13 January 2006 in Blogging & Search Technology | Comments (0)

I’ve been meaning to post some more entries now I’m back from Holiday however I was promptly shipped off to Christchurch for several weeks and don’t have the normal tools I use to post (I’m not a fan of web editing). Any .Net folks in Christchurch who subscribe to my blog want to catch up for a drink?

Anyway, small update:

There is a new build of MSN Enterprise Search out that resolves issues relating to email not being completely indexed properly.

I only post this as some people reading my blog may have installed MSN Enterprise search.

Get the update here: MSN Enterprise Search Update

- JD

8 December 2005 in Blogging | Comments (4)

Lately I’ve been trying to blog a bit more – I want to see if I can actually create any value for people who do take the time to read my blog.

So I thought I’d share some stats so far about how my blog performs.

Generally my traffic is broken up as:

33% are hits to my RSS feed
33% are hits from people actually coming and reading the site
33% are hits from search engine spiders (GoogleBot etc)

Interestingly the main feature attraction of my site so far seems to be my entry about the Consolas font. That’s not such a great thing as it’s not something I can expand much more on really.

Making things better

In order to try and attract people more often I’ve tried to focus on more specific topics. By my very nature I tend to jump from one technology to another all the time, I rarely will post on a single technology more than once or twice. However lately I’ve been posting more entries relating to search technology – so far this hasn’t made too much of an impact in improving readership but that could be because there are so many blogs out there on the subject (by people who work for Google and the likes – people with more inside information).

I’ve also looked at becoming a little more social amongst others in the local blogging community. Generally if somebody takes the time to comment and I like their blog I’ll add a link to their site (as well as blogs that I just like of course ). Following on from this I’m trying to break out of just being a reader of the blogs I keep an eye on – these days I’ll try and actually post comments. RSS a great way of managing the massive amount of information that is produced on sites I like but it’s too easy to forget that going and seeing the site, making a comment etc creates a more positive response to the content creator than just incrementing the hits to their feed by one.

I’ve added a slightly more granular category category system (which I’ll probably overhaul in the coming weeks) so that people can focus on a single area if they want to, or ignore one. I’m posting less personal entries as often the bigger audience really doesn’t want to know about that type of content.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be looking to make some more changes to my blog and I’d love to hear feedback on those changes.

Interact

So – if you do read my blog, how have you found it? What could I do to make it better? What do I do well already? If you have a blog I’d love to see some posts about what people have done to improve their sites

– JD

31 July 2005 in Blogging | Comments (0)

I’ve updated the links for my blog by adding a couple of my good friends.

Bonita’s Blog,
Kylie Legg’s Blog

These aren’t technical blogs but hopefully those of you that know Bonita and Kylie and didn’t know they had blogs can catch up with them Also Bonita’s blog is mostly in Chinese so good luck understanding that one

– JD

11 March 2005 in Blogging | Comments (0)

I’m posting this via the blogging tool w.blogger. I looked at a year or so back and thought it was quite cool but didn’t really see much of a point over just blogging via the web. Now that I want to start doing some smarter things with how I lay out some postings it’s nice to have the enhanced control.

It has great integration with a whole pile of blog APIs (mine being wordpress) and has automatically downloaded my categories etc. Very nice.

Check it out: http://www.wblogger.com

5 March 2005 in Blogging | Comments (0)

I’ve finally taken a bit of time to upgrade to WordPress 1.5

It will look like the standard install for a while until I get the time to actually modify the look somewhat.

- JD

18 February 2005 in Blogging | Comments (0)

WordPress 1.5 (the software that runs my blog) has been released. Apparently it’s quite a jump so I’ll be upgrading sometime this weekend. This will probably mean the themes get broken as there is a completely new theme system in 1.5.

- JD

24 January 2005 in Blogging & Intergen | Comments (0)

I thought it must be about time for a general update. I’ve decided to try and blog more on certain topics than so much about myself. Maybe a 3 “article” style posts to 1 personal post. That should hopefully ensure that my blog is read by those who don’t really know me.

So far I’m enjoying the long weekend – I’ve been fishing twice which was great. Tried some fishing down at the harbour which is pretty easy fishing but what you catch tends to be very small but not very edible (well – I wouldn’t eat something out of there since it seems a bit polluted). I also cycled around to Evans Bay with my flatmate and we tried fishing around there. Unfortunately it was way too windy so we didn’t stay too long. The area looks promising however – water seems cleaner and deeper. I’ll certainly try out there again soon. I’ve always enjoyed fishing – used to fish a lot with my brother and Dad so it’s somewhat in my blood to do it. I’m yet to find a pastime that is so relaxing, gets you outside and into nature and also provides the occasional high of catching something. Great thinking time.

My weight loss is still going to plan. My rate of weight loss has slowed a little (only around 200grams for the last week). However that’s because I’ve been very busy with work at the moment. I’m supposedly doing two projects, one takes about 80% of my time, the other about 20%. However I have two other projects to contend with which aren’t huge but do take up precious time. This has left very little time to actually get out and go running or cycling etc. I did manage to fit in about 20km of cycling over the weekend but I feel I should be doing more.

The great thing is that I’m getting to the point where you feel you have considerably more energy. I can motivate myself considerably easier than I used to be able to and with minimal effort. I also just feel like doing more. Anyone who is feeling lethargic really does just need to exercise more. It seems strange to say it – if you don’t have any energy you should do more. It seems to release a lot more energy than you need. Something I’ve started doing, especially when coding at home (It’s a tad embarrassing if I was to do this at work!) is when I start to feel tired I get out of my chair and do a short sharp workout. It doesn’t take long – maybe 50 press ups, 20 sit-ups and 20 bicep curls. Takes a grand total of about five minutes but it wakes you up and gets you cranking! I suggest you try it next time you’re feeling a bit low and think a chocolate bar would help you out.

Anyway, hopefully this week I can get in some more exercise and keep the weight loss train moving along. I’ll keep posting updates of where I’m at and what I’m doing.

- JD

30 September 2004 in Blogging | Comments (1)

I’ve done some hunting and found how to fix the rss feed for wordpress based weblogs.

Open wp-blog-header.php

Change:
@header('Last Modified: '.$wp_last_modified);

To:
@header('Last-Modified: '.$wp_last_modified);

That solves the problem

Update: It appears using the ATOM feed is better for SauceReader as with RSS2 it seems to link it all under “today” while the ATOM feed uses the actual date set on your entry.

My ATOM feed: http://blog.bluecog.co.nz/wp-atom.php

– JD