Ten. Ten. Ten. Ten. Tell me all about ten.

[reddragdiva]

• Cory Doctorow: how to write with distractions.

• Rocknerd: rock stars with their parents.

Lovely pubbing on Sunday with nyecamden. Hopefully convinced hairyears to get off his hairyarse and start his VBA in Excel blog. (He tells frightening tales of just how much serious money flows around investment banks courtesy stupidly complicated macros in Excel spreadsheets written by the likes of him.) Hung out with prolificdiarist and Claire someone, who were lovely. We all deeply appreciated breasts, especially aster13's ("if you're going to talk about breasts, they'd better be mine!"). Drank beer, ate the beef roast.

I haven't been doing much to push the blogs lately. I've been skipping days all over the place — insanely busy at work, Freda's being as demanding as any toddler, life is work, home, play with kid, In The Night Garden (my theory is it's designed to drive parents insane while indoctrinating their kids to the imminent return of the Great Old Ones) and maybe write a NotN every coupla days and a photo post when I remember. I certainly haven't been lifting a finger to publicise them.

Then someone emailed asking why News of the News was rocketing up the today.com charts. Then I looked at my hits. Reddit and StumbleUpon took me over 100,000 hits in the last three days. Holy crap.

The secret of successful blogging: Write stuff your readers will want to tell their friends about.

I need to apply this more.

(I write fabulously witty satires of British politics and no-one cares. I write "HAHA LOL MICRO$OFT SUXXX" and get a zillion hits. WHAT.)

Comments

[nyecamden.livejournal.com]

Lovely date.

*breasts*

[prolificdiarist.livejournal.com]

Coincidentally enough, I'm just writing an Lj post listing some of my fave satirical posts :)

Kx

PS Hurrah for breasts!

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

Cory Doctorow: how to write with distractions.

What? No distracting features? EMACS? Really?

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

/me writes thesis in gedit
(Actually, drawing pictures for it, but when I am writing, text editor.)

I write "HAHA LOL MICRO$OFT SUXXX" and get a zillion hits. WHAT.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

People will like any old rubbish (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/01/interview-iphone-dev-criticizes-customers-of-his-crap-app.ars).

[amon-zero.livejournal.com]

In The Night Garden (my theory is it's designed to drive parents insane while indoctrinating their kids to the imminent return of the Great Old Ones)

Oh God - it all makes so much more sense now...

[spangle-kitten.livejournal.com]

Having just heard you on Radio 2 (well done, you sounded really nervous) I was reminded I've meant to add you for ages! Libby xx

[rbradakis.livejournal.com]

Cory D. was talking about that sort of thing this weekend, too. So it was nice to see his writeup linked elsewhere after the con.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

> fabulously witty satires of British politics

You know that PM of ours. He's an Idiot. And One Eyed. And *SCOTTISH*.

:-)

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

> how much serious money flows around investment banks courtesy stupidly complicated macros in Excel spreadsheets written by the likes of him

Yes. Well. There is a reason for that and I dont really think it is his fault.

The problem is that a lot of it is written by non-programmers. They are often the only people who understand the algorithms required.

I have *almost* stayed entirely clear of this but did once work on a library to be used as a plugin inside Excel which did a lot of valuation as a simple VBA/Macro call. Unfortunately the algorythms used were still written by non programmers. Non programmers writing C++. Yuck.