Retrieve Old orablogs.com Posts

For those who haven’t heard, orablogs.com is gone and you really do NOT want to go there as there’s some very NSFW links now.  I’ve seen a number of posts from people who lost old content hosted there who wish to retrieve or view it. Way Back Machine to the rescue!  Here’s a direct link to the pages that the Way Back Machine has archived for orablogs.com.

The "Tom Effect"

Earlier this week I was chatting with Tom Kyte over IM about blog traffic. I was just curious about his stats as I wanted to set some goals for myself. Yes, I know we are in a completely different league, but hey, I guy can dream, right? The conversation paused for a minute, then Tom replied with “tell me what your stats are like tomorrow”. During that pause he wrote this simple post. For those of you familiar with the Digg effect, or the phenomenon formerly know as the Slashdot effect, Tom had a similar impact on my traffic, at least in the context of the Oracle community. My traffic spiked to 3x my best day. I’ve had more hits this week than any previous month!

Why do I care? AdSense baby! Just kidding. My primary goal is motivation. Knowing that people read my posts motivates me to write more. If my average daily hits drop below, say 2, I will probably stop blogging. With this huge surge in traffic, I feel an obligation to post something useful and to do it soon (though this post should not count as useful). I’ll think of something by the weekend…

Thanks Tom, you rock!

It’s about time!

Blogging has been a goal of mine for a long time. As a daily consumer of many great blogs, I’ve felt the need to start giving back at some point, but never knew where to start. I was always looking for that killer topic for my first post, but never found it. My goal was not just to contribute, but to become more involved in “the community”. Tom Kyte has been a big proponent of community and of all the things I’ve learned from him, this is probably the most important. When I was on the APEX development team, I spent a lot of time answering questions on the APEX forum. My goal was to help others learn about APEX, but I have to admit that I learned more from that community than anyone on that forum ever learned from me. There were a lot of challenging questions, requiring a lot of thought, research, and trial-and-error development. There were also a lot of creative alternatives to my solutions posted by other members of that community.

Now that I’ve got the introduction out of the way, it’s time to start posting something worth reading…