Blog Day Time

So it's time for another Blog Day, and with it the dilema - which blogs should I recommend?
Last year I tried focusing on new or unknown blogs (unknown to me, that is) - I'm not sure I'll use the same criteria this time.

1. Ken Egozi's Blog - C# development blog (over 300 posts as of yesterday)
2. My 25% - A comic strip about working in the Israeli HiTech industry.
3. 10x Software Development - Did you liked the book "Code Complete"? Think of this site as a more up-to-date summary of the book.
4. Maor David - A recommended blog dealing (mostly) with Visual Studio Team System.
5. Nicholas Allen's Indigo Blog - Probably the #1 source of information regarding WCF.
   

Happy birthday to this blog

Although I actually started this blog on 02/2007 (covering the first Microsoft developer academy event), I began using Google analytics one year ago.

Let's start with the top 10 most popular posts:

1. WebBrowser.DocumentCompleted is raised more than once
2. Help file generation for framework 2.0
3. Five steps for creating a transparent user control
4. How to be a better team leader
5. The high cost of Visual Studio Express edition
6. Reinventing the wheel
7. List of TFS tools on CodePlex
8. "Cannot call methods on bigint" error
9. Validation of a NumericUpDown control
10. Generic Singleton Factory

My readers mostly use Windows (over 90%) and IE (60%) and are from all over the world:

1. United States (33%, with the largest % from California and also many visitors from Texas, Washington, New York, Florida)
2. Israel (15%)
3. United Kingdom
4. India
5. Canada
6. Germany
7. Australia
8. Netherlands
9. France
10. Russia

After writing in this blog for a while I decided to start another blog, which is a combination of Hebrew and English posts, so here are some popular posts from there:

• How to Get a Job at Google
• David Platt on Why Software Sucks
• Tech Ed Israel 2008 lectures for English speakers

Consider your target audience

Jeff Atwood (CodingHorror) complained about the fact a caching addon for Wordpress is optional, and is not included in the basic software:

Personally, I think it's absolutely irresponsible that WP-Cache like functionality isn't already built into WordPress. I would not even consider deploying WordPress anywhere without it.

And why is that?

This is an incredibly scary result; blog.stackoverflow.com is getting, at best, a moderate trickle of incoming traffic. It's barely linked anywhere! With that kind of CPU load level, this site would fall over instantaneously if it got remotely popular, or God forbid, anywhere near the front page of a social bookmarking website.

I don't have a traffic report for stackoverflow.com, but since both Jeff's and Joel's blogs (both being among the most popular technical blogs in the world) point there, I suspect my definition of "moderate trickle" may differ from Jeff's.

And as Arik pointed out, Wordpress may target smaller users, for which this is not an issue (someone wrote the problem occurred with more than 20000 users per day) while power-users can install optional components to deal with the traffic issues.

Short connectivity report

• Still learning how to properly use Twitter (any tools recommendations?)
• Facebook seems to be using 100% CPU on my home computer for each page load
• Removed the "Blog RSS feed reader" Facebook application - it stopped updating the feed some time during TechEd and never recovered (even removing the feed and adding it again didn't help) - now I'm trying the "Simply RSS" application instead

Is Hebrew blogging the new Zionism?

Guy started the debate by calling Israely bloggers (and the blogs.microsoft.co.il platform) to write in Hebrew to encourage the creation of professional resources addressing the Hebrew reading crowd.

I disagreed by stating the fact I like to share my knowledge with the entire world rather than just sharing it with Hebrew readers and Omer agrees with me.

Tamir contributed to the discussion in his own unique way, demonstrating the frustration a non-English post can cause to English readers (and assuming I understood the translation he is basically saying "write in whatever language you feel comfortable with")

I would like to address Guy's second claim, saying the blogs.microsoft.co.il site should be used to encourage Hebrew blogging (and that English bloggers have alternatives such as Blogger and Wordpress).
Blogger and Wordpress are excellent platforms, but if I want a blogging site focused on IT blogs, they are wrong for me.
The unique thing about the blogs.microsoft.co.il site is that it's an aggregator for IT professionals, and unlike the MSDN blogs site - most of them are not Microsoft employees.
I think this is unique and would not like to close this special community to the rest of the world.

Dotmad's BlogDay recommendations

As 31/8 is BlogDay, I decided to find some blogs to recommend.
I have tried recommending relatively new/unknown blogs (at least as far as I can tell), and also focus on people publishing new posts at least once a week.

1. Blonde 2.0 - Recently opened, and already quite a success, focuses mainly on web 2.0 items.
2. Latest gadgets and the technology used - As the name says, the focus here is on electronics and gadgets.
3. Israely VCs blogs - An aggregation of the blogs behind the major VCs in Israel.
4. Gray's Matter - I started reading this blog after Justice posted his plan to take over the world (and becoming a better developer) by reading a new professional book each week.
5. Information Technology Dark Side - David Christiansen's blog about the IT profession.

Technorati tag: http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2007

Writing source code in your blog

Trying to simply copy/paste code to a blog (especially one you manage online) can create a very ugly block of text.
There are two ways to solve this problem:

1. Visual studio addins - CopySourceAsHtml creates HTML formatted code to paste into the blog.
2. Online tools - This tool from Manoli.net creates HTML formatted code online.

Joel Spolsky thinks blog comments are evil

In a recent post Joel Spolsky agrees with Dave Winer regarding the misuse of blog comments:
"to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog"

Joel furthers the idea with his thoughts:
"You don't have a right to post your thoughts at the bottom of someone else's thoughts. That's not freedom of expression, that's an infringement on their freedom of expression."

He goes even further in regards to anonymous comments:
"Thoughtless drivel written by some anonymous non-entity who really didn't read the article very carefully and didn't come close to understanding it and who has no ability whatsoever to control his typing diarrhea if the site's software doesn't physically prevent him from posting."

I may agree with Dave's original idea (as I understand it) that both commenters and bloggers would be better off writing in their own blogs. I have been trying to convince a friend slightly addicted to writing comments to news articles to start blogging instead.
But what both writers seem to forget is that comments are also used for trackbacks, and in this sense they "throwing out the baby with the water", since no one will ever read those comments-inside-blogposts, unless google ranks the commenter's blog fairly high.

It may also be related to the popularity and/or subject of the blog, but I don't see anonymous comments as the evil Joel compares them to. I have read many blogs from Jeff Atwood, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack containing meaningful and entertaining comments, some of them anonymous. Someone may have great ideas and the desire to express them, but no desire to open a blog, and you can force that person to start blogging.

New domain for the blog

http://www.dotmad.net/
I have also opened a hebrew blog, to write about subjects related only to Israely croud.

Blogs VS Social Networks

Kent Newsome wrote a post detailing his disgust from MySpace. Ayelet wrote a reply in which she claimed MySpace has it's uses.
I tend to agree with Kent.

Blogging takes effort, time and at least a little talent.
MySpace requires choosing a template.
Blogging is about sharing your view, opinions and (some times) personal life with your readers.
MySpace is about sharing links to your "friends", meaning other pages in which the only meaningful data is links to more "friends" and so on.
(Why do I use quotes? ask Samy)

If a blog is the equivalent of an autobiography, MySpace page is the equivalent of a phone book.

This is post #100

Looking back on all those years of blogging, and looking forward to many more :)

Caution: This blog contains personal opinions

It seems Oren's jab at the P&P team (see previous posts here and here), especially their CAB framework, is becoming quite an issue in the blogging community.

It led Sam Gentile to write an angry post and Oren to reply twice.

Sam repeats my question to Oren: why rewrite CAB and not NHibernate?

Oren's response to that question was simple: he would rewrite CAB because to him it's painful to use, while NHibernate is not.

I like the fact he doesn't even give pretence of being objective - he doesn't like CAB.

Some developers may find NHibernate painful and rewrite their own custom and lean ORM solution, some may do the same for IoC framework like Castle, and some will rewrite CAB.

Sam may agree or disagree with Oren, but I do think he takes the argument too seriously.

Oren is a very opinionated guy. He either likes something or hate it. This approach tends to draw fire (metaphoric) from other bloggers, but it's still his personal view and his personal blog.