Tagged: nablopomo

What I've Learned From A Crazy Month of Blogging

Well. That was an intense NaBloPoMo! I published a blog post every day in November - as I have for the last few years - but this was unlike anything that went before. I had over 50,000 viewers in a single day due to one of my posts, got hit by reddit and HackerNews, and even got asked to do some paid blogging!

I started this month hoping to average 1,000 page views per day. This was so I could hit the (pretty arbitrary) milestone of half a million page views.

This is what my November looked like...

Which means my total stats since 2009 are...

So, let me take you through what I learned.

When You Help Others - You're Really Only Helping Yourself

I've been badgering my wife constantly to write on her blog. I managed to convince her to partake in NaNoBloMo and she has done marvellously. I've been seriously impressed with her writing and her dedication. It has been great seeing her struggle with the challenge and having it pay off so magnificently.

People Are Stupid

I just wasn't able to put this adequately into words until my wife blogged, but some people really are stupid. I've been told that my arguments are invalid because (in no particular order)...

  • I haven't calculated something to N decimal places
  • I have an obvious anti-Apple bias
  • I have an obvious anti-Android bias
  • I used hyperbole
  • I mistakenly claimed something took X months, when it actually took X+1 months

In short, people seem to ignore the bigger picture, find the smallest and most inconsequential mistake, and then use that to hang an entire argument. Predictable, I guess, but a little depressing.

I could try to write everything in formal language, perhaps written in pure predicate logic, and illustrated with examples backed up by no less than 9 separate sources - but I have the feeling that would be a little dull to read. There must be a middle ground somewhere.

You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk

I hate being told I'm wrong. Especially by anonymous commentators. By contrast, I love being told I'm right. Especially by anonymous commentators.

It's a weird experience to see strangers praising and damning you in - so it seems - equal measure. Bad reviews stick around in your brain far more than the good ones.

Interestingly, when I've tackled the anonymous people saying I'm an idiot, they've either apologised straight away - or run away.

Bandwidth

May 12, 2012 held the record for the busiest day - 17,186 views thanks to this article about the SIM-less Phone.

My ecosystem blogpost got 37,776 views on November 23rd. The 24th of November saw it get 51,928 views!

Which was nice.

Luckily, my blog is heavily cached and has gzip compression turned on - but even still, I started getting alerts from my host that I was edging close to the limits of my agreed bandwith. So, I bought some more.

My hosting provider - Vidahost (affiliate link) - stayed rock solid even at the height of the traffic. They were incredibly quick to respond to my questions and even gave me some free bandwidth while I was waiting to see if the traffic would continue growing.
You can use the discount code "edent" to get 10% off your order with them.

Tomorrow Never Knows

I was completely stunned by the posts which "made it" and those which fizzled into obscurity. I thought both the one about the HackerNews Effect and Why Don't Amazon Sell ePubs would do rather better than they did.

I don't know if they contained poor ideas, weren't well written, or just didn't get promoted properly. But, there we are.

Don't Hold Back

The majority of posts were written over the last two years. One was even three years old! They'd all been sat in the draft state waiting for me to be happy with them.

The Smuggling USB sticks post was my first big "hit" of this NaloPoMo - it got 22,553 views in a single day! Yet it was first written in 2010 after the BPI threatened to sue me. I'm not really sure why I sat on it for so long...

So, the moral is either "publish those posts before they get too old" or, alternatively, "Let those old posts mature like a fine wine."

Forward, Never Backward

I'm not sure if I can keep up with Richard Herring in blogging every day - although I do have a few posts lined up for December. It's been a fun - and slightly stressful - November, so perhaps it's time to take a short break.

Thanks for reading!

The Future Is Now - But Not Everybody Knows It

In July this year, I spoke at the 25th Privacy Laws Annual Conference.

One of the things I most love doing is causing an audience to gasp with shock. I was asked about how businesses should best go about protecting the privacy of the customers - somewhat provocatively I replied "Why should they? Customers don't care."

I then showed them the Twitter feed of @NeedADebitCard - all it does is retweet people who have taken a photo of their debit or credit card and then posted it onto Twitter. Like so...



Getting a debit/credit card is a rite of passage for many young people - just like getting a driving licence or losing one's virginity - so it seems only natural that they should share that experience with their social circle.

Cue a room full of lawyers facepalming and, no doubt, checking their children's Twitter feeds.

Tom Scott does a bang up job of explaining the consequence of the future we're creating - here's his talk "Is This You"

I saw him give him this talk to a room full of MPs which was.... interesting!

Looking at the future is fun - but what's really interesting is looking at the present. That's why, for my money, this is Tom's best talk: "I Know What You Did Five Minutes Ago"

Everything there is possible right now.

In his Notes From Left Field blog post, Jonathan MacDonald made a confession which really resonated with me:

This year I've spoken at dozens of events and I'm increasingly booked by organisations who would like to hear some "challenging thinking" and "new ideas".

Without wishing to dilute the enthusiasm for this(!), I have an admission to make. I need to 'fess up. Right here, right now.

Nothing I'm saying is futuristic, left field, or out there.

Not. One. Concept.

The reason I removed any mention of the term "futurist" linked to my name (as much as possible), is that I'm (at best) a "nowist".

I think William Gibson was wrong when he said that "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed" - it is evenly distributed - but people don't know about it.

Your customers are comparing your prices using barcode scanners.
Your boss is reading your Facebook profile to see if you fit the company.
Your friends do post pictures of you drunk onto sleazy websites.
Your constituents will checking your voting record in real time.
You are currently carry a super computer in your pocket.

There's no point trying to predict the future - the present is much more exciting.

Blue Screen Bat'leth

Last year, I quickly created a blue-screen cut out of a strange photo of the police.

Today, I was alerted to this rather lovely photo.
Police Batleth
Apparently, some 6 years ago, the police confiscated this "deadly martial arts weapon capable of decapitating a man."

Well, I couldn't resist! Perhaps this can become one of my blog's traditions?

So, here's a quick and dirty removal of the bluescreen.

Police Batleth Transparent

If I think of any more funny images, I'll stick them in this imgur gallery.

Should you edit old blog posts?

The fifth anniversary of my blog went by without me noticing. I don't know if I'm a narcissist, but I quite often find myself re-reading old entries. Sometimes it's because I've Googled for the solution to a problem, only to find I helpfully blogged about it yonks ago - other times I'll read an article and think "Hmmm, I wrote on that subject a while ago," and go off to find what I used to think.

With over 560 entries - ranging from single images to thousand word screeds - it's tempting to leave everything which I've written preserved in aspic. But I can't do that. I'm an inveterate tinkerer.

One of the big challenges of any webmaster is preventing "link rot". Old sites die, change their structure, or edit their content - which means links from this blog get broken or point to things which they shouldn't. To help counter this, I use the WordPress Broken Link Checker Plugin. Every so often it emails me to say a link is down. I'm then faced with the decision of whether to leave it pointing where it was, redirecting it to a cache, or finding a new source of information.

I have to admit, most of the time I just leave the link marked as broken. This isn't just laziness - some sites (especially personal ones) have no duplicate.

As I fiddle with old posts, I notice other things wrong with them. I fix spelling errors or grammer what is clumsy. I fix issues caused with blogging plugins which I've long since deleted.

But I never change my opinion. I already feel that I'm playing too close to the memory hole. Although WordPress tracks the changes I make, the post doesn't reflect past versions unless I explicitly call attention to a change.

Is this odd? Film-makers go back to re-edit their works, musicians remix their tracks, books are reprinted free of errata, newspapers publish corrections, and software writers publish updates.

But in all those instances, the original remains. You can listen to your mono-mix of The Beatles without ever having to even know about the surround-sound remix. But with this blog only exists here on this server, and it is only read when you dial up a specific page, and then - if I have willed it - it may all be Newspeak.

I Don't Want To Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem

I was chatting with a friend who expressed what I'm finding is a fairly common opinion.

Well, yes, I'd love to move to Android - but all my content is in iTunes.

I discovered that it wasn't apps which were the problem - buying them again is a pain, but most are free. It's media content which traps people into staying with services that they no longer want.

Music, movies, TV, and podcast subscriptions. All tied up in Apple's little ecosystem. A very pretty noose to keep people chained to its hardware.

Imagine, just for a moment, that your Sony DVD player would only play Sony Movies' films. When you decided to buy a new DVD player from Samsung, none of those media files would work on your new kit without some serious fiddling.

That's the walled garden that so many companies are now trying to drag us into. And I think it stinks.

On a mobile phone network in the UK, you can use any phone you want. Hardware and services are totally divorced. It promotes competition because customers know that if they have a poor experience with HTC, they can move to Nokia and everything will carry on working just as it did before.

But, if all of your contacts, entertainment services, and backups are chained into HTC - well, then you're just shit out of luck if you want to move.

I want to see a complete separation of church and state here. Hardware should be separate from software. Software should be separate from services.

I want to watch Nokia movies on my Samsung hardware running Google's Android, and then back them up to DropBox.

That's how it works - more or less - in the PC space. I don't understand why it doesn't in the tablet and smartphone space? Why would I buy a tablet that only worked with content from one provider? Whether that's Amazon, Microsoft or Apple - it's setting up a nasty little monopoly which will drive up prices and drive down quality.

I know, I know. The mantra of "It Just Works". I'm mildly sick of having to configure my tablet to talk to my NAS, and then get the TV to talk to both of them. That situation isn't just due to my equipment all coming from different manufacturers - it's mostly due to those manufacturers not implementing open standards.

I fear what will happen when a provider shuts down a service. I joke about Apple going bust - even if they stay solvent, what's to stop them wiping all your music and movie purchases? After all, they shuttered their Mobile Me service with barely any warning and destroyed all the data their paying customers were hosting there.
Adobe killed their DRM servers with only 9 months notice - effectively stopping anyone from reading books they had bought.
Amazon wipes Kindles.
Google took Google Video to the woodshed and shot it in the head - along with Buzz, Wave, and who know how many other products.
Microsoft set up PlaysForSure - and then let it die, trapping millions of music files on devices which are no longer supported.

So, perhaps I'll stick with Google and hope that my Google TV talks to my Google Phone while I watch Google Play videos and listen to Google Play Music on my Google ChromeBook which I share on Google+ and purchase with Google Wallet. And send them the technology geek's prayer "Please don't decide that this useful service isn't profitable."

I just want us all to get along. I want my disparate equipment to talk to each other. I don't want to live in a house where every component has to be made by the same company otherwise nothing works correctly. I don't want to be stuck using a crappy product because they're the only ones offering service X.

I don't want toys that only run on your flavour of batteries.

I don't want to be part of your fucking ecosystem.