New Aussie Oracle blogger take 2

There must be something in the water down here (or maybe the lack of it) because all I seem to be doing recently is blogging about Aussies in Oracle-land (and I know I've another Aussie post coming).

I'm happy to have the scoop that Marcel Kratochvil, Oracle ACE, Oracle Magazine PL/SQL Programmer of the Year, and all round Oracle over achiever from Canberra Australia has started a blog on Oracle related content, his speciality being multimedia (and PL/SQL of course).

I'm sure there's some story behind why the blog's name is the Eternal Donut, but with Marcel, a lot of us learn "don't go there" ;)

Good luck to Marcel and his blogging adventures.

New Aussie "Oracle" bloggers

The secretive, sinister, gloomy, doomy and sightly damp Oracle Australian halls maybe opening themselves to a bit of outward inspection ;) Oracle's Barry Matthews, Carl Terrantroy, Paul Ricketts, Saul Cunningham and Steve Williamson have started the GTMi Team Blog - Australia New Zealand (ANZ).

Now to be honest GTMi sounds suspiciously like a marketing **** term, but I know enough about these guys to give them the benefit of the doubt that they know the Aussie and Kiwi crowd will turn their nose to such dribble. Instead I hope they will aim at some very interesting down to earth local content rather than towing the Oracle corporate line (which mainly involves wearing suits and attempting to talk like an American I might add ;).

Good luck to the crew and hopefully we'll see more bloggers from the Aussie Oracle halls soon?

New JDeveloper blogger

I bumped into an old university friend at the AUSOUG Melbourne conference in 2007, and something must of rubbed off. Marc Thompson has started a blog on his JDeveloper "learnens". Good luck in your new new endeavours Marc.

Readers: why not introduce yourself?

My webcounter on this blog reveals many returning readers from around the world located in all sorts of interesting places, but they all remain pretty nameless besides their IP address (hi 148.87.1.172!).

I'd love some of my readers to leave a comment of where they're from, what they do, and their general interests.

Hopefully such a request will receive a couple of responses otherwise I'm going to look a little lonely ;)

New Aussie Oracle database blogger

Yah, my 100th blog post! You just can't shut me up.

Talking about people you can't shut up, with Marcel Kratchovil this year I had the chance to meet Richard Foote from the Australian Capital Territory (you know, where Canberra the capital of Australia is) at OOW this year. Richard is an ex-ACT Oracle User Group President, is full of great DBA stories and good opinions to boot, and I note he had a number of people rapped at his OOW Unconference session on indexes.

Richard has decided to finally dive in as an Aussie Oracle blogger, with his new blog Richard Foote's Oracle Blog. While I'm not going to give Richard any points for an inspiring blog name (sorry Richard, with a surname like "Foote" you had so many great puns you could have gone with), I wish him all the luck in his new blog endeavours.

+1 to the Aussie team. 0 for the rest of the World.

New Oracle Wiki page - for bloggers

To assist new and existing Oracle bloggers on how to participate in the Oracle blogging community, I've taken the chance to create a Bloggers page on the Oracle Wiki. It's a rudimentary start at the moment, but I'm hoping the other Oracle bloggers will take time out to include any tidbits they'd like to share around. For example I've listed the Oracle RSS aggregators I'm familiar with, and some information on who to contact to get your blog added to the associated aggregation feed.

Happy blogging!

Save to Del.icio.us

OOW Blogger catchup

OOW 2007 is nearly upon us, and Mark Rittman has kindly organised a meetup at the Thirsty Bear on Tuesday 13th 7pm for all the Oracle bloggers.

Of course the challenge is on not to talk about Oracle all night. Maybe a game of "If you mention Larry it's a round of drinks" is in order ;)

Drowning in Oracle blog aggregators

Have you ever wanted to merge all the separate Oracle RSS aggregators into one, and subscribe to the merged feed?

Lazytom's FeedJumbler provides such a service, where you can list a number of RSS feeds, and FeedJumbler will publish a single RSS/Atom which you may subscribe to instead.

This has been a godsend for myself, having nearly drowned in Oracle aggregator feeds more recently. The FeedJumbler site feed makes it very easy to see duplicate entries and only read what I need to.

Now, if I could only find another RSS service that eliminates duplicates from a feed, I'll have 100% perfection.

Oracle blog aggregators

For the last few days it appears the Oracle blog aggregator www.orablogs.com has been down (or at least I can't connect?). This initiated a personal search for other aggregators, and I can't say I found that many, but thought I'd post the results and see if anybody has any feedback on aggregators they use instead.

Specifically to Oracle there are the following services:

• www.orablogs.com - as mentioned above, currently appears to be down.

• www.orafaq.com/aggregator - run by the OraFaq team.

• orana.info - run by Eddie Awad.
  

Following my interests in all things Java, and branching across from Oracle into the JDeveloper and Java world's are the following services:

• thepeninsulasedge.com/adfblog - run by Ric Smith at the Peninsula's Edge.

• www.javablogs.com - much more a Java blog aggregator than an Oracle aggregator, but many of the JDev bloggers appear here.

Are there any other Oracle aggregators that you regularly use?

How to backup a Blogger blog

Note to self and anybody interested in backing up their blog: an easy way to backup a Blogger blog under a 1000 posts.

http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=1000

To backup comments:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=1000

Hopefully Google will get around to creating a better mechanism rather than this lame attempt.

Does the average Oracle IT worker read Oracle blogs?

As I posted a few weeks ago, last week I had the privilege to present a 1 day hands on JDeveloper presentation to the Canberra Oracle User Group (ACTOUG). With just on 30 attendees I was very happy with the outcome, and I must thank the delegates and ACTOUG committee for efforts all round. Presenting just gets more and more fun everytime I do it, mostly because of the great enthusiasm and kind thanks I get from delegates at the end :)

One thing surprised me during the presentation though. I asked how many attendees regularly read Oracle blogs? The response, well, 1 or 2 of the attendees kind of put their hand up half heartedly. What the?

Now I know I'm preaching to the converted for anyone who reads this blog (because you obviously read blogs). But in the recent discussions about how (un)successful Oracle blogs have been in gaining respect and penetration in the IT market, this result shows me that there is another aspect to the whole discussion, in that the average Oracle IT worker isn't paying attention to the Oracle blogosphere. What a waste!

Does anybody have any opinion on such a premise that "the average Oracle IT worker doesn't read Oracle blogs?" .... and any ideas on how this could be turned around?