Happy Birthday Command Line Warriors

It has now been about two years since I started to blog properly here, and one of the running in-jokes of the blog is that Phill is my only reader, and he only comes because he knows me from Uni days and feels sorry for me. Seems that is not (always) true anymore.

Digg

The author of a blog called h4x0red submitted me to Digg.com, and I was on the front page for about 10 minutes until my bandwidth was full (got to get on a server with decent upload connection one of these days). You can see the screenshot of this site at the top of Digg here (large image will be slow).

LinuxUser and Developer

This is the UK's main printed Linux magazine. Issue 71, which is in the shops now, features your very own Command Line Warriors as the first blog in a new series called "Pick of the Blogs", starting on page 68. The author, Rachel Probert says:

> There is something for everyone here, and each new entry is a pleasure to read.

Did they go to the right blog? Since about a third of the page is whitespace, and most of the rest of the page is filled with unauthorised screenshots of my blog and another (ex-) blog, I thought I would share a low-res scan with you.

A time to make sites and a time to ditch them

Sadly fame is a curse ;), and the blog featured to the right of mine (TRYST WITH LINUX) has called it a day already. I noticed that the author, Nigel Kumar, has four blogs, he started a cinema blog in August 2006, the Linux blog in September 2006, and two blogs in November 2006 - a theology blog and a cricket blog. Crikey, no wonder he needs to put one down.

I also have my fair share of half-finished website hobbies littering the Internet Archive. In retrospect, many of the great web projects failed because as soon as we started to get successful, the administrative burden rose with it, so they became either unmanageable or just not fun anymore.

I think now, however, I have more or less found the balance between websites that I have to update, websites that do not need to be updated very often and websites that update themselves. Looking at my tiny list of current online hobbies, the three at the bottom are due this year for either a ground up rebuild, or they will be dropped and something new will replace them.

Increasingly I seem to be spending more time getting into making open source software, rather than just making sites, that also may cause the list to be trimmed down even further that it already has been.

Why this blog is easy

This blog is the easiest of any hobby website I have ever run. I just talk about what I am doing or what is going through my head. More or less all of the technical howtos are because I have needed to solve that problem myself, so it does not take much more energy to write it down. I would have to write it down somewhere anyway, otherwise I would forget, then have to research the problem from scratch. At least this way I can use the search tool and find exactly what I did!

I once tried to read a blog called problogger.net, it was full of stuff about how to make money from a blog, so you plaster it with ads and talk in meaningless but snappy posts and spend all your time managing your affiliate programs. But the thing is, it does not sound like much fun, indeed, it sounds like a lot of stress.

So I am convinced that I find this easy because I have not done anything much for this blog beyond writing it. It uses almost the default Wordpress theme, I have not advertised it or promoted it at all, I have not even looked at the statistics once yet (so installing AWStats might be a useful future article).

I do not care if you do not like me, I am not accumulating points for anything. I do not care if you agree as I am not trying to sell you DVDs. Instantly this is more fun, discuss with me, disagree with me, flame me! Yeah!