Blogging

You are currently browsing articles tagged Blogging.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Friday, January 7, 2011 in General by slowe | 16 comments

Everyone else is doing it, so I figured I might as well also: publish something about how the site fared during 2010. I’m going to do that, yes, but I’m also going to talk a little bit about my commitments to the site (and to the readers) for 2011.

Looking Back: 2010

The site ended the year with just shy of 1.2 million views during 2010. That’s a pretty impressive number (at least to me), but it’s barely unchanged since last year. I guess I’m going to have to find new ways of driving visitors to my site!

Here are the top 10 articles on the site (these articles could have been published anytime, not just in 2010):

The top 10 articles published in 2010 is interesting as well; I found that all of the most popular articles on the site were published in previous years. I don’t know if this means my content is getting worse (so older content is better than newer content) or if it just means the older content shows up better in search results. Anyway, here are the top 10 articles published in 2010:

The thing I found interesting about this list is that some of the posts I expected to be on there—like some of the FCoE-related posts—are nowhere to be found. Interesting…

Looking Forward: 2011

For 2011, I have a few commitments to the site and to the readers:

One thing that I haven’t done a good job with over the last year or so is responding to readers’ comments. So, this year, I’m committing to do a better job of responding to readers’ comments here on the site. If you post a comment, I’m going to do my absolute best to respond to your comment, even if that means simply saying “Thank you”.
I am committing to continue to provide full RSS feeds and not just summaries. I’m also committing to not include advertisements of any sort within the RSS feeds. That being said, I might end up switching to excerpts or summaries on the home page in order to draw more readers deeper into the site.
A lot of readers have asked for the return of search functionality. So, this year, I’m committing to bring back search functionality to the site.

I do appreciate every single person who visits the site, subscribes to the feeds, or posts a comment. To each and every reader: thank you! I will strive to provide solid, useful, pertinent technical information that will make it worthwhile to continue to be a reader!

Tags: Blogging

Hiatus

Saturday, June 19, 2010 in General, Personal by slowe

I just wanted to let everyone know I’m taking a blogging hiatus for a while. I don’t know yet how long. I do know that things are busy at work, I have a VMworld session to prepare, there are books to work on, and I have a family to enjoy while there is still time.

After five years of creating content for the site, it has become part of me. As such, I’m sure that I will pick up writing here again soon. For now, though, I’m going to take a break.

I do appreciate everyone who has read and responded to my work anytime over the last five years. I’m glad that I was able to help in some small way.

God bless!

Tags: Blogging, Personal

Blogging for the Right Reasons

Wednesday, June 9, 2010 in Collaboration, General, Personal by slowe | 39 comments

This will be a very quick blog post just to address a growing trend I’ve noticed. It started with the wave of prominent bloggers getting hired by EMC for the vSpecialist team. With the recent VMware vExpert 2010 awards, this trend has gotten even bigger. What is the trend? The trend I’m seeing is people starting blogs just to get attention in the industry.

Of course everyone wants to be noticed in their industry. I understand that. I respect that. I want to be noticed in my industry, too—there’s nothing wrong with that. But I cannot stress strongly enough that if you are starting a blog simply to make some noise in the industry, maybe win an award, or get hired by <Insert Company Name Here>, you are blogging for all the wrong reasons.

If you’re going to blog (or tweet), do it for the right reasons. I mentioned this in my recent chinwag with Mike Laverick. The successful bloggers are the bloggers who blog because of their passion for the topic(s) about which they are blogging. Consider some of the well-known and well-respected bloggers out there:

Why do these guys blog and/or tweet? Well, I’m not privy to their thoughts, but what I get out of their writing is that they are passionate about their topics. That passion comes through in their writing, it infects the readers, and their popularity grows. But I don’t think they started out with the intent of becoming popular or well-known. They started out because there was a topic that they were interested in or knowledgeable about and for which they had a passion.

So if you’re going to start a blog, fine. Do it. It’s fun (hard work, but fun). But be sure to do it for the right reasons.

UPDATE: If, for whatever reason, I didn’t list your name above, it doesn’t mean anything! Those names just jumped out of my head as some of the many virtualization-focused blogs that I follow. In addition, I know the writers of these sites on a more personal basis than the writers of most other sites. There are so many other excellent virtualization sites that I would be remiss to try to list them all. I’ll leave that to Eric Siebert!

Tags: Blogging, Personal

A Comment Policy Reminder

Thursday, July 2, 2009 in General by slowe | 3 comments

I encourage open discussion and conversation here on my site, and I’m thrilled that readers feel welcome to share their viewpoints (even when those viewpoints differ from my own). To help foster this sense of free discourse, there are two rules upon which I insist for all comments:

First, all comments should be courteous. There’s no reason to personally attack another reader or author—simply state your position, why that is your position, the facts you feel support your position, etc. Leave the personal attacks somewhere else.
Second, all commenters should provide full disclosure. This helps avoid even the appearance of wrongdoing. Where a vendor’s products helps to address readers’ needs, I don’t mind a vendor mentioning their products. That vendor just needs to be sure to provide full disclosure. If you have a business relationship with an organization, disclose that. Be transparent and provide full disclosure.

Recently, I’ve had one commenter leave a series of comments on the site that blatantly and bluntly promote his employer’s products. Unfortunately, this commenter has failed to provide full disclosure. For that reason, I’ve been simply deleting this commenter’s comments. And I’m going to continue to delete this commenter’s blatant, outright comment spam as long as he/she refuses to provide full disclosure. Other readers deserve the right to know why a commenter is pushing a particular product or feature!

Tags: Blogging, General

I Love Having My Content Stolen

Friday, June 26, 2009 in General, Virtualization by slowe | 21 comments

You know, it’s really irritating when you pour your heart and soul into something, only to find someone else riding your coattails and leeching off your efforts. It would appear that NetworkVirtualization.com is one such leech.

I have no problem with other sites syndicating my content as long as proper attribution of the original author and original site is provided. Do me a favor: visit some of the URLs below (I’m not going to hyperlink them and give the site a traffic boost) and tell me how any of the examples I’ve listed below provide proper attribution of the original author and the original site:

http://networkvirtualization.com/content/unified-fabric-inevitability
http://networkvirtualization.com/content/vmware-io-queues-micro-bursting-and-multipathing

http://networkvirtualization.com/content/tap-vsphere-pvscsi-performance-separate-vm-boot-and-data-drives

Let’s see…content from my site, Chad Sakac’s site, and Rich Brambley’s site, all syndicated on their site without any clear attribution back to the original post—except for a very small link near the bottom of the article. If you hadn’t been looking for that link, or if I hadn’t told you that the articles above were written by me, Chad, and Rich, respectively, would you have known? And those are just the authors I recognized! How many more are there that I don’t recognize?

To whomever is running NetworkVirtualization.com: if you are going to syndicate content, you need to provide proper attribution. Otherwise, taking someone else’s content and allowing people to believe that it’s yours is called plagiarism, and it’s wrong.

Tags: Blogging, Writing

Vote for My Site!

Monday, June 22, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | No comments

Last week, Eric Siebert issued a call for the community to vote on the top 5 VMware blogs. If you haven’t already voted in Eric’s survey, please go over now and be sure to cast a vote to keep me in the top 5 of Eric’s list.

Of course, I’d love to have you vote me into the #1 position, but if you’d prefer to put Duncan (Yellow Bricks) or Chad (Virtual Geek) there I completely understand. (It’s hard to compete with solid technical content like theirs!) Either way, be sure to vote and I’d appreciate your support!

Tags: Blogging, Virtualization

Train Signal, Welcome!

Monday, June 1, 2009 in General by slowe | No comments

I’m very excited to welcome Train Signal to the list of site sponsors! I’m sure that many of you are probably already familiar with Train Signal and their extensive list of training products, and I’ve been told by Train Signal that they’ll have some VMware vSphere training products available soon. I’m looking forward to seeing those!

If you are in the market for technology training products, I encourage you to visit Train Signal—feel free to use the ad in the sidebar, which is linked to their site—and see if they have something that fits your needs.

Tags: Blogging, General, VMware, vSphere

Question to my Readers

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 in General by slowe | 15 comments

One of the things that I thought might be interesting, perhaps even useful, to the readers would be to present various views on virtualization, cloud computing, etc., from industry executives. My first foray into this sort of thing was the recent e-mail interview with Surgient CTO, Dave Malcolm.

While I might think it is interesting or cool or useful, there are about 5,000 of you out there that may have a very different view. So, in the interest of trying to make this site as useful and informative as it can be, I’d like to know what you think. Is this idea a good idea? Do you find it interesting, informative? Or was it too “salesy”? I don’t want my site being turned into a platform for executives to just stand up and plug their products. Is there a better way I could do this, perhaps a different format? Should we require that people not plug their own products at all?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Tags: Blogging, General

Attending the Next-Generation VMware Launch Event

Tuesday, April 7, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 5 comments

UPDATE: Due to circumstances outside my control, I will not be attending the launch event. I’m very disappointed, but there was no other alternative. Hopefully Rick’s coverage will be sufficient.

Thanks to a good friend, I am happy to report that I will be attending the next-generation VMware launch event at VMware Headquarters in Palo Alto, CA on April 21. Look for full coverage here on my site. I’ll also try to provide real-time status updates on Twitter, where possible. I’m open to suggestions as to what medium would best suit everyone—more updates on Twitter with a full blog post afterward, or a constantly updated blog post? Let me know what you think.

Rick Scherer of VMwareTips.com will also be on-hand, and he’s hoping to be able to provide video coverage of the event as well.

This should be an exciting product launch, and I’m really looking forward to being present and providing up-to-date coverage. Don’t miss out!

Tags: Blogging, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere

My Current Mac Applications

Friday, March 27, 2009 in Macintosh by slowe | 8 comments

A colleague recently bought a MacBook Pro. As a switcher, I figured he would need some recommendations on applications to use on his new Mac, and I know it had been quite some time (3 years!) since I’d discussed what Mac applications I use on a day-to-day basis. To kill two birds with one stone, I figured I would post a quick list about some of my recommended Macintosh applications.

Free or Open Source Applications

We’ll start with free and/or open source applications. (I break out “free” and “open source” because there are applications that may be available at no charge, but whose source is not available.)

Adium: This multi-service IM client is, in my opinion, the best Mac OS X IM client available, hands down. Aside from not supporting video chat—the only reason I can come up with to use iChat instead of Adium—this client does pretty much everything you need. Adium supports AppleScript and Growl notifications. Support for OTR (Off The Record) chat encryption is built in. Adium is available for download from the Adium web site.

Camino: Camino is a Mac OS X-native web browser from Mozilla. Unlike Firefox, Camino was built from the ground up to be a Mac application. It uses the same rendering engine as Firefox, but doesn’t support Firefox extensions. If you’re big on Firefox extensions, stick with the Mac build of Firefox. Visit the Camino web site for more information. If I had one complaint about Camino, it would be the fairly limited AppleScript support in the current release.

Colloquy: Into IRC? This is an excellent IRC application for Mac OS X. It supports AppleScript, Growl notifications, and can connect to multiple servers. I especially like Colloquy’s Smart Transcripts feature, which let me filter out conversations in busy chat rooms so that I can see the ones I’m most interested in joining. That’s pretty handy at times. Colloquy’s web site has more information.

Cyberduck: Cyberduck is an FTP/SFTP application. It supports AppleScript and Spotlight, Growl notifications, and Bonjour. It’s not the fastest FTP/SFTP application out there (last time I checked, that honor went to Interarchy), but it’s pretty slick. Visit the Cyberduck web site for downloads.

Growl: Growl isn’t an application per se; it’s a way for applications to supply notifications to the user in a consistent yet highly customizable fashion. Growl support is quickly becoming a “must have” for Mac applications, and you’ll see that almost all the applications I use support Growl. Surf on over to the Growl web site to download the latest version.

NetNewsWire: I’m into RSS feeds, and my RSS reader of choice is NetNewsWire. NetNewsWire offers integration with various del.icio.us clients (like Pukka) , weblog editors (like ecto), and supports AppleScript and Growl notifications. You can get NetNewsWire from the Newsgator web site. NetNewsWire is free, but not open source (at least, not to my knowledge).

Quicksilver: How does one describe Quicksilver? To call it an application launcher doesn’t really do it justice. Yes, you can use it to quickly launch applications, but you can also use it to build ad-hoc workflows like finding a contact in Address Book and creating a new e-mail message to that contact. Or finding a document and attaching it to a new e-mail message. Or quickly opening a URL in your default web browser. Or initiating a Google search. Or…well, you get the idea. I believe you can still get Quicksilver from the Blacktree web site, as well as from a Google Code site. (Some people have reported problems getting Quicksilver to run, but it’s been rock solid for me.)

Paid Applications

There are a number of paid applications that I use on a daily basis as well.

ecto: This weblog editor allows me to compose all my blog entries offline and then post them later. It works with a number of different weblog systems. I’ve been using ecto since the very first days of this site and I can’t imagine doing it any other way. More information on ecto is available from their web site.

Microsoft Office 2008: Like it or not, compatibility with the rest of the professional world still remains a critical issue, so I use Microsoft Office 2008. Yes, I know that OpenOffice exists (and has a native Aqua port), and I know that iWork supports Office formats, but it’s easier for me to just use Office and not have to worry about it. At least in this version Microsoft has added Automator support for building workflows using Office applications.

OmniFocus: If you are a GTD fan, you’ll like OmniFocus. (You may also like OmniFocus for iPhone as well, which has the ability to synchronize with the Mac version.) Projects, contexts, next actions—it’s all there. And it supports AppleScript, comes with a plug-in of sorts for Apple Mail, and leverages Growl notifications. See the OmniGroup web site for information.

OmniGraffle Professional: Also by the same folks that make OmniFocus (as if you couldn’t tell by the name of the application) comes OmniGraffle. It’s the closest you’ll come to Visio on the Mac, and in fact has the ability to read Visio binary (.VSD) files. It can also export Visio XML (.VDX) files. The OmniGroup web site has more details.

TextMate: There are numerous free text editors out there, but something about TextMate makes me like it. UNIX die-hards like it, Mac fans like it, and it offers great integration with other applications (like your FTP/SFTP client, so that you can edit files directly on remote servers). Visit the Macromates web site for information on TextMate.

Well, that’s not all the applications I use, but these are the ones that I find myself using on a daily basis. I can’t think of a day that goes by that I’m not running Adium, Camino, NetNewsWire, OmniFocus, TextMate, and Office—typically all at the same time.

Some other applications that I also use include: