Bloggers-Don’t Blog About Spam!

Earlier this week I posted Bloggers, Quit Worrying About Spam, discussing what I felt was an over-focus on preventing spam in blog comments. I stand by that, but since that post the rate of spam being posted to my blog is up by a factor of 10 or more. Whether that’s because the spammers finally […]

SQLSaturday National Blog Sponsors

With SQLSaturday #49 we tried something I call micro-sponsors, charging $5 for a blogger to sponsor the event. It’s a way to do brand building and to contribute in a fun way. It’s not a huge amount of money, about $4.50 after the merchant fees, and I think for Orlando we netted $50$60. At least […]

Bloggers, Quit Worrying About Spam

I don’t comment as often as I should on blog posts. I say should because as a blogger I know that it’s a bit of a treat to have someone post a comment, especially when you don’t know the person, or realize the person was reading what you wrote on a regular basis. Bloggers crave […]

Do You Have Influence? Part 1

Most people blog because it’s fun, rewarding, good way to improve writing skills, be cool, and it looks good on a resume. Some people also hope to use their blog to influence others in a positive way. If you’re in the latter group, read on! During our recent excitement about the 2010 elections for PASS […]

SQL Bloggers – Build Your Brand And Sponsor SQLSaturday #49

As you may know we like to try new stuff here in Orlando, and this is another new thing. I’ve been wanting to do more to help build individual brands, and the struggle is to do something meaningful, interesting, affordable. Hard to do. If you write a SQL blog that is your blog, not a […]

The Value of Blogging – Today on SQLServerCentral

I wrote the value of blogging hoping to highlight the less often discussed value of practicing writing. Too often we look at blogs solely as a branding tool, or as a way to make money, or to get a zillion hits. Nothing wrong with any of those and I wouldn’t even discourage anyone from trying […]

Writing With More Than One Voice

I’ve been blogging for a couple of years now and have slowly settled into the style and pattern of blogging that you see here today. Most posts are several paragraphs, they reflect what I’m doing and reading, and they rarely are about topics that are contentious or highly popular. I write to share, I write […]

Help Us Update the PASS Blog Directory

We put this together last year and we’re up to 270 blogs listed, but I’m sure we’re still missing some, and some have changed names (including my own). If you’re a blogger, take a minute to check that we have the right information. And if you’re a blog reader (surely you are!), grab our OPML […]

Andy on Twitter

Just prior to the 2009 PASS Summit I posted about giving Twitter a try, and thought I’d report back on some thoughts after having tried it off and on for a couple months. I went into it biased, thinking it made sense for events and situations where the ability to reach a group quickly made […]

Installing WordPress

Last week I posted about Picking a Blog Platform on some of the process that lead to me moving to WordPress. This time I thought I’d share some notes on the install and customization process so far. This is on a Windows 2003 server running IIS 6. I’m assuming here that if you decide to […]