Blade Watch

So I was out with Chris and he asked me about bladewatch.

In return for all those times I’ve asked him questions over dinner (trying to be casual about it), and ended up interviewing him anyway, here’s his turn to interview me.

So why bladewatch

Originally I started the blog just to highlight items I thought were interesting about blades and vmware to keep me up to date, and if anyone else read it, great! As the blog came along I started to note down things I’d discovered at work or playing at home,  whether during the blade deployment process, or things I had noticed with vmware, or found out when speaking with people.

I had a series of challenges with IBM blade deployment because I was used to the HP bl30/35 blades, and one of the things I remember thinking at the time was wouldn’t it be great if you could google “silent install ibm network card driver” and get the command. IBM provide it, but you need to download the documentation, the driver, read the readme file, with that in mind when I came accross things like that, I’d note it down and post an entry about it.

The blog is live, by that I mean the content changes in line with my career, the issues that affect me and colleagues on a day to day business, giving a balanced overview of ‘business as usual issues’ and technologies that interest me.

How many people work for bladewatch?

At the moment, there’s me, I’ve got a researcher who I sometimes call upon for assistance, and Ewan (web guy) who helps with the site design and suggestions on evolving the blog.

Who funds Bladewatch and are you sponsored by anyone?

I fund the site myself, all costs are covered by me, sometimes I partner with a sponsor to help with costs.

Cool, but you mention HP a lot, any reason for this?

Well I know a lot about HP servers, and I use them as a benchmark for this reason.

I try not to be too vendor aligned, the ILO content was simply because I got emails asking for ILO, I know it can take a while to go through the manuals, so I thought I’d post a few entries about how to do things quickly.

 Ever thought about advertising? A banner?

Yes I’m open to discussion, but at the moment, I’m happy continuing and building up the content.

How many visitors do you get?

I subscribe to a couple of sites that give me rough idea, Technoratti and mybloglog, but the content was recently syndicated, so it’s difficult to tell.

Do you get paid for any of your content? You a professional writer?

No to both questions, anyone can use my content if they feel it is of value, and the documents I post and link to are also for anyone to use.

I’m not a professional writer, I write the blog when I have time either during the day on my mobile, at home before or after work. Sometimes on-call can disrupt the number of posts I do in a day which I apologize for.

Alright but if you could live on sponsorship from the blog would you?

Good question, I’d have to say no.

To be honest I love my work, I don’t mind the oncall, or working until 3am, I love support, I love playing with the technology, and I don’t think the content would be as effective if I wasn’t actually deploying it or involved with it.

Related posts:

1. Welcoming Ewan from Mobile Industry Review Before I officially welcome Ewan to bladewatch as a new...
2. Bladewatch.com: May the learning, the innovation continue We’re doing some work on the bladewatch site over the...
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