Thank you for supporting VCritical in the latest round of vSphere-land top virtualization blogs from Eric Siebert.

I am very pleased to be voted into the #12 slot among a huge selection of talented professionals, moving up one notch from my previous position at lucky #13.

The message is clear — I will continue writing about VMware and competitive topics and I very much appreciate your ongoing support!

Best regards,

Eric

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Top 6 posts — by page views

1. VMware ESX 4 can even virtualize itself — still the #1 Google result for “ESX 4″
2. Create ESXi 4 USB flash drives with Workstation
3. Yes, NIC teaming is not unsupported
4. Hands off that CSV!
5. The VMware ESXi 4 64MB Hypervisor Challenge
6. Hyper-V Linux Smokescreen

Top 6 posts — by reader comments

1. Hands off that CSV!
2. VMware ESX 4 can even virtualize itself
3. Layers and Layers of FUD
4. Microsoft tries deception, gets caught
5. SCVMM/PRO Complexity: High
6. Live Migration “significantly more complicated”

As I was pulling together these stats, I was not all that surprised to find that the more competitive posts tend to be the ones with the most comments.  The how-to posts ranked higher by page view — because they are linked to by many others around the blogosphere.

My sincere thanks go out to all of the readers, commentators, and fellow virtualization bloggers.

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3. First year of VCritical
4. Live Migration “significantly more complicated”

Content

Based on feedback and subscriber/reader metrics, the current blend of technical and competitive articles seems to be about right, so I plan to generally keep doing things the way I have for the foreseeable future.

I welcome any comments on the type of content you would like to see on VCritical — feel free to leave your thoughts below.

Traffic

As the following chart illustrates, I have been fortunate to experience month-over-month growth since inception.

My current policy is to not publicly disclose traffic statistics, but for perspective, each y-axis tick represents multi-thousands of page views.  I use several methods to measure statistics and this WordPress Stats module is the most conservative — it only measures actual blog page views from real users.

Blog Infrastructure

I started out with self-hosted WordPress as the platform for VCritical and have not regretted that decision once.  I did, however, need to change hosting companies twice in the past year.  That was painful, but now I’ve settled on what seems to be a sufficiently robust provider — you get what you pay for.  Thankfully, the cost is more than covered by Google ads and sponsorship.

Thanks

The virtualization space is really starting to heat up — I look forward to the next round.  Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading, subscribing, and following me on Twitter!

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4. VCritical in the top vDozen at vSphere-land

Congratulations are in order to all of the hard-working bloggers on the list — especially the top two, holding on to their positions from last time: Duncan Epping and Scott Lowe.

Although the VCritical grassroots campaign was not effective against the masters, it did muster up a small victory from position 17 up to lucky number 13!

See the full Top 20 at Eric Siebert’s vLaunchPad.

Previous Top 20 Blog List

Just for reference, here is the previous list of top blogs prior to July 2009.

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The candidates are out virtually knocking on doors — Duncan Epping, Eric Sloof, Rich Brambley, and several others are already campaigning for your vote.

Friends, if you have not voted yet, won’t you consider a vote for VCritical?

There are still plenty of important positions available in the VCritical cabinet — supporters will be rewarded for their loyalty.  Just look at these exciting opportunities:

• Secretary of NIC teaming
• ISO image anti-proliferation Ambassador
• VM Encapsulation Czar
• Truth in Linux Support Director
• And more…

We face a difficult time in the virtualization industry, with unprecedented challenges ahead.  That’s why VCritical needs your vote now more than ever.  A vote for VCritical is a vote for change.  Well, maybe not, but it sounds kind of nice.

Don’t forget to vote.

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Over the past few months, VCritical has climbed in the Google search rankings for certain virtualization-related queries.  One especially notable search term is SCVMM, since there are quite a few articles written about that product on VCritical.  In fact, VCritical normally appears on the first page of Google search results for SCVMM — result number five at the moment.

Google’s search ranking algorithms are secret, but results are normally useful, accurate, and seemingly fair.

Today I thought I’d try the new Bing search engine and see if VCritical comes up on the first page of SCVMM results.  Uh, no –  half-way down page three — quite a discrepancy.

Does anyone know who is behind this new search engine?  If I didn’t know better, I would say it’s Microsoft — but they are already busy with that other search engine that refuses to take off.  But it looks an awful lot like Google’s interface.  Hmm.

How does that old saying go?  “Freedom of the press — to anyone that can afford to buy one.”  The same applies to Web search engines, evidently.

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If you are a newer reader, you might be interested in taking a look at the Site Index — a single listing of all articles by title.

And here are the top two posts of all time:

• Storage vendors unanimously applaud SCVMM innovation
• Yes, NIC teaming is not unsupported

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the subscribers and readers.

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3. Best of 2009
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This won’t look anything like a blog in the traditional sense. We will not be doing daily news snippets, product announcements, new technology teasers, or deep thoughts on abstract ideas, basically all the things you are used to seeing in blogs. There are already half a dozen virtualization blogs that have that stuff nailed, I read them everyday and you should as well. Check out Must Reads at the top right for links to the sites I check every morning.

His initial posts on Kickstarting ESX installations look great.  Check them out.

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2. Vote VCritical — for change
3. vLaunchPad: Lucky number thirteen!
4. Twitter Century Mark

Those interested can follow me: @eric_gray

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Here is a quick synopsis of the series:

How to Start a Technical Blog – Part 1

• Why start a blog in the first place?
• Set your expectations
• Get a good name
• Be yourself and blog regularly (but not on certain days; read to find out why)

Part 2: WordPress and How to Configure It

• If you are serious, you want WordPress, period
• Configure WordPress just right
• Get yourself found by Google

Part 3: WordPress Plugins

• Get Feedburner and other necessities up and running with little effort
• Easy database backup solution — you need this

Part 4: Wordpress Themes

• There are tons of themes to control your look and feel
• When you find one, customize the customizable but do not think about editing the code if you have a day job that doesn’t involve writing PHP and CSS

Part 5: Blog Etiquette

• Give credit for content, but respect individual privacy
• Don’t burn your bridges, your writing is somewhat permanent online
• Allow visitors to comment

These are some of the highlights, not a table of contents for Brent’s fine series.  Even if you are a field-hardened and crusty old blogger, I bet you will find something useful there.  Check it out!

Here are a couple tips of my own that I would add:

• Be prepared to deal with SPAM comments and trackbacks; as with email, it’s sort of an arms race
• Use the “more tag” in longer posts so that only a portion shows up on the homepage, otherwise the homepage can become very, very long
• Most plugins take computing resources: CPU, SQL queries; moderation is key
• Set up a test blog to try out new plugins, themes, or ideas without disrupting your live site
  • I did this by setting up a subdomain with a second installation of WordPress — it doesn’t cost anything extra with the host I use
  • Be careful: recently I sent pingbacks to another blog from my development site by accident, doh!

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3. Introduction
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