blogging

“AWS Week in Review” goes open

I’ve been a big fan of Amazon AWS for over two years now. One thing that absolutely blows me away is how much activity there is in Amazon AWS development. Every day there is an announcement of a new services or updates to the existing ones. In order to help people keep up with all the updates, Jeff Barr of Amazon was blogging “AWS Week in Review” for a few years.

Now, imagine this – there is so much new stuff going on that it takes hours to prepare each of those blog posts:

Unfortunately, finding, saving, and filtering links, and then generating these posts grew to take a substantial amount of time. I reluctantly stopped writing new posts early this year after spending about 4 hours on the post for the week of April 25^th.

This is insane! So he almost gave up on the idea, as it is too time consuming. But people want it. What’s the solution? Go Open Source!

The AWS Week in Review is now a GitHub project (https://github.com/aws/aws-week-in-review). I am inviting contributors (AWS fans, users, bloggers, and partners) to contribute.

Every Monday morning I will review and accept pull requests for the previous week, aiming to publish the Week in Review by 10 AM PT. In order to keep the posts focused and highly valuable, I will approve pull requests only if they meet our guidelines for style and content.

At that time I will also create a file for the week to come, so that you can populate it as you discover new and relevant content.

I think that’s a brilliant move. Those weekly review posts are super useful for anyone involved with Amazon AWS. They should keep coming. But the time cost involved is understandable. So crowd-sourcing this is a smart way to go about it.

I hope this will not only continue the blog post series, but also take it to the new level, with more section, content, and insight.

Well done!

Emails, WordPress, and lots of Archives

I’ve been running this blog for a very long time now. The Archives page links back to all the months and years (all the way to the first post back on October 21, 2001) of all kinds of posts – random rants, movie reviews, technical posts, and day summaries. But who does read the archives ever, right?

Well, if you are running a WordPress site with lots of content, and you want to rediscover some of your old gems, there is an excellent plugin that helps with that – “This Day in History“. I have a widget, powered by that very plugin, both on the front page of the site (showing posts from the same day in previous years), and on every post page (showing posts from the same day of the post in different years).

Today I found this short post about email and Microsoft Outlook:

There was a time, when I used to love email. I loved receiving email, and reading it. Replying to email. Or just writing up some new email. Occasionally, forward email. I loved searching through email. Or categorizing it. Or archiving email. I loved quoting email. And I loved email with attachments. But now, I pretty much hate all of that. Thank you, MS Outlook.

Which made me think of the IT Crowd TV series, the very first episode of the very first season, where Jen was going through the interview:

I’ve always been a big fan of IT Crowd, in particular for its accurate take on the corporate culture. Obviously, I thought of myself more like the Roy character, not Jen:

Given that the post was written in 2012, and this episode came out in 2006, I was probably mocking it, but I don’t remember for sure. Anyways, it’s fun.

Oh, and by the way, if you were wondering what’s a better email client, here is the post just for you.

Jetpack annual report for mamchenkov.net in 2015

This year’s Jetpack annual report for this blog is ready – have a look. Here’s a teaser:

It’s been a busy year, so I haven’t been blogging as much as I wanted to, but overall, I think I did good (have a look at 2014 and 2013). Just to give you a quick comparison:

Metric	2013	2014	2015
Visitors	58,000	81,000	96,000
Posts	560	628	541

I blog mostly for myself, but it’s nice to see a slight grow in traffic. Although the fact that the most popular post in this blog throughout the years – how to check Squid proxy version – is a little concerning, yet funny. Well, at least people still find my “Vim for Perl developers” useful, even though it’s been more than 10 years since I wrote that (and probably five years since I promised to update it soon).

But as I said, I’m quite satisfied with my blogging this year. Hopefully I can continue to do the same in 2016.

Everyone needs a website

Matthew DiIulio shares a few good reasons for why “Everyone Needs A Personal Website“. All are valid, even if simplistic:

Using social media for your web presence works wonderfully, but you don’t own and control your content. At any time your social media account could be deleted, and then your long time web presence is gone.

Seth Godin’s post “You are what you share” takes a different, deeper, world-changing approach:

Sharing an idea you care about is a generous way to change your world for the better.

The culture we will live in next month is a direct result of what people like us share today. The things we share and don’t share determine what happens next.

As we move away from the top-down regime of promoted movies, well-shelved books and all sorts of hype, the recommendation from person to person is now the most powerful way we have to change things.

I recommended blogging to everyone for years using a completely different set of reasons, varying from improved language and writing skills, through wider social and professional network, to useful memory dumping.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter why you should do it. Everyone has their own reasons. But one thing I do agree with the gentlemen above – do have your own web presence, and keep sharing your stuff.