Blog

Craig Neuwirt has a blog

Ayende Rahien — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 17:03:43 GMT

Well, after a long time of bugging him about it, I finally decided to give Craig the first Hostile Blogging Award. So Craig has a blog now, which is wonderful.

Who is Craig and why should you care to read what he is thinking about?

A friend
Committer to both Castle Project and Rhino Tools
Main guy behind Binsor 2.0
Main guy behind Zero Config WCF
All around interesting guy

Subscribed, and very excited.

Post #3,000!

Ayende Rahien — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 19:41:40 GMT

I have been doing it for quite a while, sometimes it seems like forever. Somehow, I am not quite sure how, I got to this post, the third thousand one.

By sheer coincidence, this is also my birthday by the Hebrew calendar.

I am not quite sure what I am supposed to do about it, since the big surprise is planned for a few months from now, so I decided to go with the traditional route and do a retrospective.

I used these two posts to gather the information:

Active since: April 2004
Number of Posts: 3000
Number of Comments: 8,462
Avg. Comments Per Post: 5
Avg. Posts per Month: 73
Avg. Posts per Week Last Year: 19
Avg. Comments per Month: 208

The most popular posts, based on web views, aggregator views and comments. The results are quite surprising to me, I am not sure that I can readily explain it.

Blog feedback, and a request for help

Ayende Rahien — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 15:25:15 GMT

Luke Breuer has the following to say about this blog.

Perhaps you do not care, but Subtext is getting on my nerves. I love reading your blog, love reading comments, and feel that I have learned a lot from you. Hopefully you have learned at least one useful thing from my comments. With that said:

I cannot track comments unless I write something manual to do it. (To be fair, I have asked the commentful folks to add support for SubText, and gave them all the XPath/ID/Class information they need to do it.)
Code looks horrible in comments.
Refresh is BROKEN in Firefox 2.0. It does not show new comments. I have to activate my URL bar and hit [enter]. I think Javascript is the culprit, as it seems to be hiding new comments right after the refresh.
Post categories are not show for posts (only a list of all post categories is findable).
Comment URLs are not auto-linkified.
Your comments are the most beautiful ones I have seen. I like cleaner separation between posts. However, this is definitely personal opinion, hence its last position in this list.

Why should I have to type in the four-letter code when I've made plenty of comments that weren't spam, all from the same IP that has never submitted spam? :grrrr:

I mostly agrees with his comments. Some of them are fixable with the skinning abilities of SubText, some may require changing the code base, etc.

I will say in advance that I have looked into SubText only long enough to know how to make it work for this site. I don't have the time or the inclination to go ahead and try to fix those issues.

Therefor, I would like to ask you, dear reader, for help. This blog is running SubText 1.9.3.51, no fancy customizations or anything like that. It is run in a single user mode.

The blog skin is avialable here: http://ayende.com/Files/AyendeBlogSkin.zip

Suggestions to upgrade to a newer version (assuming it supports these new features/fixes) or patches that support it are welcome.

Thanks in advance,

~ayende

Creating readable content

Ayende Rahien — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 22:28:43 GMT

Okay, let us see if I can get this post readable. If I am successful, you are supposed to see two images, one to the left and one to the right.

Those images represent two blog posts, they are blurred on purpose, I don't want to talk about the content, I want to talk about the presentation here.

The main difference between those two posts is the amount of text that goes into one paragraph. This has a direct correlation to the way that I read content.

The post on the left is painful to read, it has massive amount of text that I need to parse and read. I actually stopped reading it when I figure out that I was merely scanning it to avoid actually reading the content.

By reducing the amount of text per paragraph, you are making it easier to read the content, you let the eye skip to the next one naturally, instead of having to parse it.

Books can get away with it somewhat, because they have much higher resolution, but on the web, you cannot. You have to pay attention to the way you are writing.

Short paragraphs make it more pleasant to read the content. Dense content is painful to read, and it gives the feeling that it is dry, even if it is the most fascinating subject on the world.

And that was a whole post that could be surmised as "just hit enter more often, dude", sorry.

Blog Posts vs. Articles

Ayende Rahien — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 15:33:43 GMT

Jakob Nielsen says that experts should not blog, Larry O'Brien disagrees and bring some real world data about leads generated from blog posts and articles.

I have a different approach for this, and it is about the time invested vs. the exposure earned. I have published several thousands of blog posts, and I rarely work on a blog post for over a few hours. The single article that I published took several weeks to write and re-write, peer reviewed and get published. The amount of contacts that I got from that vs. the ones that I get from this blog cannot be compared.

Blogging allows me to post quickly, which means that you get a lot of content that would never see the light of day otherwise. To make the cost of putting content out any higher than it should be means that you are limiting what you can do. It means that you will have less visibility and less traffic, in the end.

To my mind, publishing an article is good only for the additional exposure in channels where I don't have access to already (all readers of XYZ Magazine, for instance), but while that has an appeal, I don't see the need to invest the amount of time that would be required to do so.

Month Summary

Ayende Rahien — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 20:35:58 GMT

A month ago, I was caught red handed, with no post in a span of eight hours or so. I decided to see just how much I can post if I really put my mind into it.

This is my 150th post for this month, and obviously the last one.

Here is a chart of my posts in the last month by day, the most prolific day was the second day of the month, which actually warranted 17 posts.

It has been an interesting experience, but it turns out that it takes a lot of time, so I think that I will drop back to a saner(?) 70 - 90 posts per months instead. If nothing else, blogging has actually reduced the time that I can dedicate to writing OSS stuff and (more importantly) actually having a life outside the monitor.

Using Google to Fight Comment Spam

Ayende Rahien — Mon, 21 May 2007 00:58:50 GMT

This seems like an obvious way, but it is worth mentioning. I was reviewing the search phrases people use to get to my site, and I found some... extremely explicit ones. Not what you would expect on this site. Repeating the search in google brought me a to a post that had several spam comments of the more nasty side. That gave me the idea of trying:

site:ayende.com explicit-word-or-phrase

I found a lot of those, sadly, and I was able to remove ~50 or so spam comments fairly easily. The main issue with spam is separating the chaff from grain, google made it very easy to find the bad stuff.

Blog Data Sheet

Ayende Rahien — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 19:51:46 GMT

Active since: April 2004
Number of Posts: 2196
Number of Comments: 3030
Avg. Comments Per Post: 3
Avg. Posts per Month: 60
Avg. Posts per Month Last Year: 82
Avg. Posts per Week Last Year: 19
Avg. Comments per Month Last Year: 108

Posts to comments, over time. Around March/April last year I lost the battle of posting more posts than comments :-)

Title	Web Views:	Aggregator Views	Comments:	Weighted Score
Entities, Services and what goes between them...	850	1744	49	31905
Rhino Mocks 3.0 Beta Released!	621	1970	7	29260
Integration Tests in ASP.Net	354	2010	14	25900
Unit Testing Database: Embedded vs. In Memory..	331	1904	18	24635
Entity vs. Business Object	316	1926	3	24105
Rhino Mocks 3.0: Beta 2 Released	176	2091	11	23935
Team Foundation Scalability ??? And why CodePlex exists?	330	1760	12	22970
FireFox vs. VisualStudio: FireFox is leading...	240	1877	4	22510
How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers	140	1993	4	22170
If Program I Can't, Programmer Am I?	417	1521	18	22095
Creating documentation from XML Comments using Doxygen	297	1750	2	22025
Integration tests problems	146	1936	10	21900
What can make a great programmer?	216	1836	5	21775
Half of a book review: Windows Developer Power Tools	202	1854	3	21675
Active Directory Authentication, Part 2	102	1996	4	21630

Calculating most popular posts with SubText

Ayende Rahien — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 19:51:27 GMT

How do you get the most popular posts? There are three criteria that you want to check:

Aggregator Views
Web Views
Comments

I decided to give each the following ranking:

Each aggregator view counts as 10 points - a lot of people are subscribe to the feed and so they are more likely to go through all the posts
Each web view counts counts as 15 points - somebody bothered to go to the site, or arrive via search / link.
Each comment gets 35 points - somebody took the time to comment on what I said

This means that a post doesn't get too wieghted toward too much comments (which can happen if a discussion is started) but not enough views.

SELECT TOP 15

EntryId,

Title,

WebCount,

AggCount,

CommentsPerPost,

( WebCount * 15 ) + ( AggCount * 10 ) + ( CommentsPerPost * 35 ) weightedScore

FROM subtext_EntryViewCount,

( SELECT COUNT(dbo.subtext_Feedback.Id) CommentsPerPost,

dbo.subtext_Content.Id

FROM dbo.subtext_Feedback

RIGHT JOIN dbo.subtext_Content ON dbo.subtext_Content.Id = dbo.subtext_Feedback.EntryId

WHERE FeedbackType = 1

GROUP BY dbo.subtext_Content.Id

) Comments,

Subtext_Content

WHERE Comments.Id = EntryId

AND Subtext_Content.Id = EntryId

ORDER BY ( WebCount * 15 ) + ( AggCount * 10 ) + ( CommentsPerPost * 35 ) DESC

Blog Stats: SQL

Ayende Rahien — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 18:37:46 GMT

The best part about using a blog based on a database server is that you get to run all sorts of interesting queries against it.

Posts #:

SELECT COUNT(*)

FROM dbo.subtext_Content

Comments #

SELECT COUNT(*),

FeedbackType

FROM dbo.subtext_Feedback

GROUP BY FeedbackType

(FeedbackType: 1 = Comment, 2 = Trackback)

Avg. Comments Per Post:

SELECT AVG(CommentsPerPost)

FROM ( SELECT COUNT(dbo.subtext_Feedback.Id) CommentsPerPost,

dbo.subtext_Content.Id

FROM dbo.subtext_Feedback

RIGHT JOIN dbo.subtext_Content

ON dbo.subtext_Content.Id = dbo.subtext_Feedback.EntryId

WHERE FeedbackType = 1

GROUP BY dbo.subtext_Content.Id

) commentsPerPost

Post with most comments:

SELECT TOP 1

COUNT(dbo.subtext_Feedback.Id) CommentsPerPost,

dbo.subtext_Content.Id

FROM dbo.subtext_Feedback

RIGHT JOIN dbo.subtext_Content ON dbo.subtext_Content.Id = dbo.subtext_Feedback.EntryId

WHERE FeedbackType = 1

GROUP BY dbo.subtext_Content.Id

ORDER BY COUNT(dbo.subtext_Feedback.Id) DESC

Avg. Posts per Month:

SELECT AVG(PostsPerMonth)

FROM ( SELECT DATEADD(year, YEAR(DateAdded) - 1900,

DATEADD(month, MONTH(DateAdded)-1, 0)) Date,

COUNT(*) PostsPerMonth

FROM subtext_Content

GROUP BY MONTH(DateAdded),

YEAR(DateAdded)

) postsPerMonth

Avg. Posts per Week

SELECT AVG(postsPerWeek)

FROM ( SELECT DATEPART(week, dateadded) weekNum,

YEAR(dateadded) [year],

COUNT(*) postsPerWeek

FROM subtext_Content

GROUP BY DATEPART(week, dateadded),

YEAR(DateAdded)

) postsPerWeek

Avg. Comments per Month:

SELECT DATEADD(year, YEAR(DateCreated) - 1900,

DATEADD(month, MONTH(DateCreated) - 1, 0)) Date,

COUNT(*) CommentsPerMonth

FROM subtext_Feedback

WHERE feedbacktype = 1

GROUP BY MONTH(DateCreated),

YEAR(DateCreated)