But then, I’m busy.

Actually my biggest peak is not shown, but somewhere early 2007 or so I had compiled a big list of tips and trick for a HTC windows Phone, and it became very popular. Once I switched to an Iphone I no longer added new content, and you can see that in the decline.

The uptick around march-may 2009 is more visitors because I wrote some articles about flex3 and how to use it (or at least how I used it).

At the end of 2009 I started up my other blog called DataConnect.be and it’s app, Twita. Most of my time is now focused on those sites trying to create an analysis program for twitter.

In 1990 when I was studying Information Science (or started to) :

• email was something used in universities
• bulletin boards via dial-up modem were still the rage
• Punch cards where still a required learning subject, so was assembly code
• I learned C (not C++) via a terminal on a mainframe that emulated C in order to run it, and took up a whole room
• We still had big rule printers in separate rooms which made the most godawful noise printing on paper fed from a box below them
• We had Winchester disks for our mainframe, mounted on wooden blocks. When our class initiated the database queries we learned, they all vibrated like washing machines.

The year after I graduated, they replaced the whole caboodle with 2 Unix machines that fit in 2 shoe boxes – one for the hard drive, one for the cpu.

And now, almost 20 years later, I’m reading my email via a wireless 3G connection on an ultra-slim touch-enabled device that seems to have dropped out of some futuristic movie, and it seems that hardly any time has passed.

But in reality, lots has changed in those years. And when I think back on those years without the internet, I feel so very happy to be able to participate in this, the knowledge available at my fingertips, the social media to find just the right persons to communicate with, the speed with which you can do calculations, the ability to share your work with others, the connectedness of it all.

And I’m just really glad to be here in the now and not 20 years ago

Oh and I posted a new article on my ‘serious’ blog :  Is facebook the new social control ?

A friend of mine recently said he wanted to start blogging, and was looking at WordPress to use as a blog. I quite like WordPress, as you may have noticed. I have been using it for some years now, but there are some caveats to be aware of for a blogger new to WordPress:

1. If you decide to host your own blog, be prepared to upgrade at short notice. Since WordPress has become very popular to use as a blog platform, the hackers target this much more now as well. My blog got hacked this year sometime during the two or three weeks I was vacationing and enjoying the summer, so you really need to regularly visit your blog and check it (WordPress now tells you in the admin interface that an update is available). An alternative is to use the blogging platform that WordPress provides via www.wordpress.com.
2. Test any new plugins that you want to install one by one, especially if they are new or in beta.
3. Disable free registration for users; this seems to be a popular way of attacking, first creating a user on your blog and then using privilige escalation to get write access to your site. If you want that other people contribute to your blog, define them yourself.
4. Get an Akismet API key (free for personal bloggers) and open up your comments for all visitorss : let akismet do the heavy work of checking your comments for spam, and give your visitors the chance to react.
5. Make a regular backup of both your wordpress db content and your files on the site; especially, do this before you upgrade !

There are many more tips, but these are the ones that I practice.