OracleAppsBlog

OracleAppsBlog celebrates one year of existence

I had one of our readers remind me the other day that the blog has now been in existence for a year. Running the blog has proved to be very rewarding despite the time commitment required to keep it updated. Now that I’m settled in the UK (having moved from Botswana last year) and have broadband Internet access, I should be able to keep the blog more regularly updated. I’m hoping to write at least one post every week day i.e. five posts a week. Achieving this will easily be possible if I can find more blog authors. If you’re interested in becoming an author for this blog or know of anyone who could contribute then drop me a mail.

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone for reading the blog and participating in the discussions. Thanks also to the blog authors for their contributions. The blog now boasts a membership of just more than 1,000 and has had over 800,000 page views in the year. I have many plans for improvement over the next year including a complete site redesign - more on that in due course. Hopefully I will find the time to implement my list of enhancements. I’m really keen on obtaining feedback as to how you think the blog can improve so please add your comments to this post if you have any ideas or suggestions.

1. Richard,

   Congratulations on reaching this milestone.  It’s obvious you have been hard at work increasing the membership to the site.  I believe you will be able to increase membership, and reach your goal of five posts a week, with the following suggestions:

   1) I would suggest you develop a quick guide or online tutorial or example on posting to the site.  You have obviously put a lot of effort into enhancing the site with polls, etc.  Being an aspiring author myself, I know you had several tidbits to share along some advice on titles, URL’s, etc., and a handful of forwarded emails on a number of topics.  Not being an expert blogger, but wanting to contribute to your site and ensure it remains consistent, I am hesitant to post without knowing all the intimate details, quirks, etc. on what it takes to deliver a quality post.  An online tutorial with examples would ensure additional authors such as myself could learn about blogging, while also maintaining your standards without taking an abundance of your time.

   2) I’ve noticed that comments don’t initially load with the original article.  You seem to have to drill down on them to read them.  I would probably be more inclined to post comments if they were immediately available (or at least a snippet of them) under the original post without having to drill down on them.

   Keep up the good work!

   Michael Siebert

   Posted by Michael Siebert  on  06/15  at  01:59 PM

2. Richard,
   This has been a very interesting and useful blog to me. Thanks and congrats on the 1-year milestone! I am surprised that you have “only” 1000 members given the broad reach of Oracle Apps. As a product marketing guy for a software vendor that provides specialised tools for Oracle Apps, I would be interested in contributing articles relating to my company’s area of expertise, which incidentally is data conversions and interfaces to Oracle Apps. What is your policy about mentioning specific products that the Oracle Apps user community can benefit from on this blog? I see this as a potential way for solution providers such as us to reach those in search of these type of tools.

   Also, do you have a breakdown of the number of members/visitors the blog has from the US vs EU vs AsiaPac?

   Finally, one comment on the blog is that (in my opinion) there are too many Categories available to read or post to. Is ther a way to simplify this?

   Keep up the effort!
   Gavin Harvett

   Posted by gharvett  on  06/15  at  04:55 PM

3. Hi Richard,

   Congrats on reaching the milestone.

   I had an observation, the search capabilities of this site is not great. There have been instances when i was unable to find something on site, but when someone forwarded me a link to the same site I could get the information i wanted.

   Regds
   Mandar

   Posted by  on  06/16  at  03:37 AM

4. Michael, I certainly agree with your comments I think I need to have the comments displaying on the main page as well. I am going to try and update the author guide very soon as well as provide a sandbox for level 2 authors. Incidentally, if you subscribe to my RSS feed and read it through a reader, you will notice it comes with comments so that’s a workaround for now.

   Gavin, I’m certainly open to you blogging about your companies products if it provides information that would be useful for apps consultants. I agree with your comments about the categories I’m going to try and create them as folders so that double clicking will open the folders. If you look at the bottom of the blog you will notice that there’s now a public site meter available which I will blog about shortly. Real time Geographic distribution of visitors is here

   Mandar I actually thought the search was quite good on the blog but perhaps I should conduct a poll so that other users can let me know if it’s been effective. What I am planning to implement is a plugin called LiveSearch which should enhance the search experience. Also EE1.3 is due to be release shortly so perhaps they will have improved the search capability.

   Posted by Richard Byrom  on  06/16  at  07:45 PM

5. Hi Richard,

   I thought that this has been a great blog. Congrats on reaching the one year milestone. It’s fantastic to be able to share data and implementation experience with so many. Well done!

   Posted by  on  06/20  at  11:11 AM

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