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Jan 1 / The Architect

2010 web activity review

It’s traditional (apparently) to have some kind of review of the previous year, so I thought I’d take a look at my website activity  over the past year.

Blog migration

Having got a bit fed up of Drupal I moved my main blog over to WordPress. The import process went reasonable well sucking in the previous RSS feed, however it only imported about 30 previous posts, which meant some (that were indexed by Google) have become unavailable.

Industry news feed aggregator

I continued to maintain and add relevant feeds added to the industry news feed aggregator. For those who haven’t seen this, it consolidates the RSS feeds from over thirty server-based computing and virtualisation news and blog sites. More will be added as they appear during 2011, and if you have any suggestions on ones I should add, please add a comment with your suggestion.

Synergy Berlin

I created this WordPress-based site to provide a travel, accommodation and local attraction guide to the Synergy and PubForum conference in Berlin. This will continue to be the home of travel, accommodation advice for the 2011 conferences including BriForum Europe, PubForum Dublin and Synergy Barcelona. For the Barcelona site I’m lining up some native Spanish content courtesy of the Barcelona Citrix User group along with a new domain name (synergybarcelona.com already registered). The plan for 2011 is to expand this to cover non-European conferences too and consolidate all into a single web site.

Citrix UK User group

The Citrix UK User group was re-launched during 2010 and we needed a web site. Rather than just a basic WordPress blog site, I added the popular BuddyPress community add-on which provide forums, messaging and other features to create an online community.

Citrix Community Lab

This only just made it into the 2010 list. Documenting the progress on creating the cloud-based Citrix Community lab it will also eventually host the booking/reservation/billing system when the lab goes live in 2011.

What’s involved?

Each site above involves a number of steps to get it up and running:

  1. Decide on and then register the internet domain name
  2. Setup some web hosting
  3. Install WordPress
  4. Choose and install a WordPress theme. I try and use a different theme on each site to provide some variety. Fortunately, there are lots of high quality free themes available.
  5. Install plug-ins to add additional functionality (such as Twitter integration, spam prevention, single sign-on etc)
  6. Add some content
  7. Publicise the site on Twitter
  8. Hope to get some visitors!

Thanks to all our readers

Thanks to all who have read and contributed to the above sites during 2010. I plan to continue to maintain, update and add new sites for the community during 2011. Hopefully you’ll stick around for the journey in 2011!

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