping up with the comments: I have to go and check all the posts I’ve been interested in, on the web, to check whether anyone has added anything to them. Even when the blogging software provides an RSS feed for comments, like WordPress does, the comments for all the posts are lumped together – there is no separation by the post they apply to – primarily, I think, because neither RSS nor Atom provide the notion of hierarchies in the entries syndicated. This also means I have to subscribe to two RSS feeds for blogs where I’m interested in both the posts and the comments.

Currently, these things aren’t a major issue for me, more an annoyance, as I tend to only comment on (and be interested in the comments on) a few blogs, but if I spent more of my time reading blogs, this would really begin to get on my nerves. I also avoid commenting sometimes because I think I’ll forget to check the reply. This is what makes me wonder whether I’ve missed something: how do other people cope with this? Maybe I’m expecting too much: I have an mental model whereby I want the RSS reader to act in a similar manner as a newsgroup reader by notifying me of the new comments, attached to the post or comment that they apply to. Maybe that’s more than the designers of RSS had in mind.

In an attempt to lighten my mood from writing grumbles about big government and security, I notice that Darren Rowse at ProBlogger mentions that his local cafe has recently reinvigorated their menu, and seems to be finding more success as a result (he then creates a rather tenuous link to re-invigorating a blog by a similar method). Another vague data point for my menu study? Sadly, he doesn’t say exactly what they did to the menu to achieve this. Incidentally, ProBlogger is a meta-blog: blogging about blogging, particularly how to make money out of it professionally.

Hannah Parker has posted a picture of us (the IBM Hursley bloggers) down the pub. That’s yours truly looking stupid in the huge Aussie hat.

(note: Hannah’s blog is accessible only from inside the IBM network, but the picture is on Flickr)

These are the principles I’m currently trying to follow:

• Treat writing a blog like any other peice of published writing: spend some time on it, re-read it, correct it, don’t publish it till you think you’re done. Use the draft feature of your blog software if you need to.
• If you spot a spelling error or any other minor non-semantic blemish in a posting, it’s OK to correct that at any time.
• Substantially altering a posting is like trying to alter history: it’s bad. At a minimum it might be confusing to your readers. At worst, you are deliberately altering what you’ve said. Making the alteration clear (the previous version in brackets, say) is probably OK, but it might be better to add your correction as a comment. I sometimes make an exception to this rule for the most recently posted entry, but only for minor semantic improvements.

Of course, ultimately, my blog is my own, and I do have the right to do whatever I like with it. And if I decide I want to alter an entry (I’ve libelled someone, or I’ve misunderstood something which has substantial repercussions on my reputation), I probably will. But by and large, I will try to abide by the principles above – just because it seems like the honest thing to do.

I managed to partly integrate my new blog with new-destiny, by following this guide here. The themes aren’t quite right yet, and I haven’t got the footer working, but it’s a start.

So this is my first blog post. I’ve been meaning to set up a blog for some weeks now, but I’ve only just got round to it. It was far easier than I thought it would be; installing WordPress was a doddle. It seems to have all the functionality I wanted, and I’ve even got backups working already.

I was inspired to set up the blog partly as a self-development tool, and partly for self-promotion. Steve Pavlina also has some words to say on this; I think his notion of ‘journaling’ is slightly more private, but it sounded similar to what I’m going to attempt to achieve here.