Category Archives: what I do

Videoblogging: A Month in the Life

Ah, yes, my “glamorous” job… I admit it’s a lot of fun, but right now I’m mostly tired. This month is  the most intense I’ve yet had with Sun. Here’s what it’s looked like so far:

Oct 23: Flew to Minneapolis.

Oct 24, 27, 28: Filmed interviews with the SAM-QFS team at Sun’s Eagan, MN office, flew back to Denver.

Nov 1-6: Filmed parts of Sun’s Data Management Ambassadors’ conference, fortunately being held near my “home base” office in Broomfield. Especially fortunate because I still had a lot to do organizing the SC08 Student party. Worked long office hours when I wasn’t behind a camera in a hotel conference room.

Nov 8: Flew to San Diego.

Nov 9: Much-needed day off (it was a Sunday!), went to the zoo.

Nov 10: Filmed an all-day ZFS Workshop at LISA.

Nov 11: Flew to Las Vegas for Sun’s Customer Engineering Conference. Lunch with Barton, toured the CEC show floor, hung out and had dinner with my OpenSolaris buds, declined to go to a late show with them, went back to my hotel room, watched House.

Nov 12: Filmed an HPC track that took most of the day, plus one other presentation. In the evening, participated in a Birds-of-a-Feather session on blogging. Disagreement was, er, lively.

Nov 13: After a very bad night’s sleep (my room at Caesar’s was right on top of a disco), got up at 4 am to catch a 6:22 am flight to San Francisco. Lynn picked me up, already dialed in to a staff meeting. In the afternoon, moderated the chat as Lynn’s presentation to Forum 2.0 was streamed online. Had a few ideas about how to do the moderator’s job better, will be writing about those later. In the evening Lynn and I had a meeting with Meena, then went back to our hotel for dinner. Had an extremely hot bath – the cold water didn’t work. At least the bed was very comfortable.

Nov 14: Up early again, interesting news on my iPhone. Hurried to get to Sun’s Menlo Park campus for Lynn’s second Forum presentation, then a dash to the airport for our flight to Austin. Arrived a little before 5, Diana about the same time from Denver, then ran into Matthew at baggage claim. Everyone’s coming to town for SC08. Got our cars, I went to Spankyville, where Ross was preparing dinner for a gang of us.

Nov 15: Up at 8 to catch up on emails and run some party-related errands, then on to film at Sun’s HPC Consortium all afternoon. Ended the day filming an interview with Dr. Jim Leylek. Had a quiet dinner with Dominic, went home and to sleep.

Nov 16: Up early again today for the Consortium – first speaker of the day is Andy Bechtolsheim, so sleeping in is not an option! Will be leaving early (Peter will take over the camera) so I can go help set up the venue for the party. That will run til about 2 am, and I’m supposed to be back filming at 8:30 on Monday. Then there’s the SC08 show opening Monday night, and I’ll be filming on the show floor Tuesday through Thursday.

I hope to survive until next Saturday, when I leave for warmer climes and something resembling a vacation. I should note that this month has been equally intense for practically everybody at Sun!

Blogging Tip: Some Links Good, More Links Better

To improve search engine ranking and direct traffic to a site, we need to increase:

  • External links coming in to our pages.
  • Internal links, i.e. from a sun.com page to any other sun.com page (yes, internal links are useful).
  • Links going out – these show good webizenship (search engines like that, or at least it’s good karma). Outlinks also show the world that we are members of a community, taking part in conversations rather than trying to impose authority.

External Links

The best kinds of links are those that happen spontaneously: when someone finds something we’ve written worthy of sharing, and links to it from their own site, blog, forum post, etc.

To encourage that to happen, we need to have great content, AND we need to let people know it’s there.

Don’t be afraid to advertise. If you see a question, comment, blog post, etc. anywhere, and you know that a page or doc exists on the Sun site that would be useful, let people know in a forum response or blog comment.

If something you read elsewhere inspires you to write a blog post or formal document in response, let the source of your inspiration know that you’ve answered their question in depth, and where they can read that answer.

External links also increase direct traffic, depending on the popularity of the site the link is on and the pull of the material linked with that particular audience. But, even when a link only nets a few extra visitors here and there, it’s worth having for the Google juice.

Internal Links

Some ways to increase them:

  • In your own blog, link to others’ posts and/or documents within sun.com that are relevant to your topic.
  • Whenever you write/edit a document to be posted, keep in mind the importance of links. Instead of just putting footnotes and references, link directly from the relevant point in the document to the source – these are preserved as active links in PDF documents, and Google recognizes them.
  • When participating in forums such as OpenSolaris.org, use a signature with your name, some sort of descriptor of who you are (e.g., “iSCSI guru”), and a URL where the user can go for more information, such as your blog.

Tips for Links

Use good link text that tells the reader what he will get to by clicking that link (test: if the reader had only the link text to go on, would he click? Sun’s own Martin Hardee explains some of the reasons why “click here” is evil).