Blogging Ottinger (tim)

I finally signed up my joint project with Jeff Langr for google analytics. It’s really been very interesting. The service is free, and only requires that you place a little bit of text into your template (or specific page content you want tracked). You can have several accounts, and I track both the In A Flash website and my church’s activity. I’ll only be talking about AgileInAFlash.com here.

At this point in time, I can see that most of the (growing!) traffic is from RSS or bookmarked direct site references (34%) or references from other sites like twitter & Agile Voices (64%).

Today we only get 1-3% of our traffic from web search engines. That suggests that we’re at a kind of “friends and family” stage, with coworkers and colleagues visiting and some new people coming to sniff out the site. Google says we’re growing a steady base of repeat visitors.

Eventually I’d like to see it reach a point where searches on my name or Jeff’s name, and searches for “index card” or “reference card” will show the site in the top page or two. Google analytics tells me that we’re not really moving that direction just yet, but it is good to know what’s happening.

It’s cool to see the slope of our traffic uptake. I know what to expect, and am encouraged. It keeps my expectations in line, though, because we’re not getting the kind of traffic there that a more established agile site would. It keeps me humble and hopeful.

I put in a glitch the other day, so that one of the card images in the articles did not link to the larger printable, more readable, card image. I got a pretty quick response from an anonymous reader. Actually two responses, because Jeff noticed pretty quickly too. I had it fixed in minutes.

Thanks to my friends and colleagues who are keeping an eye on the site. You make my day.

And thanks to Agile Iowa for the good company at the Firkin Fox last evening. I had a good time.

I’m looking at setting up a new blog for my professional musings, so that this blog remains a random life blog. I will move my more popular papers to the new location and blog all the work-related, agile, TDD, Python, management, etc to that location.

I’m having trouble with personal branding here. Do I make the name include “agile”, or “object” or what? Do I just call it TimOttingerBlog? Agile Otter? What is too whimsical and what is too bland?

Please drop me some feedback, and let me know what you think.

Agile Otter is the new blog.

Ignoring the advice to never blog about blogging…

I have been watching my blog traffic for some time. I have some days with relatively heavy hits (heavy for me being maybe 300+) and some light days (100 or so). On the days when I have over 400 hits, I suspect a lot of spidering going on in the world.

I don’t know how often the same people visit, whether I have several hundred visiting every week or a hundred and some-odd people visiting every day. But I do know that by a large margin, most of the traffic here is “direct” meaning that people have bookmarked my site or are using rss readers to keep up with me. Thanks for hanging out with me.

The most popular pages are the home page and after that are my two popular programming papers. The first is the article on naming program variables, classes, and methods, and the second is an article on using the vim text editor (like a pro).

The second largest source of readership is from google. People are usually searching for some opinions or information about guitar stuff, one of the two popular papers above, or some forgotten lore about Linux or programming in general. Imagine that: outside of my circle of friends, my blog is primarily of interest to programming geeks and guitar nuts (AKA: my peers).

I’m writing a program to copy my podcasts and mp3 files to my player. Copying is not a big deal, but I have funny ideas about how to do it.

Before I tried writing a program I would pick them by hand and copy them to my player. That was clearly for the birds. I don’t need to spend 1/2 hour picking my songs and programs each day or even each week. It’s too much.

I started by collecting up all the files and then pulling them by random selection, but that left a lot to be desired. Some of the podcasts are series. I don’t want to hear the episodes out of order. Then there are some that are long, and having them chosen twice in the same month is too much. I end up skipping them, and it wastes space for stuff I want to hear.

I tried to work it out by file date, but it’s not really related to anything but when I retrieve files. When I subscribe to a new series, I really don’t want to listen to all 7 episodes I just downloaded in order of retrieval. I want them to “merge into the flow” with all the other programs I have. Especially if they’re talk programs (engadget, buzz, etc).

So I figure that I should write a program to deal with my complex “needs”. It needs rules.

• I don’t want two files from the same series, so I need to group by series
• Within a series, I want the oldest file that I’ve not already heard
• I want to be sure I get a file from each time-sensitive program if possible
• Once I get the time-sensitive stuff, I want to fill with non-time-sensitive stuff
• I want to get as much as possible on my player each time
• I just want to click a button and have it “happen”. I don’t want to be involved

Guess what? This is really hard when podcasts don’t have their ID3 tags filled in. I’m writing all kinds of silly “fall-back” algorithms to try to figure out what series and episode and date I’m dealing with. What I would love to see is consistent use of “ALBUM”, “TRACKNUMBER”, “YEAR” and “ARTIST”.

• ALBUM: the podcast
• YEAR: the podcast year if possible. That would be *this* year if you’re making new ones
• TRACK NUMBER: either an index for this year, or for all time. Either is fine
• ARTIST: if you have a guest or are rebroadcasting, this is handy. If you broadcast OTR, then “The Shadow” is a fine artist name. This way, I can group all of The Shadow broadcasts and file them through in order, and can treat “Fibber McGee and Molly” separately.

If you are broadcasting sermons, a similar scheme is much recommended. ALBUM would be your church, and ARTIST would be the minister. The others are unchanged.

If you don’t care to help by doing consistent tagging, then please try to use a good filename convention. I personally like the ALBUM-EPISODE-YYYY.MM.DD format. I can parse it and work with it rather well. Please don’t add extra separators or the like. And please don’t use US (MM/DD/YY) or European (DD/MM/YYYY) date formats or anything else clever. The thing I’m shooting for here is that the titles should sort well.

It would be easier yet if you were to use YYYY.MM.DD-ALBUM-EPISODE so that the names sort naturally.

Of course, that’s all a fallback position. I don’t care how you name or number your episodes if you will give me good ID3 tags. Dr Dan Hayden (a word from the Word) does a wonderful job. C/Net buzz stinks at it. Ravi Zacharius (just thinking) does a good job. IT Conversations stinks at it. Charles Hodgson (podictionary) is wonderful. Slashdot review stinks out loud.

It is funny to me that the ones that are best at using ID3 tags are the ones that are non-technical!! Is that bizarre? The educational and theological podcasts are leading the way in intelligent and consumer-friendly ID3 tags, while techy podcasts are seriously trailing. It’s crazy.

No, there is too much Let me sum up…

It’s about who “owns” the internet and can charge for access, or for “preferred” access.

Nobody owns the internet. Everyone is a participant. If someone starts charging for special access, I hope all their local competitors (wifi included) will eat their lunch. The internet needs to be a free and open bazaar. It doesn’t need to be owned by a corporation.

These are just too pretty. I can’t imagine them at this price. I think maybe I need to get some small bucks together and do some mail-ordering. These are also from Rondo

It is a little discouraging when the vast majority of the responses you get in a given week are porn spam. I have marked and deleted almost everything I’ve gotten for the last week or two. I guess spam never sleeps. S’okay, I know that there are friends and others reading. It’s good of you to keep up with me. And I’m glad to be keeping the porn spammers at bay so at least this one place can be tidy (as long as I can keep it so).

My programming articles are going to be moving up to But Uncle Bob since I’m an Object Mentor now (again) and there is a place provided for it. I mostly will be moving those articles dealing with agile programming and test-driven design. Some other articles may continue to appear here. I was not going to split my blog, but this is a different situation and will be good for all concerned. Catch you there.

I’ve gotten rather familiar with a few programs which help to make my absurdly-long daily commute time a little less unpleasant.

One of them I mentioned before is SlashDotReview (to whom I can say that objects are now a little further away than they once appeared). This is still a nice slashdot summation with tasty indy music every day.

Speaking of music, I’m moderatly addicted to The Portland Jazz Jams. I’m learning more about jazz and music through this program, and I’ve always loved jazz. It’s sweet stuff. Sometimes it’s interviews, sometimes it’s playing, and sometimes it’s the coveted guitar talk.

Third is a strange little podcast called the Linux Link Tech Show, where I enjoy all kinds of interesting banter about “unreliable bash scripts” (I agree, a dumb string of words) and various problems in the industry. I like that they don’t whitewash problems with browsers, macs, skype and even asterisk on the show. There is software that works for them, and software that does not. They don’t bother editing out the problems and mistakes.

These are just good drive-time company. There are perhaps more and less uplifting work out there, but these are quick becoming some of the staples of my week. Thanks for all the hard work, podcasters. Keep it up.

Should I have multiple blogs? I have categories now, but the main page shows everything. Since some people are here for hot sauce, others for Christianity, and others for Programming categories, maybe I should have three or four more-focused blogs?

I finally decided to find out a little bit about blogging, and try to make this one a little more interesting and useful. I’ve made a few changes. I had a (personal) record-setting day this week, and that motivated me to put a little maintenance into the site.

• The “most popular posts” now really works. I fixed bug in the template with help from blogsome’s technical support forum.
• I changed some of the titles and descriptions of older posts to make searching more accurate. I promise to be more descriptive than cute in the future. I guess naming is naming, whether it’s variables or blog posts. Apologies if you can’t find something you liked.
• The right margin is reorganized. I moved the parts that I like to see up toward the top. As a result, the RSS links are ‘way down at the bottom now, but overall I think it may be more useful. Let me know if you think it helps or hurts.
• I’m using gvisit.com to report where my hits are coming from (just the city). You see a little list of locations in my right margin. The information it gives me is at my gvisit page if you are concerned about privacy.

It’s not much, but I thought I’d mention what I’ve done and give a little explanation, in case it disrupts any of your blog-reading habits.