yowkee essential

Trackforward: Information Survey on Salon/Radio Blogger

via Dave Johnson -> Scott Rosenberg -> Dave Pollard's 6 questions survey for Salon/Radio Blogger. Here's the 6 questions he asked if you don't bother to browse over:

1. How do you publicize your blog?
2. What do you like/dislike about the existing Salon/Radio features?
3. What additional functionality is needed in Salon/Radio?
4. How do you decide what to read and what to blogroll?
5. What's your advice to newbie bloggers?
6. How do you gauge the success of your blog?

What's your answer? Just applied the questions to your favor weblog system. Here's mine:

Q1. How do you publicize your blog?
To be accessible to public, Google always come to be first choice. So I go to add an entry to Open Directory Project (dmoz.org). There are quite a few search engines using ODP's directory. All I have to do is just add my blog to it and wait. The next step would be adding blog url to blog monitoring service, e.g. Daypop, Blogdex. MT has the feature to ping weblogs.com for the blog updating. Just have to enable it.

Q2. What do you like/dislike about the existing MT features?
I like the customizable, hackable of MT though I don't know about Perl. There are lots of resources regarding how to hack around MT on net, and growing MT-plugins ready to use. However, MT isn't quite friendly to non-geek users. I hope there would have more themes design of MT availble on net, then you could just copy-n-paste on your index/stylesheet template to change the looks of your blog.

Q3. What additional functionality is needed in MT?
Hmm...So far I am happy with it in these 3 weeks usage. Can't think of any enhancement yet. Could it be that perfect?

Q4. How do you decide what to read and what to blogroll?
This is an easy one. My preference go to technical blog. Any blog talks about good technical stuff would be blogrolled by me. And blog-to-blog recommendation also play key part to blogrolling.

Q5. What's your advice to newbie bloggers?
What's my advice? I am the newbie blogger who need the advice. Generally I'd noticed there are good articles blog about blogging, e.g. living web, write better blog. Go read them. Familiar with your blog tool would help a lot. So be use a good tool with great support and community, like MT.

Q6. How do you gauge the success of your blog?
I just started it. And as most others, it's justified by personal satisfication and having fun :-).

Off-topic 1: Why do Radio has to use numbering in blog url? Isn't that ugly and against usability?

Off-topic 2: Good to find good reading through blog-to-blog, it's trackforward, not trackback.

SQSH

I forgot to mention sqsh. It's a tool designed with intention to replace isql for Sybase. There are a few key applications in our company use Sybase. So it's my everyday tool. Sqsh could be built in most of the Unix system. And it could be executed under Windows with Cygwin library. Why is it my favourite tool? It provide a shining feature where isql can't compete with (if you have to work in command line env): sqsh could pipeline your SQL query with your shell. It's common to use the following usage:

sqsh> select * from tableName

sqsh> go > tablename.txt


sqsh> sp_help

sqsh> go | grep favortable

sqsh> select name from person

sqsh> go | grep simon | sort | uniq

sqsh> select......

sqsh> go | myfilter.sh | more

You could do the post-processing, filtering of your SQL query result with quick customizable shell script. Or just some quick-n-dirty hack. It's just too much useful compare to the plain old isql. You should try it if you're still frequently query your Sybase database with isql.

Command Line Fun

John Gruber is enjoying the command line fun with running PHP, enhanced "rm", appswitch in his Mac OS X box.

I am an UNIX guy, but most of the times the machine I used at the work installed with Windows. Although I am quite happy with the GUI of Windows, I tends to spend more time to put my hand on keyboard instead of mouse. That's the joy brought from Cygwin to me. What is Cygwin? Cygwin is an UNIX environment for Windows. And it come with lots of powerful tools ported from Unix. Better yet, it has a friendly setup wizard nowadays. The setup allow you to install directly from Internet or local. All you have to do is just select the wanted packages/softwares, it would fix it up for you, no dependency hassle! Back to old days of Cygwin B18, B19 version, there always problems of figuring which version of library to install and what extra libraries needed. Now you don't have to worry, what we need to do is act like an plain normal users. The setup works like a charm!

It's good to have tools like gawk and cURL. I got many simple scripts done in AWK or PHP to process lots of files. What's the choice you have in Windows? The old DOS batch file scripting? VBS/WSH? Thank God I got Cygwin and the tools come with it. Shell scripting is more fun then and tools like grep, awk, cURL, even php/perl/python just simply work! They get the jobs done.

The Blog Stock Exchange

I just got my blog listed. Oops, even though I just started to learn about the BlogShares. It is going to go live in 7 days!! The share would be reset and users' cash would be brought forward. That means you gonna sell as lot as you could to enjoy the beta benefit. :-)

Too bad, don't think I got any chance to sell my shares as the blog started only for 1 to 2 weeks. I am still wondering anybody read the blog or not?