Status of my blog after 8 months
I started my blog in October 2006. Life is not easy when you begin. You always start in the 'long tail' of the internet. Very soon, Google picked me up and started to show me in its search results. To my great surprise however, I became almost number one when people looked for things like 'IE7 emulate IE6'. Hey, guys, I was just accidently mentioning this... the real content is about building web applications with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino. However:
About installing multiple Internet Explorers
I don't think I've mentioned it, but there is a fabulous program that installs every single Internet Explorer version on your computer. You can find it on tredosoft.com. Apart from some strange behaviour: menu-items acting weird and getting popups for every Eolas-copyrighted content, all IE versions are perfect to test HTML, CSS and JavaScript on.
Am I a real blogger?
As some might have noticed, I am no regular blogger. Sometimes I get a burst of energy, and if by accident I have time at that moment, a stream of posts emerge. And other times, I am too busy with other things or just too lazy. A blog in its essence is an online diary, so you are supposed to post at least once a day. Because I want to write mostly technical stuff with sample code, it is not possible for me to create one every day. Ten eggs is the most this chicken can lay in a month. But I think for a technical blog, I'm not doing that bad.
Getting noticed
From time to time I get noticed by a blogger I really admire. These are happy moments. Last Saturday, Kevin Pettitt aka Lotus Guru referenced my tool to convert code to HTML in one of his posts. It seems like more and more people are discovering my blog and are keeping an eye on me. I also was very happy to discover that Theo Heselmans, a consultant I know for a very long time, also started blogging. He founded his own company. And he found my blog. Apart from that, he's a wine and fantasy lover like me. I believe he uses the Domino Blog template shipped with the IBM Lotus Notes/Domino 7 server.
In the lift
One remarkable fact: the last days, I notice a spectacular rise in visits. Probably because slowly I'm getting accepted in the Domino blogosphere. Thanks guys!
Comments
29/06/2007 20:00:01, Charles Robinson
I don't remember where I found your blog, but you've been in my Netvibes for a few months. Good content gets noticed. Your posts on creating web-enabled Domino databases have been extremely helpful. :-)
I do suggest you get rid of the authentication requirement for comments. Many people find that extremely off-putting.
29/06/2007 20:34:58, Michel Van der Meiren
My apologies, Charles: I know I am making it rough to comment. I added registration, partly to avoid being spammed, partly also to make the message clear that in order to build communities, you have to overcome your fear of revealing yourself. My Tangosite had an open guest book, and I had to close it down because people were filling it mostly with commercial messages and links to porn and gamble sites. When I find a better method, I'll change it.
30/06/2007 01:25:32, Kevin Pettitt
Hi Michel,
Charles is right, good content gets noticed, and your's has been very interesting to say the least. With all the hype about Web 2.0 it is very timely as well.
Charles is also right about the comment issue. It's much too painful and I know I've tried in the past and gave up when faced with the authentication prompt. Being familiar with Blogsphere, I would recommend you try using that as your blogging platform. I almost never get any comment spam. It would also be great if you could put some of your Domino web expertise into improving Blogsphere, which currently does not have any web interface for posting or administering the blog.
I know its fun to "build your own" sometimes, but I know from experience that it can also be fun to build on top of other's work :-). In this case I think your readers would appreciate a blog interface that "just works" the way they expect, while other parts of your site could serve as demonstrations of your other work. Food for thought anyway.
30/06/2007 18:03:02, Michel Van der Meiren
Hi Kevin. Thanks for the feedback. When I wanted to start blogging, I did look at Blogsphere, but this template does it all with QueryOpen agents, which I would only use when everything else fails. I am also very concerned about the response time of the pages with Blogsphere and also with the IBM Blog template: I have mesured from 3 to up to 10 seconds per page load. I haven't looked into what might cause this. My goal is staying under 0.5 seconds. But you are absolutely right: it is great fun to work together, building on each-others work. And I will change my comment system to make it behave more natural. In fact, it asks for registration first because I was to lazy to build a QuerySave agent on the Comment form to log the user data in a separate document.
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