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By Krishna, June 29, 2009

Jurgen Appelo has the latest edition of the top developer blogs up. Surprisingly, I have jumped from 149 to 127 despite having a couple of months where I hardly wrote anything at all, and also after a move to WordPress that seems to have dropped my RSS subscribers by half.

I have been noticing the reduced frequency of many bloggers that I follow. Perhaps the pervasive use of Twitter has contributed to this, because what used to be a post is now a Twit. This is perhaps a good thing as it raises the quality of the average blog post. But at the same time, it moves the attention of the blogger away from writing longer posts, the cycle feeds on itself and the frequency keeps going down.

Writing, like other creative activities, requires momentum. You cannot just turn it on and off. The more you write, the more you are inclined to write. If you stop for sometime, it is harder to restart the process. They talk about writer’s block. It is much more difficult when you haven’t written anything for a while.

Another problem is that when you have a gap, there is an added pressure of producing something of higher value than usual. Perhaps like an actor who took a break and wants to pick a movie that is sure to become a hit. This means further delay as the selection process continues ad infinitum. On the other hand, if one is writing frequently, there will be good ones and bad ones, and you are generally more concerned with the process than the outcomes.

One aspect specific to writing about software development is that after a while of writing, you get a sense of déjà vu, as you go over the same ground and topics. Sometimes, it also seems that you are beating the same point to death. Part of keeping it interesting is to be able to keep a broader mind and keep looking at new developments and ideas.

Obviously, software development is a highly innovative field, but a lot of the innovation is in the tools such as languages and frameworks. The overall process of managing software development doesn’t change so quickly. And it shouldn’t, really, because it would mean an unstable working environment with the managers trying the latest management fad. That partly contributes to some of the repetitive themes in blogs.

And of course, life happens. Writing a blog is generally a labor of love for most people who are not paid to do it and don’t have ads (like this one). And you do it juggling time between work and family, snatching a few extra minutes at the start or end of the day or during a weekend. Sometimes, there is not enough to juggle.

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By Krishna, June 17, 2009

I changed my hosting from Blogger to a hosted instance of WordPress. I hope this does not result in a deluge of posts to your blog reader (Google Reader does that sometimes). Thanks for continuing to read my blog. If you are not yet subscribed, you can subscribe using a blog reader at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/thoughtclusters or through email at http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=thoughtclusters.

There were a couple of reasons for the move to WordPress:

1. I recently bought some space on MediaTemple, which allows you 1000 GPU (Grid Performance Units) per month. That is a lot of horsepower even if you are getting thousands of pageviews per day. All for $20 per month, which also includes PHP, mySQL, a great control panel and other goodies.
2. Once you start playing with WordPress themes and plugins, Blogger seems like a toy project compared to WordPress. There simply isn’t any comparison. I had written a post comparing Blogger and WordPress.com which may have given the impression that there is nothing much to choose between them. Perhaps it is still true about Wordpress.com, but a hosted WordPress instance is incomparable in power.

I changed the look to the Journalist theme from Lucian E Marin. Simple black-and-white design. Other themes I liked before I finalized on Journalist were iNove, Carrington and Vigilance.

The move from Blogger to WordPress was painless for the most part. Here are the things I did:

1. Changing the domain name settings. Google uses eNom for domain names hosted on Blogger. It ties that into Google Apps. So you cannot just point the eNom settings to the DNS servers of MediaTemple unless you want to also ditch the other Google Services. I guess I could move the domain registrar to MediaTemple, but I was not ready to do that yet. So the configuration is to add an A record for “www”. This may be a problem if the IP changes. So it is a short-term fix.
2. The other problem is that when you install Wordpress and then navigate to the login page, it shows you the admin password and then asks you to login. This is a problem for an existing blog which is being visited by people. One way to get around this is that before you change the domain registrar settings, change the Network Settings in Windows to use the DNS servers of the WordPress host. This will enable you to set up the blog and change the administrative login.
3. Getting WordPress to import Blogger posts and comments is a breeze. All you have to do is provide your Google login, click a few buttons and just sit back. One important thing is to make sure that you have set up the users corresponding to the Blogger authors so that you can map them correctly.
4. I learnt that the pictures do not get imported automatically into the WordPress media library. I suppose there may be some tool that does that. If not, I would have to manually upload them and edit the posts to use the images. That is going to be some work.
5. Blogger Gadgets do not get imported. So you have to set up Google Analytics, Google Webmasters, Creative Commons license, etc. manually. It is not difficult, just another thing to take care of.

Should you move to WordPress? Definitely yes. If you cannot move to a hosted installation, get a domain name and move to Wordpress.com. One day, you can make the transition to a hosted site. I did this after 3 years. So can you!

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By Krishna, April 13, 2009

Or, translated from Australian, miscellaneous items, in this case, too small to write a long blog post on. And a bit too long for Twittering.  So here are a few of those thoughts:

1. Most newspapers have fact checkers for their articles and reports. Newspapers are dying and being replaced by bloggers and other websites. Several bloggers today have subscribes that surpass the circulation of small newspapers. How much fact checking are they doing? And how many errors are they fixing? Considering that most bloggers are preaching to the converted, that is not happening anytime soon. So the lesson is “reader beware”.
2. On that note, there is a meme that technology bloggers should worry about what they write, because they could be a bad influence on inexperienced programmers. I don’t agree because the person who doesn’t do more research on both sides of any topic will always get into trouble, regardless of the experience level. And paternalism is never a good teaching strategy.
3. Programming is like a game you want to learn, like, say, tennis. You don’t learn it by reading all the book on strategies and tactics. You go out and play (code). And then, when you read the books, it makes it much clearer how you can use those tactics better. It doesn’t mean that the books are wrong or useless. It just means that they are more valuable when you have already practiced some.
4. The saddest person is the bad programmer who genuinely wants to improve, but has no passion for his job. He doesn’t understand that you cannot be a better programmer by simply taking shortcuts. You have to possess some intrinsic traits such as being curious about new things and being excited about solving problems. If you don’t, programming is probably not the right profession.
5. People like talking about the 10x programmer – the one who is 10 times more productive than your average programmer. That’s great, but we should also talk about the 0.1x programmer who is dragging down the rest of the team. It is not even about the speed at which tasks get accomplished. It is whether they even get completed or, worst case scenario, started. The 0.1x programmer is not the actual worst programmer (because they get fired), but the person who just does enough NOT to be sacked.

[Photo licensed from CarbonNYC]

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By Krishna, April 3, 2009

I am not entirely sure why I did it, but I spent a few hours going through every single blog in the Kerala Blog Roll maintained by Manoj Prabhakaran, Asst. Professor at the University of Illinois. Out of those, I looked at those public blogs related to software or technology written in English and updated in the last three months. I then selected the top 10 of them based on their content and design.

Here is the final list (in alphabetical order of their names)

1. Ajay George
2. Anil Kandangath
3. Arun Ravindran
4. Binny VA
5. Dinu
6. Milton
7. Praveen Arimbrathodiyil
8. Ranjith Antony
9. Ranjit Wilson
10. Vysnu

Kishan Thomas has a very good blog/website, but he has not been updating it recently.

If your blog was not on the Kerala Roll, drop me a comment so that I can take a look at it and consider it the next time I update the list.

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By Krishna, February 5, 2009

WordPress.com just published their statistics for the month of January:

372,519 blogs were created.
393,836 new users joined.
4,592,097 file uploads.
2,710 gigabytes of new files.
553 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
8,771,891 comments.
6,528,657 logins.
1,073,421,738 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 945,105,050 on self-hosted blogs (2,018,526,788 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
1,373,108 active blogs and 18,768,022 active posts where “active” means they got a human visitor.
1,295,531,829 words.

Using that, you can derive some interesting facts, such as:

1. The average blog receives 6 comments per month, about a comment or so every week. There is one comment for every 122 page views.
2. The average active blog received 25 page views per day. However, this value is the mean. It might be useful to know what the median page views for a blog is.
3. Assuming that all words were produced by active blogs, the average blog author produced 944 words per month, or 30 words per day. That is 20% of the maximum length of a Tweet.

Also, 66% of all WordPress blogs are in English, followed by Spanish (8%), Indonesian (5%) and Portuguese (4%).

When talking about WordPress for serious bloggers, Dan Woodman, the ex-Microsoft Solutions Advisor who got himself a Blue Monster tattoo, quickly found that WordPress.com was not for him:

I then realized that this is not the place for my blog — it’s too limiting.  I don’t really mind not being able to run ads (I don’t delude myself into thinking that I am going to turn this blog into my sole job.  I simply enjoy it and want to be able to continue blogging), but I do want to be able to track my readership.  That’s important — having a readership of an unknown magnitude is not quite as impressive as being able to say I have a blog readership of “X.”  I’d also like to know what is working and what isn’t… so, the long and short of it is that I need to move my blog (again).

I agree. For casual blogging, any blogging site would do. But Google Blogger is perhaps a better place to get started with hosting your blog if you plan to build a readership. I don’t know when Blogger will return to asking money, but for the time being, it offers a lot of functionality for zero or little cost.

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By Krishna, January 30, 2009

The reason why free markets work is that profit is a powerful motivator for economic activity. Supply and demand in the marketplace drive production, encouraging greater investment in goods demanded more by consumers. This is just as true on the Internet. There is a growing need for online services and information, and suppliers are rushing in to fill the need. Suppliers range from large Fortune 500 companies to small startups to individuals, each claiming a piece of the pie.

Different companies (and individuals) have created business models to generate revenue from the demand. In the case of informational websites and blogs, the business model usually involves making money from paid subscriptions or from advertisements in various forms (text ads, banners, etc.) or, in the case of some, questionable practices such as sharing user information with their marketing partners.

Paid subscriptions are increasingly becoming rare, as most companies find that hiding their content behind walls is not how the web works, and reduces their capability to attract consumers. Short-term border-line methods of generating revenue are simply that, just short-term. As consumers lose trust, they go away and the website dies a deserved death. Other ways to generate revenue like selling stuff (memorabilia, books, etc.), or simply asking for donations are also possibilities, but not every site can use them or will gain much revenue from them.

So we are mostly left with advertisements as the primary means for generating revenue. As I mentioned in a previous post, this has forced the bigger, multi-person blogs to change their layouts to display a lot of ads. Some of them have been able to maintain visual coherence and integrity despite the onslaught of ads. Others haven’t. Unless you are reading them in a blog reader, they are quite ugly looking and, in some cases, embarrassing because of the kind of ads that are displayed.

The popular single-person blogs have been less quick to move to such ad-prevalent designs. One reason is that many such authors are not professional bloggers, and make money elsewhere (running a company, working in a large company, funding companies, etc.) Secondly, of course, their expenses are quite low when compared to a dedicated blogging outfit and do not need to generate the last bit of revenue from them. Most popular bloggers have done a great job of carefully blending ads with the rest of their content to present a very consistent and aesthetic look.

So that is why it is so disappointing when I come across some single-person websites and blogs and find them literally plastered with ads over any available space. Take a look at the image on the right. This is a site which I marked into portions, where yellow stands for ads, blue for useful content and gray for meta-content. As you can see, less than one-fifth of the area is allocated for actual content, which is partly below the fold, because of the advertisements that come at the top.

If these sites were simply spammers trying to make a few easy bucks while serving stolen content, they would simply merit contempt. But these websites were created by people for blogging about their work or for displaying their resume or simply talking about themselves. It is disappointing because while they are creating unique content, they tarnish that legacy by imitating the ad strategies of spammers.

I simply don’t get it. These sites seldom attract the volume of visitors that would generate any appreciable amount of revenue. Because Google AdSense is typically used for advertisements (as it is easy to set up), the websites have a poor visual look and fail to attract repeat visitors or incoming links, thus defeating any purpose of using the website as a launching pad for bigger things. What they do instead is reduce (and even destroy) the brand value of the individual and the website in the minds of visitors.

To “paraphrase” a little-known politician speaking in 2002, I am not opposed to all ads. I’m opposed to dumb ads.

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By Krishna, January 29, 2009

Once again, another blogger (Michael Arrington of TechCrunch) is targeted with death threats. This is fast becoming too crazy for comfort:

Something very few people know: last year over the summer an off balance individual threatened to kill me and my family. He wasn’t very stealthy about it – he called our office number, sent me emails and even posted threats on his blog, so it wasn’t hard to determine who he was. The threats were, in the opinion of security experts we consulted, serious. The individual has a felony record and owns a gun. Police in three states became involved and we hired a personal security team to protect me, my family and TechCrunch employees.

At over $2,000 a day we couldn’t keep paying for security indefinitely. And the police were helpful but couldn’t do much based on the threats until he acted. We had the option of getting a restraining order but that just tells the person exactly where you are (the places they can’t go). So for a week I was literally in hiding with my parents at their home. The TechCrunch office was empty, and the police made regular checks to see if things were ok. One evening they almost arrested one of our employees who stopped by the office to pick up something.

Back in 2007, Kathy Sierra stopped blogging after death threats. Then, Jeff Atwood wrote about the recurring pattern of what is happening to successful bloggers:

1. Author starts blog
2. Blog becomes wildly popular
3. Popularity causes problem for author
4. Author stops writing
5. Everyone loses

This year, during the presidential elections, political blogging and micro-blogging has been enormously influential, when compared to past elections. Regular news organizations, especially newspapers, are having a difficult time capturing the attention of news consumers who are moving to better sources of information, sometimes run by a single person. This phenomenon has created backlash in the following forms:

• Politicians are finding it unbelievable that a person sitting at home and posting content can be powerful enough to sway large chunks of voters and raise money for the opposition. This is leading to politicians decrying such activity and even attempting to pass laws in some countries against them.
• Conventional journalists are feeling threatened by bloggers and attempt to belittle the quality of their content. From there to intimidation of bloggers is a short step.

As online activity increases and some bloggers and Twitterers become very popular, they will be faced with all kinds of problems from spamming and hacking to legal bullying to physical threats and attacks. A blogger with more power and followers can create many enemies even with innocuous-looking posts praising a particular product.

It is time that forward-looking politicians look at these challenges to democracy, entrepreneurship and innovation, and create new (or update existing regulation) to adequately protect bloggers and other online activity against such threats. Right now, the law is very vague about all of this.

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By Krishna, January 24, 2009

Blogger and Wordpress are both blog platforms as well as blog hosting services. The latter allows you to write and post blogs on their servers, saving you the effort of setting up your own server. This is useful if you are an individual blogger, less if you happen to be an organization. I have been using Blogger for hosting this blog and Wordpress.com for hosting a more informal sports blog on cricket. Both applications offer similar services, but unfortunately each of them have a few important missing features and some nuisance behavior:

1. Blogger does not support trackbacks (unlike WordPress), which allow you to notify another blogger if you are linking to his/her post. This reduces your ability to influence the conversation around a topic, and reduces traffic to your blog. Instead, Blogger offers backlinks which work only on Blogger blogs and hardly offers the same functionality.
2. WordPress provides its own blog traffic statistics which it gets from Google Analytics code that it inserts automatically into your blog. So far, so good, but instead of sending you to the Analytics website, it offers a few simplistic graphs and reports. This is the height of online paternalism. I can understand them doing this for novice bloggers, but for everyone else, this is very limiting.
3. Blogger only allows you to create blog posts and provides no way to add web pages that are outside the regular flow of blog posts. For example, you may want to add a page containing a summary of statistical information or a calendar of events. This is not possible. Moreover, Blogger republishes posts that have been re-categorized, so re-organization of your site can cause a deluge of posts to your readers’ Inbox or blog reader. Again, I clamor for an integration between Blogger and Google Sites, which may be coming soon. (Google Page Creator has silently died.)
4. Wordpress.com does do the static page thingy, but like the traffic analysis, they don’t allow you to decide what to do with them. As far as I could see, there is no way to organize your static pages, such as deciding their hierarchical order. My current theme displays every static page as a separate tab. Because of this, I have an ongoing integration issue with Google Webmasters that requires me to repeatedly hide and unhide a static page. Blogger does not have this problem because you can directly edit the HTML of the page.
5. There is no effort on Blogger’s part to monetize blogs. Google got rid of the paid version, Blogger Pro, when they acquired Blogger. Not only does this make the long-term future of Blogger uncertain, it surely means that Google is not investing as much as it could on Blogger’s development. As Google faces pressure to make money off its properties, this could change. Wordpress, on the other hand, earns money on upgrades to storage space, number of users and so on. In addition, Wordpress is open source software with contributions from hundreds of developers.

Both services are capable of handling the needs of most bloggers, so if you are looking for a quick solution, either is fine. On the other hand, if you are looking for more advanced features from them, take note of what is missing before making a decision.

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By Krishna, January 21, 2009

As of January 20th, I have written more posts than I did in the first five months of 2008, which shows how pitiful my blogging activity was. Last year was very chaotic for me on both the personal and professional level. Too many activities consumed too much time and attention. In addition, the unprecedented primary and general elections and the nosedive by the stock market were very distracting. My blog fatigue started around October 2007 and lasted a full five quarters. During this period, I was tempted to abandon my blogging entirely, but I forced myself to at least put out one essay per month, until I felt able to resume blogging regularly.

The lesson is that it is easy to do one-off items, but not recurring tasks. You have a task on a To-Do list. You do it. Tick off the checkmark and it is gone. Doing something regularly is much more challenging, particularly if it is not your full-time profession. You have to weave the habit into your daily life like brushing your teeth so that it becomes a habit. But creative work like writing is not like brushing your teeth: if you don’t have any ideas, the time you planned for the activity will come and go, and you will have nothing.

Darren Rowse has a few tips on getting over such blues:

1. Focus on your long-term goals.
2. Try and put the fun back into blogging.
3. Plan your time.
4. Connect and ask for support.
5. Reach out to readers for inspiration.
6. Exercise.
7. Take the pressure off yourself.
8. Unshackle yourself from your desk.

The whole point behind blogging, which sometimes we forget, is that it offers us an avenue to express our thoughts and ideas, and connecting us to those interested in those topics (even if they don’t necessarily agree with us). If you aren’t having enough fun writing about your thoughts, it has suddenly become a chore. As Mark Twain said,

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign. [The Adventures of Tom Sawyer]

The role of exercise in creativity is not given enough credit. Getting more exercise helps in calming the body and clearing the mind. It is an illusion that staring at the monitor can automatically bestow ideas on the writer. A healthier writer makes for a better writer. And the time spent for exercise is gained back manifold by reducing the relaxation time required by the writer.

I have mostly tackled this subject from the point of writing. But it applies to any regular creative activity. If you want to produce consistent, regular output, Darren’s advice holds good. Keep going and keep producing.

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By Krishna, September 9, 2007

Mike Ramm has been kind enough to translate a few of my blog posts into Bulgarian and comment on them. Thanks, Mike!

• Hard-coding and soft-coding: English version here
• The Dilemma of the Capable: English version here
• When Murphy Strikes: English version here

Many of us, in our Anglo-centric view of the world, do not pay attention to other languages and cultures. But the principles of business management and software development are not restricted to people living in English-speaking countries. We must make the literature and knowledge accessible to all. People like Mike perform an important function here.

More importantly, there is much knowledge that we do not have, because we are not aware of the knowledge base in other cultures. Very few important works created in other countries get translated, if at all. As I have mentioned a few times before, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe invested heavily in science and technology, but much of this knowledge is hidden in book shelves and the minds of students and professors.

If you look at the invention of programming languages, Ruby was invented in Japan, Python in the Netherlands, PHP in Greenland, and Pascal in Switzerland, none of which are English-speaking countries. There is much innovation and invention going on across the globe, but we are only partially aware of such happenings.

I believe that a fundamental next step of evolution of the Web should be in the direction of making all information accessible in each person’s language. Search engines have a responsibility here of understanding queries written in one language and being able to retrieve related information in all languages. I know Google does fetch results from multiple languages, but I think it works only with proper nouns like Rio de Janeiro, Estonia, Claude, etc., not with common words.

Also when browsers display content in another language, they should be able to translate that automatically into the user’s language of choice. Although this sounds hard, natural language parsers and translators are getting more intelligent and able to convey the right meaning. I have been using a plug-in for the Altavista Babel Fish translator (seen on the right), but in future, browsers may already come integrated with that functionality, instead of having separate buttons for translations.

As I write this, I did a search and found FoxLingo, a Firefox plug-in that seems to do a lot of this work.