Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

This blog is moving!

I've been blogging for little over four years now. The first blog entry was on Apr 8, 2005 on weblogs.java.net/blog/arungupta. A new blog was born on Aug 2, 2005 on blogs.sun.com/arungupta. While java.net blog was focused exclusively on technical entries, blogs.sun.com also talked a lot about personal stuff as well. Both blogs.sun.com and java.net teams have done a stupendous job providing my first ever blogging platform ever. I learned a lot during the process and will always remain thankful to them for that. blogs.sun.com provide a fair amount of look-and-feel customization and java.net somewhat basic (although it seems to be changing). But here are few things that I never encountered being an end-user:

• What does it involve to manage and administer a blog server ?
• How to leverage the "community innovation" with pluggability, extensibility, themes, and other stuff in the blogging world ?
• How to have complete control (including hosting, domain, installation, upgrade, etc) over your blog ?
• What issues are involved in ensuring high availability of a blog ?
• What are the "joys" of running a blog on personal domain ?
• Who knows what future has in store ? It's easier to deal with uncertainty this way ;-)

• If you subscribe to "http://feeds.feedburner.com/MilesToGo", then you are taken care of because the underlying blog has been updated to reflect the change.
• If you subscribe to "http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/feed/entries/atom" or "http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/feed/entries/rss" then update the URL to "http://feeds.feedburner.com/MilesToGo".
• If you subscribe to "http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/feed/comments/atom" or "http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/feed/comments/rss" then update the URL to "http://blog.arungupta.me/comments/feed/".
• If you read the blog on web, then change your bookmarks to "http://blog.arungupta.me".
• For IE and Firefox users, you can add a custom search engine to search this blog by right-clicking on the top-left corner in Search Engines/Providers drop-down and selecting "Miles to go ...". Make sure the photograph in the text matches the one displayed in the top-right corner of new blog.

Technorati: milestogo bsc java.net wordpress

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[0]

ClustrMaps Archive - Jun 20, 2009

The clustrmaps on this blog are scheduled to be archived sometime around today. And so here is a snapshot of visitors to this blog from Jun 20, 2008.



The legend is:



And here is the same map with smaller clusters:



The entries tagged milestogo show other similar statistics.

Technorati: blogs bsc milestogo clustrmaps

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[0]

blogs.sun.com turns 5

blogs.sun.com - the blogging server for Sun employees has been chugging along for 5 years today!

Congratulations to Linda and her team for running a stupendous show and providing all Sun employees with a great opportunity to engage with the community.

• 633,614 visits and 871,737 page views since Jan 5, 2007 according to Google Analytics
• 20,088 cities from 210 countries according to Google Analytics
• 747,907 visits since Jun 12, 2006 according to clustrmaps

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[1]

800th Blog Entry

Do you know this blog has been read in 19,457 cities from 208 countries, has more than 25% repeat visitors, and close to 3000 comments ?

Now that's nothing comparable to Scobleizer or TechCrunch but I'm still happy with the achievement :)

This is the 800th blog entry in little over 3.5 years and below are some statistics.

Before this blog is published, the following counter was shown in the top-right corner of the blog:



With this blog, the # of blog entries will now be incremented to 800.

Here are some charts generated by Google Analytics since Dec 2006:



And then a geographic distribution of visitors ...



And the page views ...



Here is another distribution (since Jun 2008) generated by clustrmaps:




Archived versions of Jun 2006 - Jun 2007 and Jun 2007- Jun 2008 are available. I really wish however there was a way to generate a consolidated map from all the years. It even features in top-1000 free users :)

Here is the tag cloud of entries:



As evident from the tag cloud, GlassFish (427), NetBeans (191), Web services (146), Ruby-on-Rails (128), and JRuby (107) are some of the prominent technologies featured so far.

And finally the top-25 entries:




Now the march towards 900th entry and finally completing a centennial ... most likely this year :)

Technorati: blogs bsc googleanalytics milestogo clustrmaps

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Blog Fan

It is embarrassing to share the post below but certainly very encouraging to know that readers like the posts on my two blogs (weblogs.java.net/weblogs/java.net and blogs.sun.com/arungupta).



I've thoroughly enjoyed 544 posts on weblogs.java.net and 762 posts on blogs.sun.com so far :)

Thanks for the continued readership and feel free to send suggestions by leaving a comment on the blog!

Technorati: blogs java.net bsc milestogo

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TOTD #59: How to add Twitter feeds to blogs.sun.com ? + Other Twitter Tools

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users's updates which are text-based posts upto 140 characters in length. This Tip Of The Day will show how to add Twitter feeds to your blog but first some facts about Twitter:

The State of Twittersphere Q4 2008 was released recently (generated using Tweet Grader) and shows:

• Total of 4-5 million users
• 70% users joined in 2008, 20% joined in past 60 days, 5-10 new accounts/day (so mostly noobies)
• Only 5% have 250 or more followers
• Only 0.8% have 1000 or more followers
• 35% tweeters have 10 or fewer followers
• 9% tweeters follow no one at all

1. Go to twitter.com/widgets and select Other as shown below:
   
   
   
   It allows you to create Flash and HTML widgets for any web page. Twitter feeds can be directly added to some other popular social networking websites by selecting their option.
   
2. Click on "Continue" and choose between Flash or HTML widget as shown below:
   
   
   
3. Click on "Continue" and feel free to customize as shown below:
   
   
   
   "Number of updates" is the number of tweets that will be shown and title can be changed as well.
4. For blogs.sun.com, this obtained code fragment can be easily added to "_sideColumn" template.

1. Twitterfeed: Twitter your blog entries
2. Twitterank: Page rank for Tweeters (85.01 as of this writing, live here)
3. Twinfluence: Combined influence of twitterers and followers (as of Jan 2)
4. TwitterCounter: Widget that shows twitterer follower
5. TwitterFox: Firefox extension that notifies of tweets (really sweet and lots of other related plugins)
6. SocialToo: Manage online interactions of Twitter (surveys, auto-follow/unfollow, Direct Messages to new followers)
7. TweetStats: Trends and analysis as shown below:
   
   
   
   Live stats for @arungupta are available here.
8. TweetLater: Schedule tweets for a particular time/day and some other features similar to SocialToo (auto-follow/unfollow and DM to new followers)
9. Easy Tweets: Schedule tweets in future, automatically post RSS feeds and other similar features

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[5]

Happy New Year 2009!

Wishing everybody a very happy and prosperous 2009!

With 275 total blog entries published during 2008 on this blog, 2008 was the most blogging-healthy year. Thanks to all the readers of this blog for a continually increased readership.

Here are some statistics for this blog for the year 2008 (2007 stats here) generated by Google Analytics:



2007 reported 183,031 visits and that shows upto 86% growth in page visits.




The average index is constantly over 2000 (again better than 2007). But there is a definite mismatch between numbers reported blogs.sun.com (powered by Roller) and Google Analytics. Unless the definition of "page views" is different, the numbers reported on this blog are constantly in the figure of 6-8K/day and Analytics report only in the vicinity of 2K.

Here is a geographic distribution of visitors:



And same data using ClustrMaps (from Jun 20, 2008 only):



Jun 2007 - Jun 2008 clustrmap is archived here.

Here is the tag cloud (including number of blog entries on each tag):




And finally here are the top-25 accessed blog entries:





Enjoy the new year eve celebrations all around the world:


Let 2009 bring peace and prosperity every where!

Technorati: happynewyear 2008 2009 blogs bsc googleanalytics milestogo

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500 Blog Entries Old

This is 500th blog entry on this blog :)

Here is the tag cloud indicating the major topics covered so far:

And here is a geographic distribution of readers:

Technorati: bsc 2008

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Happy New Year 2008!

2007 is history. Even in 2008 a day is gone, and 2 days in some parts of the world. But better late than never, so this blog wishes everybody in the blogosphere a very happy new year!

Here are some of the statistics for this blog for the year 2007:

Site Usage

Page Views

There is a high likelihood of mismatch between the way Roller instance of blogs.sun.com and Google Analytics calculate pageviews (or may be the definition of "pageviews" is different). This blog typically averages from 4-6k hits/day for past 6 months as reported on the side bar of blogs.sun.com. That would calculate to 1.27 million pageviews (5k hits/day ~ 6 months + 2k hits/day ~ 6 months) but Google Analytics report approx 1/4th of that number.

Top-25 sites

The statistics so far are generated using Google Analytics.

Geo Map of Visitors (still Miles to Go ... :)

Places visited by this blog

And a brief moment of excitement was when this blog showed up at the top rank on blogs.sun.com :)

Thanks to all the readers of this blog for a continually increased readership. Please feel free to suggest topics that you'd like to hear about.

Technorati: happynewyear 2007 2008 blogs bsc googleanalytics

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First time - Blog at top rank

Oh gosh, this is exciting!

Thanks Eduardo for the tip!

Technorati: blogs rank bsc hotblog

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BSC Scobelized

Robert Scoble's list of top 35 feeds has blogs.sun.com at #6. Read more here.

Technorati: bsc scoble topfeeds

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Blog in top 3 today

My blog (Miles to go ...) is at third position in hot blogs today, how cool is that ?

Thanks to all of you and please continue suggesting more topics on which you'd like to see entries.

Technorati: blogs rank bsc hotblog

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[2]