2011 annual review


The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 33,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 12 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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Getting Technical: Resources for MDM Developers


One reason for the lack of new posts here is that I’ve been attempting to write my first article for the Mastering Data Management blog. After several false starts, and falling back to old school pencil and paper to finally get going, it’s finally done! So, for anyone interested in master data management, here is the very latest Mastering Data Management front page hot off the press:

Getting Technical: Resources for MDM Developers

Happy New Year!


Following Dan Power and Crysta Anderson’s lead, I’m going to kick off the new year with a look back at the most popular posts from 2010. So with barely a pause and not even a drum roll, the winners are…

1. My second CurrentCost development board circuit

Way out ahead at number one is the only circuit board I’ve completed and put to regular use. Still working fine, apart from a brief pause when the batteries ran out. Kind of regretting replacing the batteries just in time for the recent spell of cold weather!

2. Master Information Hub: Getting Started

Not a close second, but still respectably ahead of the pack, this post is one I regularly point people to the first time they use the MDM Workbench. Hopefully it’s helped a few people out this year.

3. New clock radio

Leading the pack is this surprise entry to the top ten. Unlike some Joggler owners, I still use it fairly regularly and, apart from the occasional experiment, I’m still using the O2 software it came with. I did give Jolicloud another go yesterday, to see whether a little bluetooth keyboard helps; nice, but just not quite fast enough to switch permanently. Might give MeeGo a try next.

4. Get off my hashtag

Had a really interesting chat at the last homecamp about tagging, so this is a subject I’m likely to return to this year.

5. Weather Underground + Mashup Hub + Pachube = orb food

Maybe it’s just me but I get quite excited about the potential that this kind of data mashup has. Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen what you can do with enterprise data and software like Message Broker; now imagine the possibilities with open data and simple ways for anyone to manipulate it. (That’s not manipulation in the political sense of course!)

6. Master Information Hub: Social Bookmark Services

This follows on from the number 2 post, while the third in the series has some catching up to do and didn’t make the top 10. I also have some has some catching up to do; I hope to get to the next instalment early this year.

7. Liberal Democrats can’t win here

Politicians, gotta love ’em. I wonder how these graphs will look if we get proportional representation for the next election.

8. Home Easy ambient orb

All soldered together but not yet receiving that lovely data from the number 5 post. I’m currently pondering whether to just hard code things ‘for now’ or hack some more so that the three orbs could be programmed using the BlinkM sequencer.

9. Digital House Arrest

Politicians again. Really. Very. Annoying. I never did get a reply to my last letter to my MP, Chris Huhne.

10. Manifesto

Given that all politicians seem to be as bad as each other I was half tempted to stand as a RON (reopen nominations) candidate Anyone else up for a For The Win party next time?!

Highly commended: It takes two

Not actually in the top ten but this post about Hedge End twinning deserves an honourable mention for the great comments about Frome’s twins.

Happy new year!

First Century


Almost by coincidence (i.e. only slightly contrived after I noticed how close it was) this is the first anniversary of Notes from a small field and the 100th post! If you don’t like blog posts about blog stats, look away now!

  • First post: Hello world! on 19 September 2007, and I didn’t even write it!
  • Least popular post (not including this one!): Perranporth, Cornwall with 3 hits, which is a shame because the Ordnance Survey still do nice wallpaper pics
  • Most popular search term: “low power home server” 112 times
  • Busiest day: Thursday, July 31, 2008 with 306 hits
  • Total views: 8,994
  • Spam: 2,763 (all caught thanks to Akismet)

Luckily it’s not all numbers. Here’s my roundup from the past year/99 posts:

  • Favourite comment: if I’d have started this blog sooner, there would have been a lot of posts about fitting the kitchen!
  • Most useless post: iPhone accessibility (nobody seems interested, which is a shame- must try and catch up with Andy about trying it out on the touch screen kiosk in the ETS lab instead)

If you got this far, well done! If all goes to plan, I’ll have some cakes at my desk in Hursley to celebrate.

P.S. Aarrr!

Update: If you were working at home today/don’t work in Hursley, you missed out… yum…

Cake

Cake