It’s the end of the year, and like most bloggers I decided to take a look at my blog’s performance over the last year…

My Top Posts (According to Google Analytics)

Here’s are my top 10 posts from 2008, as ranked by Google Analytics:

1. The Dark Side of LINQ
2. 99 Ways to Become a Better Developer
3. Wordpress – 10 Tips and Recommendations
4. Scaling Web Applications – Recommended Readings
5. Developing a Robust Data Driven UI Using WPF – The DataModel
6. Developing a Robust Data Driven UI Using WPF – Introduction
7. Microsoft’s Next Killer OS is… SharePoint?
8. WPF Screen Saver Template for Visual Studio 2008
9. Google Applications for your Domain – Does it Measure Up to Expectations?
10. How Do You Define "Good Code"?

Personal Favorites

The following are a couple of my personal, somewhat overlooked, favorites:

• Looking For New Adventures – On May of this year I left my (pretty cool) job with the Duet team at SAP to face the unknown…
• Google Chrome is a Failure… Surprised? – Originally published on Cloud Avenue and triggered an interesting discussion worth going through.
• Are You Designing for Bigfoot?
• Is Google Replacing My OS Again?! which was followed by On Google’s Chrome and The Future of Cloud Computing.
• Introducing Kampyle – The Next Generation of Online Feedback. Just because I got to be the first to write about my friends company and I think this post written a lot better than the many posts that followed on TechCrunch etc.

That’s it. All wrapped up and ready for 2009!

Tags: Blog, Blogging, Cloud Avenue, DeveloperZen, ekampf, Eran Kampf, erankampf

The hero of our story is Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.
The background for the following discussion is a post made by Dare Obasanjo referring to TechCrunch as FuckedCompany 2.0. A response on TechCrunch was soon to follow, blaming Microsoft as a company for the things said.

(You can read the full details  here and here)

The discussion then moved to Twitter where it deteriorated pretty fast:

Regardless of the topic and which side is wrong or right, discussion should reach this kind of level…

While Dare’s blog may have an impact on Microsoft’s brand, its no question that whatever Michael does impacts the TechCrunch brand. The above discussion doesn’t do well to TechCrunch…

The of the story? Never (ever!) write when you’re upset.
Or to be more exact, take the night to sleep it off before you publish it. If you still think your text is ok on the next morning, then by all means publish it.

Remember that text (e-mail, blog post, twit, etc.) is a terrible medium for communicating emotion. The reader can’t see your facial expression or hear your vocal intonation. Therefore, any negative emotion that is expressed in the text is probably going to be perceived several times stronger – much more than intended – probably just causing damage instead of getting your point across.

When I was at SAP it wasn’t uncommon for me to get really upset and write long, angry emails through the night. Most of these never saw their way outside of my drafts folder. I would wake up the day after and figure out that things aren’t that bad, that there’s a better way of handling it, or simply that I have to pick my battles and that there’s more important stuff to spend my time on…

I’m sure Michael’s reactions are just a result of frustration and the heat of the moment. In fact, Michael edited the post and removed the controversial paragraph the day after.
Everything’s brighter on the morning after…

(P.S., if you just can’t hold it until the next morning, at least take a moment and listen to yourself. You’ll get a different perspective doing a second reading. I used to have a rule in my Outlook to elay delivery on any email I send by 2 minutes. It helps….)

Tags: Blogging, Effective Communication, productivity

Since my recent move to WordPress I’ve been crawling the web looking for useful WordPress tips and ticks. Below are my essentials for anyone using WordPress:

Security

Protect Your Login Page from Bots

The LoginBlock will prevent bots from continuously trying different combinations to crack your account. This is very similar to how Windows works if you’re in a domain environment.

Every failed login attempt is recorded, along with the timestamp of the attempt and the IP address of the user. If a user tries (and fails) to log in too many times within a certain time period, the system then blocks any login requests coming from that IP range until the lock-out is released. The lock-out period defaults to 1 hour, although that can be changed within the admin panel. The number of retires and the time period that they occur within in order to trigger a lock-out are also configurable from the admin section, and admins do have the ability to release an IP block manually (assuming of course that they haven’t locked themselves out ).

Secure WordPress’s Folders
Prevent readers from browsing your WordPress files and folders by adding the following line to the .htaccess file on the main WordPress installation folder:

Options All -Indexes

Storage

Save Space – Turn off WordPress 2.6 Post Revision
WordPress 2.6 introduces post revisions allowing to save and access all the previous versions of a document.
This feature is mainly useful for blogs with multiple authors who work on the same blog post (editor corrections etc.) but its pretty useless to most blogs out there and unnecessarily increases the databases size.

To disable post revisions add the following line to wp-config.php:

add_filter( 'pre_comment_content', 'wp_specialchars' );

Change the Default Image Upload Folder
The default installation settings store your uploaded files under the wp-content/uploads folder.

As you can see in the picture above, you can change the uploads folder to any folder, and even use a subdomain to serve files.
This has several advantages:

• File URLs become relatively smaller
• When using a subdomain, the files URL is independent to their actual location on the server. You can easily move them or even host them on a service like Amazon’s S3 (if your traffic will grow) without changing the URLs in your posts.
• The WordPress installation folder becomes small and manageable.

Promote Your Blog\Be Sticky

Conversation is what makes a blog interesting, it also gives readers a reason to come back to your blog.
The following tips will help you make your blog a little bit more sticky to the readers:

Allow Readers to Subscribe to Comments 

When an occasional reader makes a comment on your blog, chances are he’ll never remember to go back and check for responses. If he does, it will only be through a short period of time.
Subscribing to comments helps the conversation flow, which is what blogging is all about. People are genuinely interested in knowing what others think of their comment and this feature saves them time having to manually check for new responses.

Subscribe to Comments is probably the most important plugin you can install on your WordPress. It adds a check-box below the comment form on each post, and when checked by a commenter, they then receive an email update as soon as someone adds a new comment after theirs.

Support Social Bookmarking

Help your readers promote and share your posts by using ShareThis or Sociable to provide quick links for posting into sites such as Facebook, Digg, etc.

Promote OpenID

OpenID is a win-win for blog comments.For the comment author, it means less information to type. For the blog owner it means that comments have a real identity behind them. Simply install the WP-OpenID plugin and you’ll get support both for OpenID comments and for OpenID WordPress login.

Be Mobile Friendly

With the introduction of SmartPhone, and especially the iPhone, more people are now browsing for content using their mobile devices.
When browsing from a mobile device users expect a simple listing of blog posts in a reverse chronological order. If they’d like to read a post, they can click on the title and get a mobile friendly version of the post.

The easiest way to support mobile devices is to use Google Reader.
Google Reader generates an excellent mobile view of your RSS feed without any effort. All you have to do is append your feed address to the following URL and your mobile blog is ready:

http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/<feed_address>

For example here’s how it renders DeveloperZen’s feed (http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2Ferankampf):

You can call this link “Mobile View” and place it at the top of your blog design so mobile phone users will notice it instantly and switch to the mobile view. Alternatively you can map it to a subdomain like m.yourblog.com and points mobile users there.

I’m using WpTouch to support iPhone devices (its good for most mobile devices, not just the iPhone). Its easy to install and configure and looks absolutely great..

 

Optimize for Search Engines

The SEO All in One plugin lets you easily optimize your your titles, meta tags and headers rather than being limited to WordPress’s defaults.

Stats

Tracking your blog’s statistics lies at the core of any well thought out marketing campaign for your blog. Why jump back and forth between Google Analytics, FeedBurner and various other tools when you can simply put the summary data in your WordPress administration dashboard?

• Wordpress Reports – This plugin gathers and displays data from Google Analytics and Feedburner to display a comprehensive report of what’s been happening on your blog for the last 7 days. It also comes with a Most Active Content allowing you to display your top content on the sidebar. Since it gathers information from Google Analytics and FeedBurner it doesn’t add tracking codes to your client code and increase server load.
• StatPress is a real-time plugin dedicated to the management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers etc. and displays live and up-to-date information in the administration dashboard. It also comes with a StatPress Top Posts widget.

Sneak Preview – Nuconomy Blog Stats

We’ve been working very hard here at Nuconomy on a plugin for WordPress and WordPress MU. It’ll soon be public but for now here’s a sneak preview:

Tags: WordPress

I’ve recently decided to move my blog from dasBlog to WordPress. The reason for this move is mainly because dasBlog really lacked several features that were important for me and I found WordPress to be much more mature platform with a wide community support.

Moving the blog to WordPress turns out to be not as complex as I thought it would. However there are some pitfalls that are important to avoid in order for the process to really be as quick and simple as possible.

When moving our blog we have two main tasks: migrate all the blog’s data (post’s etc.) and ensure that the old blog redirects all calls to the new blog so that we don’t loose search engine links\ranking and confuse readers.

Migrating Blog Data

WordPress does not support importing from dasBlog out of the box and there’s no available plugin that does that. The best way I could find to migrate the data to WordPress is to use RSS import. The only downside here is that comments will not get imported

In order to migrate dasBlog posts to WordPress using RSS perform the following:

1. Setup dasBlog’s RSS to contain all your data. On dasBlog’s configurations page, under Syndication Settings, increase the number of items in your RSS feed to cover all posts.
   

   Also, turn off FeedBurner support so that when trying to access dasBlog’s RSS feed it will not redirect you to FeedBurner.

2. Disable Aggregator Bugging. dasBlog can add an image to your RSS item that is used to gather feed usage statistics. You don’t want those images to be part of your WordPress posts.
   To disable feed bugging simply go to the dasBlog configuration screen and uncheck the Enable Webbugs for RSS checkbox in the Service Settings section:
    
3. Save the RSS as a file. Load the RSS into your browser by clicking on the RSS icon on your blog’s home page or by navigating to http://<blog url>/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss.
   Save the displayed XML to a text file on your local drive.
4. Fix content formatting in the RSS. You have to remove end-of-line characters from the file, otherwise they will be transformed by WordPress during import to line breaks that will mess up your posts layout:
   1. Open the file in Microsoft Word, press CTRL+H to open the Find and Replace dialog.
      Click on More->Special Characters->Paragraph Character. Replace it with nothing (an empty string).
   2. Replace all double spaces with one space character.
5. Import the file to WordPress. In the WordPress Admin Dashboard go to Manage->Import (or navigate directly to http://<blog url>/wp-admin/import.php). Click the RSS link and browse for the RSS file you just edited. Click Upload file and import button to import your content to WordPress.

Redirect Requests from dasBlog to WordPress

If you’ve been using your blog post title for your post’s permalink than you’re going to have a relatively easy job redirecting all the requests made directly to a post on your dasBlog blog to their new location on WordPress (some coding is required though). Handling the other pages – archive, date and category pages – is a bit more complicated.

First, configure WordPress’s permalinks to use the post’s title like dasBlog. In the WordPress Admin Dashboard go to Settings->Permalinks and choose the Day and name option so that your permalinks will look as follows : http:// <blog domain> /2008/08/04/sample-post/

Now we have to redirect the requests from the old blog to WordPress. I couldn’t find a way to perform this without editing dasBlog’s source code. To be honest, I’ve been running my own customized version of dasBlog for a while now so I’ve had the code ready for use and I didn’t invest much time in looking for alternatives.
In the newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core project, open SharedBasePage.cs and add the following code snippet at the end of the SetupPage method:

// *** Redirect to WordPress
string redirectUrl = "http://<blog homepage>.com/";
if (!this.IsAggregatedView)
{
    // We're looking at an indevidual post so we can redirect directly to
    // that post's new location
    Entry entry = DataService.GetEntry(weblogEntryId);

    redirectUrl = string.Format("http://<your blog>/{0}/{1}/{2}/{3}/",
        entry.CreatedUtc.Year,
        entry.CreatedUtc.Month,
        entry.CreatedUtc.Day,
        entry.CompressedTitleUnique.Replace('+', '-'));
}
else
{
    if (Request.QueryString["category"] != null)
    {
        // We're in a category page
        redirectUrl = string.Format("http://<your blog>/redirectFromDasBlog/category/{0}", this.CategoryName);
    }
    if (Request.QueryString["date"] != null)
    {
        redirectUrl = string.Format("http://<your blog>/{0}/{1}/{2}/",
            DayUtc.Year.ToString(),
            DayUtc.Month.ToString("d2"),
            DayUtc.Day.ToString("d2"));
    }
    else if (Request.QueryString["month"] != null)
    {
        redirectUrl = string.Format("http://<your blog>/{0}/{1}/",
            Month.Year.ToString(),
            Month.Month.ToString("d2"));
    }
}
this.Response.StatusCode = 301;
this.Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
this.Response.RedirectLocation = redirectUrl;
this.Response.End();

Compile dasBlog and then replace newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core on your dasBlog’s bin folder with the modified version.

The snippets redirects requests to blog posts and archive pages (day pages and month pages) to their new destination on WordPress using permanent redirect status code (301).
Category pages cannot be handles automatically as, when moving to WordPress, you will probably play around with the category hierarchies, names and slug.
Therefore, the code builds a category URL that points to the WordPress blog and guaranteed to get a 404 error. We can track 404 hits on WordPress and manually configure where to direct them…

Track and redirect 404 requests on WordPress. A WordPress plugin, called Redirection, allows you to track 404 errors and manage their permanent (301) redirections:

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Install the plugin and then you can go to Manage->Redirection on the WordPress Admin Dashboard and manage redirections from the fake URLs created by the code we added to dasBlog to real destinations on your new WordPress blog.

That’s it! If you’ve reached this far you’re covered…
All the posts have moved to their new WordPress location and all links are correctly forworded to the new location. As mentioned earlier, unfortunately, the only thing left out are the blog comments.
If you know of a way to get the comments migrated to WordPress too please do tell…

Tags: dasBlog, WordPress

At least if everything goes as planned, your RSS reader should keep on getting regular updates without any work on your part (thanks FeedBurner )

I just retired the good old dasBlog on ekampf.com for a branch new WordPress 2.6 blog on www.DeveloperZen.com.
The ekampf.com is still up and running, forwarding all traffic to the new blog (even old blog permalinks are redirected to the correct post under DeveloperZen.com) so you can still use it if you’ve got existing bookmarks, subscriptions, or if just feel it’s easier to remember.

The move to DeveloperZen.com brings along a brand new design (still in the works) and a renewed commitment to blogging – I’ll be working a lot harder on the DeveloperZen brand from now on.

Please let me know if you have any problems moving over subscriptions, finding stuff or getting old links to work. I’ll also be happy to heard comments or suggestions regarding the new site.

I was checking out my analytics page with Yosi the other day when I noticed this rather disturbing Unique Visitors graph:

I’ve been paying less attention to the blog the past couple of months and it shows… I’m loosing readership and I don’t like it…

As I see it, the most important rule for blogging successfully is to continuously produce great content for your blog. As Larry O’Brian best puts it:

My theory is that lead generation derives from Google rank and that the best way to increase Google rank is to be like a professional fighter: neither jabs nor haymakers are enough. You must be always jabbing and you must regularly throw haymakers. Blog continuously to keep your hit-rate and link-traffic high and write longer pieces, containing the high-value words associated with your niche, occasionally.

I’ve been pilling up more than 15 posts on my drafts folder so it doesn’t seem like I have nothing to write about. Getting these drafts to a state where I’m willing to post them online is a different story…

As I’ve learned for the past couple of years, the best thing you can do when writing a blog is to pick a schedule you can live with and stick to it.

And so, I’m going to pick a two-posts-a-week schedule and see how well it goes…

What’s your posting schedule?

Tags: Blogging

There’s nothing that pleases me (and I guess, any blog owner) more than getting feedback on my blog.
While I do my best to respond to comments as soon as possible some of you who contacted me through dasBlog’s contact form are probably wondering why I’m ignoring you. Well, I’m not!

It seems like there’s a bug in dasBlog’s form – although the form specifically asks for your E-mail address it does not use that information for anything.
So when I get the email notification I only get the comment text without the E-mail to respond to (unless your signature includes it).

I will replace this form with a better alternative as soon as I get home.
If you’ve been waiting for my response please accept my sincere apologies and feel free to write again (and include your email in the comment text).

Tags: dasBlog