One Year Blog Anniversary

Ok, I am a real sucker for all things sentimental, such as Anniversaries.

One year ago, I made my first blog post, a huge script code snippet that illustrates some frequently misunderstood concepts. Never mind the fact that it was not until four months later that I made the next blog post and a couple months after that when I figured out that it is better to make regular daily posts instead of bi-weekly Q/A marathons... but here we are, a year after it all began, and I still find and get interesting things to write about...

Of course, I have to take a moment to evaluate exactly what I have achieved and re-evaluate exactly what I want to accomplish...

Ok, so it is time to play with numbers. I decided to take a stroll through all of my blog posts and do a rough "popularity" score of each blog post to see what people like to read. Based on that statistic, some of my most popular blog entries include:

• 13 to 1 https://blogs.msdn.com/david.wang/archive/2005/07/14/HOWTO_Diagnose_IIS_401_Access_Denied.aspx
• 5 to 1 https://blogs.msdn.com/david.wang/archive/2005/05/26/IIS_User_Identity_to_Run_Code.aspx
• 4 to 1 https://blogs.msdn.com/david.wang/archive/2005/05/27/Access_Denied_to_Administrators_or_Anonymous_User.aspx
• 4 to 1 https://blogs.msdn.com/david.wang/archive/2005/07/11/Allow_file_downloads_on_IIS_6.aspx
• 4 to 1 https://blogs.msdn.com/david.wang/archive/2005/08/01/HOWTO_Common_URL_Redirection_Techniques_for_IIS_Summary.aspx
• 3 to 1 https://blogs.msdn.com/david.wang/archive/2005/06/21/HOWTO_Diagnose_and_Fix_Common_ISAPI_Filter_Installation_Failures.aspx
• 3 to 1 https://blogs.msdn.com/david.wang/archive/2005/08/29/HOWTO_Understand_and_Diagnose_an_AppPool_Crash.aspx

Incidentally, the 401 diagnosis article is also my first 10K blog entry. People really seem to like searching for and then reading it. The other articles are also what I deem to be basic "HOWTO" articles on IIS functionality... and are at the root of most of the frequently asked questions, so having a blog entry to reference has made answering newsgroup questions that much easier. It is kind of cool to just reference blog URLs instead of KB articles. :-)

Believe it or not, it is far easier for me to publish the correct technical information in a blog entry than for me to get that information into a KB article or documentation. The documentation process at Microsoft just plain sucks at all levels:

• I never get the correct technical information published because some technical editor with zero clue on the subject decides to change my words without telling me. I hate talking through a middleman.
• There is a mountain of red-tape just to get a change made. For example, it takes me at least six months to make a fix to MSDN documentation, from when I first notice something is wrong until the fix is published. That is frickin ridiculous in the Internet age.
• I think documentation is very much a "product", just like software products... but amazingly, it is NOT treated as such within Microsoft and is NOT produced with the same level of quality nor project management as its software counterpart. Frightening. Makes me want to shake it up.

Anyways, I can rail against that all day long and plan to within a future blog entry. This is just a sampling. ;-)

I guess I should take a quick poll and see what you would like to see me do more/less within this blog... here is your chance to make comments and suggestions. :-) Because otherwise, I will just continue writing about whatever I feel like talking about, in accordance to my blog's tagline...

Virtually Yours,

//David