I first switched to Wordpress on 7/6/2006, almost 1 year ago. In November of 2006 I was getting about 1,123 unique users a month and 12,296 page views. Right now June 1st - June 19th I am at 6,166 and 29,894 page views. Might not be as high as a lot of sites, but going from an average of about 40 unique users a day to an average of 335 makes me happy. I don’t advertise or push my blog to anyone other than through XML-RPC to the normal sites and thats about it. I think when I start adding screencasts it will improve even more.

I just finished up an interview with a company in San Francisco looking for a PHP developer. At points I thought I said the wrong thing, but at the same time I feel the interviewer did not indicate that I did. You can sense those things and there were things he said that makes me feel there is real interest, but I could be misreading it. Even if I don’t get the job or even a second interview all you can do is try and every interview prepares you for the next. I had four people in one interview one time, and it was the most difficult interview ever, some apparently have experienced this before, but others were shocked when I told them.

I mentioned the other day about my move to Google Apps for all my email and calendar needs. I am really loving it, I don’t have to worry about not having previously sent email when I am on the road or having to login to a ton of accounts to access it. IMAP is nice, but this is a little better in my opinion. With IMAP if you delete something locally it will eventually get removed remotely, with Google Apps you can download like POP3 but it remains on the server.

I have started to work with Ruby on Rails and I have come up with a terrific project, I am unsure if it will be done in RoR or not, but I thought about it when I was brainstorming ideas for RoR applications.

During my time at beCamp I got to meet Waldo. Waldo has some great ideas about handling people on the internet and I wanted to share. He mentioned one alternative he has used to combat trolls on forums and people who are commenting on blogs. This method involved placing in some code that would have the posts that individual wrote to only show up for them and nobody else. Eventually they will stop posting when nobody responds, letting them leave on their own instead of banning them and having them come back. He also wrote a post about being anonymous on the internet and how it is pretty hard to do. I like his approach to handling people who cause problems, not many people seem to be willing to keep people away from the firing squad, but Waldo did.

I have learned that conferences really are career builders. I met a guy named Roger at beCamp and he has been helping me to make myself more marketable from the first night. I am in a very rural area so I don’t see a lot of things that happen in the “real world”, and he is filling some of the things I miss out on by not having conferences available all the time or LUGs to go to.

The randomness is complete….for now

I just started using my LinkedIn profile that I have had for forever. From what I hear some good things can come out of LinkedIn. beCamp added a few connections to my profile and I am at 90% completion on my profile, I just need to call in some recommendations to complete it. If you are LinkedIn and want more connections add me to your network from my profile page, put me down as a friend.