Performance Zen

Category: Blogging

  • The fading of blogging

    Through 2007, the number of posts I made per day/week/month decreased steadily. I know post new items 2-3 items a month, or less. After 2 years of steady entries, I just didn’t have anything to add to the conversation.

    Having been an A-list groupie for this entire period, I lost touch with the self-perpetuating scene. A comment that I saw on Top Gear summed it up: Jeremy Clarkson had another chat show host on, and they both commented on how all British chat show hosts end up appearing on each others shows.

    That’s how blogging began to feel to me. I began to step back.

    I stepped back from true, active day-to-day management of GrabPERF.

    I drifted, intellectually and emotionally.

    I found the sharp edge of my humor, which had wandered off and gone hitchhiking through the British Isles disguised as Roger Daltrey for six months.

    The last few weeks I have been asking myself if I want to go back to blogging, if I want to continue to produce the random ideas for the world to see.

    The death of my grandmother a few weeks ago brought my world back into sharp focus. Who is going to see these stories, these tales? Who will be the keeper of my intellectual flame? What will people know of me when I fade away.

    I will be trying to storm back. My brain is here.

    I AM THOR, GOD OF THUNDER.

    Ok…maybe that was delusional. But hang on for another wild ride.

  • PubSub: Death by Shareholder Stupidity

    The news that Bob Wyman posted today (here) hit me hard. Bob was one of the first folks to see the value in GrabPERF, and to put his own money where his mouth was (as well as helping to host a GrabPERF measurement location).

    I have valued his advice and support over the last year.

    Best of luck, Bob. You and PubSub deserve better.

  • Search Engine Referral Statistics

    Jeremy Zawodny asked the community for stats on where their search engine referrals were coming from.[here]

    Google is crushing all other engines. However, I have noticed that my traffic has dropped substantially since the new Page Rank indexing began this week. Wonder what’s up there…

  • Screw the A-List! Bring on the FemBlogs!

    I am an addict.

    It started simply. A little dooce here and there. Then I had a 3-day dooce-o-rama this weekend.

    Now, after Jeremy’s post this morning, I kicked into high gear.

    These women have voices. These women make me LAUGH OUT FREAKING LOUD. I want to buy them all tequila…ok, maybe my momentum carried me there; they could drink me under the table, and I would wake up hanging nude by my ankles under the Bay Bridge.

    Read them. Enjoy them. Screw the A-List.

  • BlogPulse: Recovery is a relative thing

    BlogPulse has improved, but it is still a very relative improvement.

    Still no word from anyone on the BlogPulse team about the challenges they are facing.

  • More Stupid Trackback and Comment Spammers

    Ok, started to notice a dramtic and sudden increase in traffic to my site yesterday. Turns out that all of these folks were headed to the same place at this host:

    /index.php?disp=stats

    So, when I checked this out, they were all indicating referrals from the usual illicit medication and adult sites.

    <sigh> More trackback and comment spam.

    Now, I know that this page exists in b2evolution, and it is a way for visitors to view my traffic stats. However, a link to this page does not exist in my main display page. The only link to my stats is to my StatCounter stats.

    Enter mod_rewite.

    A simple rule disposes with these morons.

    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} disp=stats
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.pierzchala.com:9080/ [R,L,NS]

    Please do not attempt to load the redirected URL; you will get nothing. NADA! That port is set to be dropped by iptables, effectively hanging the client end as it attempts to make a TCP connection.

    /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -i eth0 -s 0/0 --dport 9080 -j DROP

    I use iptables to handle a lot of these morons. As the only people who view this page are infected with some virus or spyware, then I feel no shame in tying up their systems.

  • Industry Analysts: The Beasts Within The Necessary Evil

    This post has been slanted by an article I read today about Yankee Group 451 Research analyst Laura Didio (hmmm…no bio on the site), and an encounter I had today with a real industry analyst. [James Governor points to this article as well.]

    Ms. Didio has been accused of placing a very hard slant towards Microsoft in most of her Operating System analyses, to the point of being almost completely invalid and useless. If Microsoft pays the bill, I don’t have a problem with her coming out and indicating where Microsoft server OSes are strong compared to Linux. But to take facts which are inconclusive and then skewing them to favour the client…well, please get out of my office.

    Then I was a passive participant in a call with a well-known analyst (no name or firm here). My takeaway from the call was: I want his job. Not because he had brilliant things to say, or incredible insights to offer, but because he was being paid repulsive sums of money to state the obvious.

    I spent most of the meeting shaking my head and wondering how he did it. It was like delivering a monlogue in an echo chamber: he had one thing to say, and anything that our team brought up was routed back to his topic, in a cursory way.
    It was clear he had no idea what our company does, what our positioning and strategy are, and how our services could help our customers.
    And we paid for this.

    The analyst industry is so corrupt and meaningless. I am glad that there are folks like ARmageddon, GartnerWatch, and Analyst Insight out there to expose the industry.

    I hate blogging about blogging, but the whole area of analyst research is being eroded and corroded by blogs. Companies are doing their own research using Technorati and Feedster and making their own judgements.

    The best way to make analysts extinct is for companies to tell their own story, in their own words, within their own context, and give it meaning.

    Analysts have stolen our the ability to find and tell our own stories.

  • Zawodny: WordPress v. MT

    Jeremy Zawodny weighs in with some comments on the growing differences in the WordPress and MT user groups. [here]

    I agree with his comments, as I use b2evolution, which is effectively a branch in the WordPress family. It is all native PHP with a simple MySQL backend that I can run on a relatively underpowered server in my basement, and still look like I know what I am doing.

    Heck, the app even survived a Scobelization last week.

    Why b2evo over MT? I took a look a MT when I was shopping around for blog software to do self-hosting with when I wanted to move off TypePad, and when I read the MT user manual, I walked away. Sure, it may be richly featured and extremely powerful, but this is a hobby, not my life.

    b2evo was so simple I neary cried. I unpacked the tarball, made some minor changes and I was blogging.

    So, I thing that JZ is right on when he differentiates the two user populations. They will both be wildly successful, but WP will be for self-startes and maintainers, while MT will rely on highly-skilled IT teams for implementation and maintenance.

    There is no good or bad; just different.

  • IAC Buys ASK; Owns Bloglines

    John Battelle points to this.

    $2billion. Wow. Sure feels like another bubble.

    Was Ask REALLY worth that much?

    And yes, this means that Barry Diller effectively owns Bloglines.

    More here and here.