Lately a shocking thing has happened. People have started reading my blog. While this probably isn’t surprising to you (the reader) it is highly surprising to me (the author). I started blogging as a way to make it easier for me to find stuff in Google. When something wasn’t immediately clear using the keywords I had tried I would blog about it making sure I used the appropriate keywords so that I would be able to find it again. This also helps out other people and even now 70% of my site traffic comes from people using a search engine and landing on some random article. The ones about generating excel files in C# and what to do if SourceSafe tells you your ss.ini file is not found seems to be consistently popular. When other people started arriving at my site, I found this highly motivating and posted more. Occasionally, a work colleague would stumble upon my blog as an answer to a work related question – another unexpected business benefit to blogging.
However, since I have been regularly posting about my experiences with Team Foundation Server, many more people have subscribed to my blog – so I can only assume that they are subscribing for TFS information. I say this is an assumption because when I do drift off-topic those posts seem to get most response.
Recently, I’ve been feeling hesitant about posting certain things because I know they’ll show up in the RSS aggregators of people subscribed to my blog and I worry that I’ll be giving stuff they are not interested in. To resolve this, I have created a few more feeds. They are:-
- Martin Woodward Uncut. The current RSS feed containing all my posts. Expect to see the odd random gadget and personal post here (but no pictures of my cat or random confessions of love for my wife / family / cat / sheep that live in the field outside my window).
- Martin Woodward’s Teamprise Feed. Posts about Teamprise. These also appear in the Teamprise developer blogs feed which I would encourage you to subscribe to if you are interested in our company as the people I work with are probably more interesting than me and definitely cleverer.
- Martin Woodward’s Off Topic Feed. Just the random stuff and non of this work-related rubbish. Intended for friends who have a healthy dis-regard for my day job.
- Martin Woodward’s Microsoft Feed. Posts about Visual Studio Team System, Team Foundation Server, .NET programming etc. Everything Microsoft related. If you arrived at my blog via the link http://www.woodwardweb.com/Vsts then this may be for you.
- Martin Woodward’s Java Feed. Stuff about work I do in the Java and Eclipse areas (including Teamprise). I am currently coding in Java during the day so have a few articles here that I have been hesitant to post. The conflict between these last two feeds is what has motivated me to offer different feeds.
OK. There you have it. I hope you stay with the main feed as I hope that stuff I find interesting is interesting to you – however if things are getting a bit annoying but you don’t want to loose out on Teamprise or Team Foundation Server related bits then you can just get the relevant posts. I should add that I regularly tag posts with more than one category so if an article has both Java and Microsoft interest then it will appear in both feeds at the same time along with the Uncut feed. You’ll also frequenltly see Teamprise information showing up in the Microsoft feed. If anyone needs a feed to keep up with all of my feeds then let me know :-)
