New Banner Pictures

I’ve added some 2010 pictures to the banner on this site. They come up randomly and you may not fortunate enough to be the one to see them, so here they are all together.

These are some of the flowers from the garden:

Spring_Flowers

This is Buttermere taken from in the lake:

Buttermere

This is Northumberland where we spent this year’s summer holiday:

Northumberland_Beach

Grassmere and some more lake swiming:

Grassmere_Evening

Chatsworth and some interesting sculptures:

Chatsworth_Sculpture

A very cold Derwentwater:

Derwent_Snow_1

I like looking back over photos it reminds of the great times we had.

My top 50 posts for 2010

Even though 2010 isn’t over yet I don’t suppose I’m going to write anything that’s going to radically change this list over the next few days – so here it is, in order of the number of individual page hits:

  1. Rich Pictures
  2. Team Development: Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing
  3. A Lack Of Planning On Your Part Does Not Constitute An Emergency On Mine
  4. Windows Live Writer Dictionary – Hack
  5. Why am I wound up by this?
  6. Friday is no longer the end of the working week
  7. Look out – the Millennial are coming
  8. Tension Headaches: My Journey So Far
  9. Technology is making us rude
  10. Concept of the Day: Cognitive Surplus
  11. Brabantia: Excellent Customer Care
  12. The unwanted results of Social Networking
  13. Let’s hear it for the New Dorks
  14. The New Work-Life Balance
  15. Social Networks – Unexpected Results in the Snow
  16. Single Instance Storage in Windows Server 2003 R2
  17. Slow Logon v Slow Applications
  18. Playing a new game
  19. The IT Vendor – Pen League Table
  20. Top 10 – Lazy Blogging Tips
  21. Procrastination
  22. Where’s the Whiteboard?
  23. Conference Call Meetings
  24. My Tools: Office Clip Art
  25. Top 10 – Communication Tips
  26. Story, Biography and Metaphor
  27. What do I know?
  28. Why is IT changing? Why does it have to change?
  29. Blogging – 5 years on (well nearly)
  30. I love what I do – because – I’m good at what I do – because…
  31. Random Thoughts for the Bank Holiday Weekend
  32. Stress and Information Addiction
  33. Business Networking – Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and the Cigarette Shelter
  34. Designed on the back of an envelope
  35. Speak Clearly
  36. Is the devil really in the detail?
  37. Adding more people won’t fix the problem!!!
  38. The Conversation Prism V3
  39. 2009 Top 10 (sort of)
  40. Branding Colours – on the Web
  41. Write something!
  42. Learning About Me – Learning Agility
  43. I could spend hours doing this…
  44. Caffe Business Observations
  45. Confessions of an Information Addict
  46. The need for exposure
  47. Feeding the Fire of Expectation
  48. The Power of WordPress Infographic
  49. Statistically Predicting the World Cup
  50. Who’s Suing Whom In the Telecoms Trade?

The reality of the situation is that the Rich Pictures post is by far the most popular one which is primarily because of a lot of visitors from educational establishments.

It’s interesting to me that the posts I am most proud of are rarely the ones that get the most visits. There’s a certain irony in that.

Windows Live Writer 2011

Really enjoying the new Windows Live Writer 2011.

I was a little concerned that the development team might decide to take this nice sleek stripped back tool and give it some “features”. Thankfully they haven’t gone after the spec. sheet and added in a whole load off new things.

The ribbon interface is most welcome and it looks a bit neater, but apart from that it does what it says.

And I don’t want it to do any more than that thanks.Smile

Top 10 – Lazy Blogging Tips

Here are some tips for the lazy blogger – but remember “lazy” doesn’t necessarily mean “good”.

The aim of the lazy blogger is to get as many updates on their blog as possible – with the minimal amount of effort. Here are some great ways of getting the most output for the minimal amount of input:

  1. Write about the same subject over and over again. There’s no need to find something new to say, you can just regurgitate the same old stuff under a different title.
  2. Get systems to post stuff you are doing in other places. Delicious, Twitter, even Facebook can be made to post the updates you make there into your blog. It’s really annoying for the reader because the value is very low indeed, but at least it keeps your blog updating.
  3. Top and tale someone else’s content. Find a post you like, copy most of the content out of it into your blog, make a comment at the beginning and the end, done.
  4. Embed. As with above, just embed someone else’s picture, video, etc. in order to create a post of your own. You can do this without even topping and tailing.
  5. Just write infrequently.It’s a balance between laziness and neglect.
  6. Split your posts into multiple posts. If you do get an idea of something to write about, don’t put it all into one post so that it’s easy to read. Instead split the updates across a number of days by writing multiple posts.
  7. Write trivia. There’s always something useless that can be said, but probably shouldn’t be said.
  8. The “popular posts” blog. Just cut and paste a list of the most read posts from your WordPress statistics and post it. This list is highly unlikely to change very often partly because you’ve increased the popularity of the popular posts by posting them as popular posts.
  9. Write Top 10 lists. They are very poplar, they’re easy to write, and often only contain a couple of really valuable insights. I’ve never really understood the phenomenon myself.
  10. Why does there need to be 10?

Write something!

This site has had 11% less visitors this month – but why? What’s happened?

ClimbingIt’s simple – I haven’t written anything since 26th July. I’ve not been lazy and I’m not loosing interest, I’ve just been on holiday and as part of my effort to frame a new work-life balance I decided that I wasn’t going to write anything while away, not even on my blessings site (and not facebook, or twitter either). It was also part of my leaving for a while and my ongoing relationship with information addiction.

The result is not surprising – less visitors.

One of the reasons I don’t try and glean any financial benefit from this site is because I don’t want to feel under pressure to keep the visitor numbers up. I have enough pressure to deal with without giving myself any more.

Look out for an update on my journey with tension headaches, I’ve been to the doctor again this morning after some interesting experiences on holiday.

I’ll also be posting some pictures from our trip to Northumberland when I’ve sorted through the multitude. Look out for some new Jimmy and Granddad and many, many floral shots (a project being undertaken by another member of the family).

So, we’ll see how long it takes for the statistics to recover – or perhaps they won’t?

Lists of Stuff

Some people’s blogs are full of lists of thing – I’m not a huge fan of lists for lists sake, but thought I would make an exception. An exception for no particular reason other than I thought I would, and it’s my blog, so I get to decide.

Jimmy and Granddad Explore the Lake DistrictThese are the top 10 posts for the last 90 days:

  1. Rich Pictures
  2. Team Development: Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing
  3. A Lack Of Planning On Your Part Does Not Constitute An Emergency On Mine
  4. Friday is no longer the end of the working week
  5. Tension Headaches: My Journey So Far
  6. Let’s hear it for the New Dorks
  7. The New Work-Life Balance
  8. Concept of the Day: Cognitive Surplus
  9. Windows Live Writer Dictionary – Hack
  10. Playing a new game
  11. What do I know?

For anyone listening – the one on Windows Live writer hack is no redundant and has been for a very long time.

and these are the top 20 search terms:

  1. rich picture
  2. rich pictures
  3. rich pictures examples
  4. graham chastney
  5. forming storming norming performing
  6. a lack of planning on your part
  7. group dynamics forming storming norming
  8. nice quotations
  9. rich picture symbols
  10. “a lack of planning on your part”
  11. ssm rich pictures
  12. lack of planning on your part
  13. forming in team development
  14. rich picture example
  15. quotes about reading
  16. cultural plasticity
  17. “lack of planning on your part”5
  18. focussing on work
  19. forming storming norming performing diagrams
  20. forming team development

Interesting to see that people were searching for me by name.

and this is the top 10 list of visiting countries for the first half of 2010:

  1. United Kingdom
  2. United States
  3. Australia
  4. Canada
  5. Germany
  6. India
  7. Malaysia
  8. South Africa
  9. Singapore
  10. Russia

and in that time this is the mix of browsers used (which has changed significantly from the previous 6 months):

clip_image002

1.

 

Internet Explorer

42.25%

 

2.

 

Firefox

34.44%

 

3.

 

Chrome

13.74%

 

4.

 

Safari

6.73%

 

I could continue but I can sense, already, that you’re not really that interested.

Although I’m not a huge fan of lists – I am quite a fan of statistics.

WordPress 3.0 – Updates Complete

A short note this one.

Flowers in the Museum Gardners - YorkI’ve now upgraded all of my WordPress sites to WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious”.

Everything upgraded without a hitch, which was a pleasure and a relief.

I did all of the usual safety things and took backups of the files and the database, but didn’t need any of them.

Once the preparation was done, all I had to do was to click “upgrade”, so easy anyone could do it.

A big thank you WordPress.org and a similar sized thank you to all of the plug-in writers who’ve updated their code.

Trying out Wordress for BlackBerry

This post isn’t going to say anything of any real value other than to say that I’m trying out the WordPress Client Beta for BlackBerry.

It looks like it will be a really tidy little application for blogging those ideas that are on my mind and need to be written there and then.

The problem with those ideas is that they aren’t, on consideration, normally that good.

New design for this site

For those of you who are reading this through a some kind of Reader you might be interested to know that I’ve been tweaking the design on this site. Wisley in the AutumnFor the rest of you, you’ve probably already noticed.

There was a bit of thought behind it:

  • 3 Columns – I like 3 column designs, most people have a wide enough screen these days to make the most of it.
  • Simplicity – I like designs that are very simple, but still functional. I’m not a huge fan of designs with loads of bling. I know that this slightly contradicts the previous point but it’s a balancing act.
  • Photographs – I wanted something that would showcase some of my favourite photographs. Pictures are also a great way of engaging with people, but the skill is creating a design that allows this without it being gaudy.
  • Fonts – I don’t like serif fonts. Don’t know why particularly, I just don’t.

I’ve still got some tweaking to do.

Let me know what you think.