In the months ahead, I will be making use of this weblog to discuss software development technologies and processes I’ve learned to use in my ten-year career. I will most likely be writing about web technologies and web services, and open source technologies rather than proprietary ones.
I am more likely to cover Ruby on Rails and Ruby as a language and cross-platform development technology versus other open source technologies, as this is what I now prefer. But you may also see posts on C and C++, Java Enterprise Edition technologies, Python, Mozilla technologies such as XUL and XULRunner, and software development ideas in general. I may cover C# and .Net, but only because you can develop cross-platform applications with them using Mono.
My article proposals for “the secret online geekly articles site” are most likely to be accepted if they are about Java technologies. As I research my articles, I am bound to write about Java subjects here. But I’ll try to make the weblog posts more general than the articles. If the article proposals get turned down after a few rewritings and retries, I will publish the subject here or try to get them published somewhere else, like InfoQ and The Server Side.com. (BTW, that should be a hint that those two sites aren’t “the secret online geekly articles site.”)
I will also cover some Unix administration topics. For example, I feel I ought to cover the details of pjtrix’s Subversion configuration, as I found the online manual a bit wanting in specifics. Other like-minded geeks, the very people I’d like to bring to my weblog, might welcome a more direct approach. There are also more ssh tricks I haven’t begun to cover.
All of this writing will hopefully be bringing new readers to my humble weblog and other parts of the website. Armed with this hope, I continue to get pjtrix.com ready for 2007.
Tuesday night, I signed up to Google Analytics and Tools for Webmasters, and added to the WordPress and Trac templates the bits of JavaScript that report to Google where you all come from. The reports Google provides are nice and pretty, but I find Google’s solution wanting, specially in their support of blogging and citizen media. The tools are more geared towards “website” traffic analysis. That’s just lame.
Not everyone that will come here will do so with a JavaScript-powered browser. Feed readers and podcast clients, for instance, only speak HTTP and RSS or Atom. They will leave no trace in Google Analytics’ logs.
To complement Google Analytics, I’ve installed the Webalizer Apache log analysis tool, which will help me study my web server logs in more detail without my being swamped in hundreds of megabytes of raw text.
I also installed the Popularity Contest WordPress plugin. This should help direct search-passers-by to what’s hot on this site, or just make it more clear sooner that they got to the wrong place. 
Hopefully, the combination of Google Analytics, Webalizer, and Popularity Contest, will together help me learn who my audience is, learn what is “my voice,” and learn how to make this weblog more valuable to my readers.
Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, hacks, ssh, software.development, open.source, web.architecture, wordpress, weblogs, web.technologies, web.services, cross.platform
