Blogging is a relatively new idea. We could argue that it is unprecedented. People kept diaries before, but they were personal. If they ever got published they would likely be heavily edited. Only the Internet allowed you to publish a diary every day – or even every hour – or if you’re a twitterer then all the time.

One of my analyst acquaintances, Jon Collins, leads a dual life, writing IT Analysis pieces and also writing on music (he does rock star biographies). This means that his blog is to some extent “schizophrenic”. I’m similar, in that I write about many things. Until now I’ve only published the IT stuff, but a blog gives me the opportunity to publish it all in some way or other, as long as I structure the blog in a way that isn’t too confusing and caters for that.

So the philosophy of this blog is to publish everything I write that might have an audience. Hell, it’s a grab bag, but I guess that this can work as long as I use the right structure. So here’s the plan that I’m following:

1. Everything I publish will be published as a blog entry, except structural and navigational pages. In that way, anyone can choose to read any posting and it might be about anything. Although most postings will be about IT.
2. The left hand column shows what I want you to think of as the most recent 16 posts.
3. I use the categories (see categories list on the left hand side) to classify every posting in one way or another. That means you can get a list of postings by category, by clicking on these.
4. Some of the navigation tabs at the top of the page also correspond to categories, but they provide a more organized means of getting at content.
5. I can back-date postings, and I do. I back-date any posting that I don’t want to be on the home page. I don’t want postings that are likely to be less popular to be on the home page.
6. I have an extensive back catalog of postings (from IT-Director.com) that I am gradually putting up on the site. I always back-date these when I post them, if they clearly relate to an earlier time. You will thus never know when I put them up as they do not appear on an RSS feed or as a recent post.

I’m hoping that this structure will enable and encourage visitors not just to read the latest post, but also to explore the content on this site. I’m hoping that, in time, the content will become a useful resource for some.

Building this blog site has demanded more effort than I expected, possibly because I’m on a ferocious learning curve and partly because I have many other calls on my time – so it’s all subject to random interrupts. Also, I haven’t built anything in software terms for over 15 years. Anyway even though I still don’t regard the site as officially live it has attracted too much traffic for the resources that I originally rented, so I’ve had to transfer the site to a dedicated server.

So if you noticed that the site was out of action at any point in the past 7 days, that is probably why. The status of the site is now as follows:

Performance

The site shouldn’t need much attention for a while unless I get more popular than I can imagine.

Content

I am gradually loading my back catalog. I have added quite a lot of content, but back dated it to accord with the time that I wrote it. Consequently it will never show up on the home page. However, it will draw some traffic through Google and other search engines. I eventually intend to load everything I’ve written – which amounts to over 15 years of writing articles, reports, reviews, etc. I’ll only load the stuff that has some relevance, but the outcome I’m shooting for is that this will become a useful reference resource.

Roadmap

I don’t intend this to be a “text only” site. I’ve already added images as a separate line of content for the site and I will develop this in time. I will also be adding other media. Actually I’ll be adding many things. There’s little point in doing that unless the site is “sticky” to some degree.

Traffic

Currently Google analytics is telling me that the site is sticky, with the average number of page views per visit being just under 2.5. About 70 percent of visitors read a single page, while 30 percent are returning visitors and those are the ones that read several pages. Most readers are from the US (after which it’s the UK, then equal activity from the rest of the world).

Layout

I’ve been ignoring layout for weeks now. I’m going to get back to it. When I do I’ll implement the changing skin effect that I’ve been planning for months. However, right now, content takes preference over layout.

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The most disturbing place I visited this last year was New Orleans. To those visiting for the first time, even in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is exotic. The French Quarter has a beauty that is unique, right now, this area of New Orleans has revived, with all businesses reopened and the tourist traffic quietly growing. It is more than two years since Katrina, and while half of the city’s evacuees (about 200,000) will never return, there is still a steady trickle that are returning, with the intent to rebuild.

C’est magnifique, mais c’est folie.

Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level. At the time I set out for the Big Easy, National Geographic published a story suggesting that if the sea level rose by 3 feet, then Lake Pontchartrain would no longer be a lake but a bay, and New Orleans would be pretty much gone. As it passed through, Hurricane Katrina destroyed a big piece of the wetlands that serve to protect New Orleans from hurricanes. But the wetlands have been losing 24 square miles each year since the 1930s. Katrina wasn’t even that big a hurricane. It was force 3 when it came ashore, but it came ashore East of New Orleans. It was only force 2 in the Big Easy itself, but that drove enough water ashore and into Lake Pontchartrain to break the levees.

In any event, a 3ft rise in sea level is pretty much a given in the coming years. For that increase, scientists no longer calculate “if” they try to guess “when” – and it is no simple task. Most of the ice that is on land is in Greenland or Antiarctica. If all of the glaciers elsewhere melted, then the sea level would rise a mere 1.5 ft. Luckily, most of the ice on Greenland and Antarctica cannot melt. It is lodged in areas where the temperature never rises as high as zero. Calculating how much of the ice in the coastal areas of Greenland and Antarctica will melt and when it will melt is the difficult thing. As far as I can tell, all we can do at the moment is measure what’s happening and model it, until we get close to being able to predict it accurately.

So, What About My Home Town?

If you happen to live on the coast and you want to know if your property or your home town is destined for a watery grave, there are some useful resources on the web. Earthtools links to Google, to provide a contour map capability that can tell you precisely the height above sea level for most of North America and Europe. A more disturbing capability is provided by architecture2030.org. This provides pictures of how various coastal cities in the US will look after various increases in sea level rise.

If, for example, you’d like to see New Orleans after a 1 meter rise in sea level then click here. It’s sobering – especially when you realise that there’s neither the political will, nor the money to save New Orleans. And the same may be true for many other cities that are far too coastal for their own good (like New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, etc.) It is simply a fact that the vast majority of the commercial centers of the world are on the coast, or near to the coast, and most of them are vulnerable to quite modest rises in sea level. Right now, nobody is working to preserve any of these great cities.

For that to happen, the world needs a poster child – a great city that does disappear irretrievably. My guess is that it will be New Orleans. It is a beautiful place, and the time to visit it is now, while it still exists.

When you leave it, say “adieu” not “au revoir”.