July 10, 2008 - personal update

This was a fast busy work week!  I'm out of town for a long weekend so no Interesting Finds the next few days ... I should be back online for the Monday edition.

Last week I got, what looks to be, great reading material for my trip this weekend: IT Consulting by Joe Webb.  Plus today the latest MSDN magazine arrived ... which I've been trying to read - in order to help me catch up with the new stuff.

I don't know if anyone has noticed, but I'm finally starting to order my groupings in the link blog.  Starting always with 'Other stuff' and ending with 'Other link blogs', then in the middle I've been ordering by most technical at the top to less technical and more business/career stuff at the bottom - this seems to help me when I revisit the list throughout the day to read some of the links.  Anyone else notice these things?

I've been thinking a lot about my site and blog lately and thought I would put together a list of some interesting tidbits about it (for the curious out there):

  • I currently have between 1000 and 2000 readers that subscribe to my rss (had less than 100 for the first year or two)
  • I have between 400 and 600 people visit the site daily (mostly coming from search engines and codeplex - related to Reflector addins)
  • I make between $5 and $20 in ad revenue a month (not bad for a bunch of links)
  • I started the Amazon Associates links about month ago - and have yet to make any money from it
  • I spend around 30 - 45 min each morning putting my link blog together
  • Usually I have between 160 and 280 unread entries to go through in the morning
  • I rarely read all of the entries I link to (all intentions to do so when I add them - but either change interest throughout the day or don't get to it)
  • I have little idea of how many blogs I subscribe to - a recent version of my subscriptions is on my site at http://jasonhaley.com/files/subscriptions.opml
  • I type the html for the link blog in notepad (also it is usually before the coffee kicks in ... so some times there are typing errors)
  • I use Google Reader and Safari for reading the blogs
  • The picture of me on my home page was taken on my wedding day - over 4 years ago (seriously need to update that)
  • The picture in the header is of Elliot Bay, taken from Myrtle Edwards Park (along the water front in Seattle) looking towards Bainbridge Island
  • ... and I'm working on the next version of the site

posted on Thursday, July 10, 2008 4:34 PM

Feedback

# re: July 10, 2008 - personal update

Still enjoying it. Thanks for continuing to create this great resource!

Out of curiosity, are there posts that especially stand out from day to day? I'd love to see a star or bolded line (whichever is easier) next to the top three or five posts. Some days I'm so busy and I scan your list and move on, only to realize I missed something especially good. ;)

Also, why aren't you using WLW? The latest CTP is really outstanding, producing clean HTML.
7/10/2008 5:34 PM | Haacked

# re: July 10, 2008 - personal update

Phil, I've been thinking about different options for a ranking and/or ways to categorize the different groupings inside of one blog entry (so someone could just subscribe to debugging stuff for example) but haven't gotten the point of actually implementing anything.

I use WLW for everything except the Interesting Finds ... mainly out of habit, but after reading you note I decided to play with it a little and found that I could just drag and drop the links, but would still leave me to type the names or copy paste ... which may be better. I'll give WLW a shot monday morning to see how it would work.

Thanks for the note!
7/10/2008 6:07 PM | Jason Haley

# re: July 10, 2008 - personal update

BTW: Phil - when you guys going to do another geek dinner over in Bellevue?
7/10/2008 6:09 PM | Jason Haley

# re: July 10, 2008 - personal update

You've got to figure out a way to monetize your RSS feed. I haven't been to your site in months, but I scan thought every post in Google Reader. If you can sneak an ad in there, I would be glad to click on it.
7/10/2008 7:00 PM | Bryan Peters

# re: July 10, 2008 - personal update

Bryan: I've been thinking about that, just haven't come to any conclusions yet. I guess I need to look into the options there.
7/11/2008 3:16 AM | Jason Haley

# re: July 10, 2008 - personal update

You still look the very same as you did on your wedding day (with the exception of the tux), so don't bother changing your photo.
7/11/2008 4:16 AM | Dave Burke

# re: July 10, 2008 - personal update

Let's get a geek dinner together soon. I usually wait till Lazycoder does something.
7/11/2008 1:01 PM | Haacked

# re: July 10, 2008 - personal update

G'Day Jason - I just had a thought (don't know if it can be done) but could you not use del.icio.us to save your links, tag them with a date and then generate the HTML for your blog entry?

The process would go something like this:
* read
* when you find something interesting, tag it with the date (among other things) in del.icio.us e.g. tag with "20080710". Add your comments using del.icio.us
* use the RSS feed of the del.icio.us tag for the date ("20080710") to gather all your links in one place, and generate your HTML out of that?

OK, writing it down like that makes it look a lot longer than I'd originally thought :-)

Keep up the good work anyway Jason!

Cheers, Thomas
7/11/2008 6:25 PM | Thomas Williams

Post Comment

Title  
Name  
Url
Comment   
Please enter the following code into the box below to stop spammers

   		Enter Code Here *