Adam Machanic : SQLblog

Spam Fighting and Lessons Learned

Adam Machanic — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:01:00 GMT

Here on SQLblog, we take spam seriously. Actually, I should rephrase that: I take spam really, really, really seriously, some other people take spam somewhat seriously, and some don't really seem to care. It all balances out in the end. We've done a pretty...(read more)

About the SQLblog Roller Outage

Adam Machanic — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 19:24:00 GMT

Over the past few days you might have noticed that the SQLblog external feeds roller had mysteriously vanished. We had some technical difficulties on Tuesday, things appeared to have fixed themselves by Wednesday morning, and then the problems returned Wednesday evening. So I decided to disable the feature. Honestly, I didn't think anyone would even notice, but I received some e-mails from some concerned parties; apparently there are people out there who actually use the roller.

The bad news is that we have no idea why this issue cropped up, but the good news is that I've been watching it now for three days and it seems fine. I've just turned it back on, and as part of the process of cleaning up the mess I even added a few new blogs to the list. As always, I'm looking for more great blogs to add, so if you have any ideas leave a comment here. Enjoy, and please let me know if you see any further issues.

Help Improve Our Roller -- What are the Best SQL Server Blogs?

Adam Machanic — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 17:51:00 GMT

One of the coolest things about SQLblog--aside from our bloggers, of course--is the roller feature. Here we aggregate posts from many of the best external blog sites, and give them to you in one convenient place/feed. I've personally used this feature as my main source of SQL Server news, and haven't even turned on my blog reader software for several months.

That said, Peter and I first populated the roller's feeds over a year ago, and things have changed since then. I just went through and removed all of the blogs that hadn't had a post in over a year, in addition to blogs that are mirrors of content that you can get from the main SQLblog feed--for instance, Louis Davidson runs an external blog and already mirrors his SQL Server-related posts to SQLblog. No reason to also carry them in the external feed. So I'm sorry Louis, but your Spaces blog has been removed from our roller. Nothing personal!

Now that I've done the cleanup, I need your help. What blogs are we not aggregating, that we should? Please leave me a comment and let me know what we've missed. We're looking for quality in addition to activity. A brand new blog with three posts won't get added--yet. But I'll certainly watch it. And a blog with 20 posts a day but only one or two a month that are technical will also not get added. I don't want to water down the roller or decrease the signal:noise ratio. I also want to keep things up to date, so dead blogs with no recent posts won't be considered.

Since this is SQLblog I am mainly interested in adding SQL Server blogs, but I may be open to other related areas--ADO.NET, general database and/or data architecture, data warehousing, etc. Anything that will add value to a SQL Server professional's reading list.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

Goodbye, SQLJunkies!

Adam Machanic — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 14:15:00 GMT

A year ago this week, I moved my SQLJunkies blog over to this one, on SQLblog.com. I decided to cross-post for a while in order to take advantage of the syndication offered by SQLJunkies. At this point, it seems that my SQLblog blog is getting more activity (and better activity), so I'm officially cutting off my cross-posting. Going forward, content will only be posted here.

Thanks to all of the SQLblog bloggers for helping to create such a great community!