sidudun

About a year ago, I created a blog aggregator, or sometimes also called Planet. This planet display all the blog posts from my registered friends. At first, I did it alone. I maintained and designed it by myself. And then, my friend Andreas wanna help me maintaining the site. So I gave him a role as administrator. Some days ago, he sent me this email:

Rif,

Do you have opened the website in IE6? The layout and the design looks screwed :(

IE6 or Internet Explorer version 6 is a browser shipped with Windows XP. It was released in 2001. It has better CSS support than the previous version, at that time. The problem with the browser is it’s lacking support on the web standard. If you’re a web designer, you must know the designing problems in IE6 . This browser has bad reputation among web designers. Continue reading

About a year ago, I started an English conversation club with my friend in the college. Well, it’s not a real conversation club actually. Instead of doing direct conversation, we’re using instant messenger or irc. Later, I realized that I was doing it because of my own selfishness. I did it because I was lonely at my home, while my friends are on the other city. As expected, the club didn’t last in the long run. My friends became busier with their job and I couldn’t control them. Maybe they were eager to learn English, but they have their own business.

Now in my graduate college, I found that my classmates also trying to run an English conversation club. The great things about it, they are eager to learn how to speak and we can do it directly. We do it in Sunday morning under the tree in the campus’s park. I come twice and I started to love this club. And last day, we’re talking about my favorites: blog. Continue reading

Two months ago, I wrote a simple tutorial on how to create a Hadoop MapReduce program using Netbeans. Not a slightest clue in my head that this post will change my life. Okay, I’m exaggerating. I mean the post change the history of this blog.

The first day after I wrote the post, nothing special happened. But the day after, I was shocked when I checked this blog stats. This blog usually have about 15-25 visitors a day. So I was amazed when I saw 90 visitors that day. I started to investigate which post has the biggest contribution in delivering traffics. And I found out that it was the Hadoop in Netbeans post. I noticed that all of the traffic came from one site called DZone. DZone? I never heard that site before. When I was investigating the site, I found that it’s a cool bookmarking site for developer around the globe. And someone, later I known as mitchp, just share my post into this site.

The magic continued the next day. My traffic keep increasing. Then later in that day, I got an email from my hosting provider:

The domain arifn.web.id has reached 80% of its bandwidth limit (807.50/1000.00 Megs).

Well, my bandwidth limit was just 1 GB a month. So I double checked the hosting package and found that my bandwidth limit should be 2 GB. I contacted my hosting provider to make sure that they didn’t make any mistakes. They said that my bandwidth should be 2 GB and they will resolve it a.s.a.p. Okay, so I started installing WP Super Cache to prevent my site from being down because of the high traffic and low bandwidth limit.

The magic ended. The highest peak was on the third day, near 200 visitors. After that, the traffic declining and found its equilibrium state. But, this state is higher than my average traffic before. My average traffic now is about 20-35 visitors a day. Not bad, huh?

And now, I’m a fan of DZone. Some days ago, I found out that I’m not the only one who has this kind of experience. Yeah, of course. Jordi Cabot wrote in his blog about his DZone traffic experience:

Unfortunately, a completely different story is the mid and long-term impact. By this I mean the number of people that discovered my portal thanks to the link and that has become a frequent visitor of the site since then. This is very difficult to assess (there is no way to know if a new subscriber originally discover your site thanks to the DZone link or it is just a temporal coincidence that he/she joined the site around those dates) but if we look at the increase in the number of subscribers to the RSS portal feeds , my twitter account or the daily visits to the site, my estimation is that only a 2-3% of the original DZone visitors has converted into new portal followers.

I second that. Maybe it’s just a sweet temporal coincidence if my traffic growth above the average. But one thing that I can learn from this experience is that if you want to have a high amount of traffic, you should write a good post regularly. And I hope I can do that.

Do you have the same experience?

So, why am I blogging you are asking?

I still remember the old days when I started to write blog. Like a child who found a new toy, I showed it off to all of the people. Not just showed off, but also tempted my friends to start their own blog. And I still remembered it clearly as day, one of my pals said these things. He said that what are blog used for? It’s just a narcissistic writing by some dudes, telling about their lives and bla bla bla. But you know that I don’t buy it, because you’re reading mine, right? And I don’t think I am a narcissist (0kay, maybe a little).

I’ll give you my story. It started some years ago. I was thinking it was cool to have a place where I can write some and access it from everywhere. Yes, I’m talking about writing on the clouds. At that time, I wasn’t thinking about what should I wrote. I just wanna write, that’s all. Continue reading

Howdy,

Couple weeks ago, I used pre-made template. I have to admit that the design is good. But there are some parts of it that bother me. So I decided to write a new design.

For this new design, I didn’t give a name. It’s a custom design anyway. I’m a man who believes in simplicity, so I’d like to write design as simple as possible. I also powered up the footer section. When I was blogwalking, I found some pretty blog doing the same. I like the concept and I adopted it in my footer. Maybe you like it better than the previous one? Well, it’s up to you to decide.

With this new design, I also created a new logo for sidudun. Just need some refreshments, no other reason. All of the credits for the icons and font creators is in the footer.

So, do you like it? Comments and suggestions are welcome..