From the ‘If-Tom-Raftery-can-do-it-so-can-I‘ school of marketing, the name of this blog has changed from Technology in Plain English to Technology and People. Justin has also done a name change, so maybe it’s something in the water (or is going to happen to everybody once they’ve been blogging long enough). On the other hand, Grandad’s Name change ended up getting voted down.
Reason for the change is that the new name explains better/shorter what I’ve tended to write about. Not just the technology (go to the wiki for a real dose of that) , but how people use the technology. It’s still all shameless self-publicity.
Url and feed address remain unchanged.
You may remember our ‘Free beer at the Irish Blog Awards competition‘. Well FeedBurner have smiled from on high at our efforts, and decided to donate some goodies to the cause.
So, in the spirit of increasing everybody’s subscriber numbers I’m going to give YOU the gear to give away on YOUR blog. Here’s how it works:
1) Leave me a comment on this blog. Wordpress will ask for your email when you leave a comment, but it won’t be publicly displayed.
2) Sometime next week, I’ll ask you (by email) to post on your blog. I’ll even give you a bit of advance notice . Most blogs allow you to publish at a given time in the future , so you don’t even have to be there to push the button.
3) I’ll be asking your readers to leave a comment on this post. We’ll leave the lines open for a couple of hours, then pick 3 comments at random to win the stuff.
To keep it clean , you can’t giveaway the stuff on your blog and win at the same time. I’ll reserve the right to change the rules if somebody blatently tries to cheat (not that it would be hard!).
Unfortunately , because I’m not a photo blogger , I couldn’t get a clear shot of what the goodies look like. Trust me that they’re pretty cool.
- 1st Prize : A long sleeved FeedBurner Jersey, and assorted stickers and badges.
- 2nd Prize : A T-Shirt with the FeedBurner logo, and assorted stickers and badges.
- 3rd Prize : Just the T-Shirt with the FeedBurner Logo.
I’ll post the stuff direct to whichever reader of yours wins - so it doesn’t matter what sort of blog you have, where you’re located , or where your readers come from.
I’ve been trying to get this working for a while. If you’re reading the blog (rather than following via RSS) you’ll see the following changes:
- MyBlogLog Readers (your photo) is now on the top left.
- Tag Cloud is now working , thanks to the Category Tagging Plugin for Wordpress.
- Monthly Archives are now at the bottom left, with number of posts per month.
Let me know what you think.
Ruby has a lot of buzz around it. The idiots version of what Ruby is:
- It’s a programming language (like Java) that allows you to tell computers what to do.
- Used with the Rails framework , it allows you to churn out your latest Web 2 site faster than you can pitch it to your friendly VC.
InfoQ has a good link to a Free Ruby Book that has just become available. The author of the book (Jeremy) blogs here.
We have two main reasons why we’re interested in Ruby:
- Java is great for scalable , Enterprise systems used by thousands of people. Sometimes we just want something quick and dirty to try out an idea.
- If your idea proves successful , you want a migration path (i.e. not to have to throw away all your original work). Ruby gives you this as the way it is organised means it is less likely to fall into a heap (Object Orientated)
- So Why not PHP (the way this blog, using wordpress, is built)? Ruby has a companion tool called JRuby. This means that you can run Ruby code anywhere you can use Java. Anything that Java can do , Ruby can do as well.
We’re also going down the free book route on Enterprise Web 2.0. Only it’s taking us a lot longer to get there. Currently the problem is a techie version of writers block.
As Recommended by Donncha, a very useful plugin for Wordpress that generates sitemaps to help Google find your content.
Update: Thanks to the Hairy Lemon, we now have the sitemap being created for Mediawiki, where we host our knowledgebase. Previously , these sitemaps were done by autositemap.com, but the site seems to be on the blink for the last couple of weeks.
Update 2: Thanks to the suggestion of Richard from RedCardinal , we now have the Sociable (bookmarking) and Subscribe to Comments (Email) plugins enabled