Shaping Thoughts

Moved to Feedburner after 2 years

During the weekend I created, or should I say “burned”, a new feed at Feedburner, because I wanted to learn about the RSS/Atom feed traffic I am getting and the number of actual subscribers to the feeds out here.

Because this blog has been live for more than 2 years now (more on that in another post this week), I was assuming that I already had some subscribers. These had to be included in the new statistics. But, if I just created a new feed at Feedburner (actually a new redirect!), I would not have counted those old subscribers. So what to do?

All in all, it not became a real painful process, although I have been looking for maybe 1 1/2 hours to find a good tutorial.

The steps it involved:

• making new feed (from Atom it was adviced; I already did that)
• redirect every feed being hit at old URL’s to new one at Feedburner (you now, via those nice unreadable .htaccess files)

The results:

• Before the redirect: 5 subscribers (on new feed)
• After 12 hours : 85 subscribers
• After 36 hours: 91 subscribers

So there were approximately 86 existing subscribers to the original feeds on my blog and they are now nicely included in the stats!

Up to the 100st subscriber!

The current stats:

Technorati tags: Feedburner, Textpattern

Comment | posted Jan 14, 03:55 pm on Jan 14, 2008 | category: This blog / Textpattern

Off-line for the next three weeks

As I will be on holiday for the next three weeks, comment moderation will be postponed for a while. Unless of course, I find myself a nice, cold beer equipped, wifi place.

But, please do not let that stop you from commenting on my blog! I am especially still looking for comments on the latest blog post on Managing a local online community without being being harassed or worse.

Finally, may I point you to the latest piece of interesting activity on Our Virtual Holland in Second Life? One of ING’s most web 2.0 minded location, ING Asia/Pacific, invites everyone to a ING Virtual Cha Lounge Logo Contest, celebrating the opening their own ING Virtual Cha Lounge. So if you like some tea in your Second Life...

Ok, that’s it: now let’s move to France…

(Disclaimer: I am employed with a subsidiary of ING Group)

Related: all my Second Life articles

Technorati tag(s): Second Life, ING, ING Group, Our Virtual Holland

Comment | posted Aug 4, 08:35 pm on Aug 04, 2007 | category: This blog

Slowing down my pace of blogging

After one year of blogging, I have decided to considerably slow down my frequency of posting. Not because I have turned away from the blogosphere, but mainly to find a new balance between “computer-things” and the rest of my life. Things just got out of hand a little bit.

Of course I will still try to keep up with the RSS feeds of those 200+ blogs I follow, but reacting and sharing my thoughts will only happen once in a while. I do hope to get the mechanism for posting Del.icio.us links working on Textpattern, so there will be some flow around here.

Technorati tag(s): Blogging

Comment | posted Jan 8, 10:06 pm on Jan 08, 2007 | category: This blog / Blogging

Currently Shaping Thoughts on

This could very well become a nice regular feature on this blog.

Sometimes I have much more in my head than in draft on the blogging engine, just because I am still thinking about a subject and not found the time to write it down.

Main current “thoughts getting into shape”:

• Getting my head around the much too theoretical subject of emergence as discussed by Andrew McAfee. I want to come up with a list of practical examples showing how the emergence can work behind the firewall. By the way emergence to me is something like achieving “collective value from mainly independent contributions”.
• Creating a nice post on the value of internal blogging, including types of uses (by managers, for events, for change processes, for projects, for employees).
• Thinking about the optimal wiki-infrastructure: one or many wiki’s behind the firewall.

Anyone interested in joining me in one of my thought experiments? Just drop me an e-mail (address on the left).

Comment | posted Oct 15, 10:15 pm on Oct 15, 2006 | category: This blog

I am still around!

Yes, I am still around, although haven’t really had time to blog recently.

I have been quite busy with work (including some interesting social software stuff!) and with the new design of our family website, the address of which I rather not share here (it’s a private site).

I have a few posts waiting to be finalised though…

Comment | posted Oct 4, 09:30 pm on Oct 04, 2006 | category: This blog

Why do I blog & celebrating my 100th post!

Today I celebrate my 100th post on this weblog since I started in January of this year. The first time to look back on this grand venture.

To follow up on a tradition of a lot of my fellow bloggers out there, when celebrating like this, I first present some stats:

• Total number of posts: 101 (including this one)
• Total number of comments: 74 (including some of my own)
• Most popular post: The chair: scandal, bad luck or bad management (384 visitors; 462 page views)
• Most commented post: Billy Joel in Rotterdam: my review (12 comments)
• Number of unique visitors: 3,838 (counting started in April)
• Number of page views: 7,390

Second, I would like to reflect a little bit on why I am I doing all of this blogging. After some mind reading I came up with the following list:

• I like to share.
• I like to communicate with people how like the same things as I do.
• I like to leave behind something (“Who writes stays isn’t it?”).
• I love the technology behind my blog engine (Textpattern in this case).
• I like to show off a little bit.
• I like to be part of the blogsphere where great things happen and/or are discussed first.
• I like to the serendipitous “meeting” of people via my blog.
• I like to create.
• I like finding out some high profile blogger links to your blog post causing a traffic spike (thanks Steve and Doc!)

Of course, I could just go through my RSS reader every day, comment here and there and get that connected feeling, but for me, at least at this moment, that is just not enough.

What do you get out of blogging?

Technorati tag(s): Weblog, Blogging

Comment [2] | posted Sep 19, 10:24 pm on Sep 19, 2006 | category: This blog / Blogging

The army checks in

From my referrer files today:

Hey, they need some relaxation as well!

Technorati tag(s): Iraq

Comment | posted Sep 6, 03:54 pm on Sep 06, 2006 | category: This blog

Back online: things that caught my attention

Here I am back online again, after two weeks with very little connectivity. With 160 feeds in my feed reader, I found out that catching up is almost impossible. You really go for the very well respected sources.

Here is a short list of some stuff that caught my attention from a couple of those feeds:

Getting to know Wikipedia the hard way
Adding an article to Wikipedia is harder than it looks, even when you are the expert. Ross Mayfield and Andrew McAfee, two of the most prominent people in the world of Enterprise 2.0, or using collaboration software behind the firewall in companies, got to know some unexpected rules in Wikipedia, when editing the Enterprise 2.0 article.

Dave Winer’s mobile web revolution
RSS guru and A-list blogger Dave Winer, bought himself a BlackBerry device and build some software, to read websites on the small screen (“River of News style”) and even to blog on such a device. Some people think Dave is actually re-inventing this kind of software and questioning his originality. The timing could be perfect though, because this time around people might actually be interested in reading the news and even blog on such small screens and have the devices. To quote Dave Winer: I see a flood coming.

Technorati tags: Ross Mayfield, Andrew Mcafee, Wikipedia, Dave Winer, BlackBerry

Comment | posted Aug 27, 10:28 pm on Aug 27, 2006 | category: This blog / Wiki

Two weeks offline

If you do not see any post the coming two weeks, do not worry. I am still around, but only offline. I go to a place where connectivity is out of the question. I will go for books, a couple of saved podcasts and hopefully some sunshine.

If you decide to leave a comment somewhere, please have some patience. Your comment will appear as soon as I get back (unless you’re a spammer of course).

See you in two weeks!

By the way the nice image was borrowed from luisa27266 on Flickr.

Comment | posted Aug 4, 09:52 pm on Aug 04, 2006 | category: This blog

Do not trust your hosting provider to backup?

Just saw this message on the help desk page of my hosting provider.

Rather disturbing if you ask me. I wonder what is going on? Never had troubles before with them.

Happy to know I get a backup of this blog’s database in my mailbox every night (see the sentence in the box)

Technorati tag: Textdrive

Comment | posted Jul 13, 11:33 pm on Jul 13, 2006 | category: This blog