Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Blogging

Top 25 bloggers 2014 results are out…

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The top 25 bloggers 2014 voting results are out. This year the competition was insane, and I know that I say this every year but if you look at bloggers like Cormac Hogan, Derek Seaman, Frank Denneman, Chris Wahl and William Lam you know what I am talking about.

1400+ people voted, 15 new blogs in the top 50, 5 new blogs in the Top 25, and a new blog in the Top 10. A big thank you to every who has voted for me again, I am honored and humbled to have been voted number 1. I want to call out the top 5 as I have worked closely with most of them the last years and it has been a great pleasure: William Lam(2), Frank Denneman(3), Cormac Hogan(4) and Scott Lowe(5). Each of them has consistently produced excellent material. I have been very very impressed by what they’ve released over the last year and hope everyone keeps putting out their material as I very much enjoy reading it.

Congrats to everyone else who made the list, if you are curious who they are head over to the full top bloggers list on Eric’s blog. Maybe even better, watch the awesome show Eric, John, Rick and David recorded… It is very entertaining!

Support your fav. virtualization bloggers, vote for the top blogs!

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I just woke up in an extremely warm Vietnam and noticed it is that time of the year again. I am hoping to end up somewhere at the top of the list again, but I realize like no one else that this is not a given. The competition is huge and some really stood out this year. There are three in particular that stood out in my opinion which for sure made my Top list: Cormac Hogan, William Lam and Derek Seaman. All three did something different than most bloggers do. They bring unique content, a unique perspective and showed dedication / perseverance. I am expecting all three to be in the top of the list for sure.

2013 was a crazy year… I joined a new team and am working on an exciting new product at VMware, which I unfortunately cannot talk about yet. We saw the beta release of Virtual SAN and that resulted in many many articles. I was fortunate enough to be selected to present at both VMworld EMEA and US, and presented at various VMUGs but the two which particularly stood out were Italy and Denmark as I had not been there before. The busiest blogging day of the year was August 27th with over 13k views.

I guess something exciting to mention is that I started working on a new book, of course somehow Eric Sloof managed to notice if first and scooped the news. Will take a while before it is released but the title will be: Essential Virtual SAN. The rough cuts should be online soon as well. Happy to be working with Cormac Hogan on this, I couldn’t think of anyone else who would be better fitted to write a book on the topic of VSAN with.

Something worth noting as well, the top referring sites: twitter, VMware VMTN Community, facebook, Eric Siebert’s VLP and blogs.vmware.com. In that order, and it makes you realize how important social media is today. Whether it is twitter or a community forum… it can drive a lot of traffic when used in the right way!

Thanks again to Eric Siebert who spends a MASSIVE amount of time going through the voting, filtering out discrepancies and making sure it all is done in a fair manner! Make sure to bookmark his website, add it to your RSS reader and follow him on twitter. So what are you waiting for, head on over and take the survey!

Access Denied on wp-admin / wp-login page

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I have had this problem various times in the last 6 months on my WordPress blog. For whatever reason all of a sudden when I access my wp-admin page I receive an access denied on wp-admin / wp-login.php. Really annoying as you can imagine as it means you cannot get in to the back-end of your blog making it impossible to manage it. The blog it self is still available though when this happens so I figured I would write down the fix, as I somehow keep forgetting it.

  • FTP in to host
  • Check file permissions on wp-login.php, in my case permissions on this file are somehow magically always “00”
  • Change permissions back to 0644
  • Fixed, you should be able to login again

Simple solution, for a strange problem. If I ever find the rootcause I will post it here as well.

Top 25 bloggers 2013 results are out…

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The top 25 bloggers 2013 voting results are out again. This year the competition was insane. With newcomers like Cormac Hogan and Chris Wahl, but also old-timers like Chad Sakac, Scott Lowe, Eric Sloof and of course Frank “resource management” Denneman.

First of all, a BIG THANK YOU to Eric Siebert who took the time and effort again to set this up. I know how much work these kind of things take, so once again thanks Eric for spending your evenings on this! There were over 80 new blogs this year and 4 new blogs made the top 25, and one new blog made the top 10. With a total of ~1300 votes this is probably one of biggest community awards I have seen. Yes being a vExpert is awesome, but getting votes from your readers feels 10 times better.

I am not going to list the full top 25 here, I feel everyone should hit Eric’s page for that. I do want to thank everyone for taking the time to vote for me. I am honored to have been voted number 1 blogger for virtualization again for the 6th consecutive time. This is crazy, who would have thought that when I started yellow-bricks.com years ago… I sure did not expect that, and it was also never my intention. Thanks everyone, and please keep coming back and leave comments – be interactive!

There are two bloggers I do want to call out, first of all someone who I managed to persuade to start his own blog and who entered the Top 10 as a newcomer… Cormac “the god of all things VMware storage related” Hogan. What a tremendous achievement this year by Cormac. So many great articles, not just deep technical but also his “storage vendor overviews” are awesome. Of course the resource management guru who jumped from spot 5 to spot 2, Frank Denneman. Awesome work, what can I say more?! Keep it up,

Once again, make sure to watch the vChat below and hit Eric’s page for the full list. Thanks everyone, and see you next year 🙂

Vote for the top virtualization Blogs / 2012 looking back!

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Yes, it is that time of the year again… vSphere-land.com’s voting for the top virtualization blogs has started again. Of course I am hoping to end up somewhere at the top of the list again, but I realize like no one else that this is not a given. The competition once again is huge, there are a couple of new-comers which has published some outstanding work. Personally I am a huge fan of Cormac Hogan’s work and I hope he will make it in to the top 10 this year, I sure as hell voted for him! Of course I expect my friends like Frank Denneman, Alan Renouf, Massimo Referre and William Lam to also hit the top 10.

I am hoping each of you will select the top-10 blogs again based on quality, relevancy, longevity and frequency. (I personally find length of the article irrelevant, content is King!) I always use the yearly voting to look back at what happened the last 12 months. What happened in 2012, what has kept me busy?

For me 2012 started with Partner Exchange. Presented a 2-hr workshop on how to design a Cloud Infrastructure, together with Dave Hill (he is on the list as well, so vote for him :-)) and guests Frank Denneman and Chris Colotti. On top of that Chris Colotti and I presented a DR solution for vCloud Director based environments. This is something that people had been waiting on for a long time. I came up with the process/concept for this and also published a whitepaper on this topic. The same concept can be used for VMware View environments by the way, white paper out soon! I published a whole bunch of other white papers (1, 2) this year as part of my Tech Marketing responsibilities, of which the vMSC Best Practices paper is probably the most read and best received. I managed to get a couple of sessions approved at VMworld and had a blast presenting with my buddy Lee Dilworth. Also being a VMworld “Expert” was once again an awesome experience, I especially enjoyed the group discussions. I also presented as a couple of VMUGs (belgium, ireland, uk) and last but not least, published the vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive… which happened to be the most sold book at VMworld San Francisco.

Along the way I managed to crank out an article or two hundred, and my blog went down during the vSphere 5.1 launch due to the massive amount of traffic. I can tell you that my hosting company was surprised as they thought it was a DDOS attack, but then they figured out it was just a massive amount of people hitting my site on the same day. I guess thanks for that 🙂

I did want to list my 10 top articles over the last 12 months in no particular order:

Thanks again to Eric Siebert who spends a MASSIVE amount of time going through the voting, filtering out discrepancies and making sure it all is done in a fair manner! Make sure to bookmark his website, add it to your RSS reader and follow him on twitter. So what are you waiting for, head on over and take the survey!