Simon Lyall's Blog

Recently Jurgen Appelo listed the Top 100 Blogs for Development Managers .

Now the list looks okay except for the first entry – Joel on Software. Now I’ve been subscribing to the site for a few years along with at least 100,000 other people ( about 10,000 times more than read this blog) but I really question it being number one anymore.

Sure there are great articles and Joel is a smart guy who creates things like Stackoverflow.com but I doing really think his blog deserves the Number 1 ranking anymore.

The main reason is that Joel doesn’t really write any articles. Looking at his archive page we can see the recent history:

Year   Number of articles


2000    42
2001    23
2002    14
2003    12
2004    9
2005    22
2006    20
2007    12
2008    4 so far

Yes, just 4 articles this year so far and the last one was in May, over 6 months ago.

Now Joel is doing the odd smaller post, he podcasts and writes articles in Inc but the point of reading the blog is the content there, not somewhere else.

So really, you can’t rate a blog that hasn’t had a real post for 6 months as being the top blog in the world for software development managers. Even Paul Graham posts more often. END

We got word a couple of days ago that the Sysadmin Miniconf had been accepted for Linux.conf.au 2009 and the media have been informed so I can can say so publicly.

It looks like the following Miniconfs have been accepted:

• Open Source databases
• Kernel
• Sysadmin
• Virtualisation
• Linuxchix
• Myth TV
• Gaming
• Mobile
• Multimedia
• Free As In Freedom
• The business of open source software

I guess the main differences from previous years are the MySQL and PostgreSQL miniconfs have been merged. There is no Debian, Education or Gnome miniconfs and I guess Mobile has replaced Embedded. It’s interesting to see the loss of the regulars, I guess in some cases it is because they have their own regular conferences.

The last two miniconfs ( “Free As In Freedom” and “The business of open source software” ) are also new, I guess they will be fleshed out.

We’ll be updated the Sysadmin Miniconf website over the next few days and the call for papers should be out next week sometime.

I also posted an email to the NZNOG list asking about interest in a Sysadmin thing at NZNOG 09 ( in Auckland the week after LCA 09 ). have a quick look and pop me an email if you are interested. END

I spent a couple of ours doing a mock up of a possible new website ( sorry not online) for the Auckland Chess Centre (link is to the old site) using wordpress.

I must say I was fairly impressed the 5 minute install really does only take about 5 minutes and everything else is pretty easy. The only hard bit was finding a good theme since most of those out there are blog based rather than designed for fixed websites but I ended up picking the deLight theme which looks okay.

Overall I’m pretty impressed with WordPress and it took just a couple of hours of playing around to get the site to 95% of what I want. Depending on the feedback I might be able to go live in a few days.

Throughly recommended for small sites. END