Michael McNamara

We’re coming up on two years since I started (October 10,  2007) this blog on Blogspot and I thought I’d make a post about the past and future directions.

I’ve met a lot of great people, both users and vendors, both experts and novices, and learned a lot over the past two years. Let me just say that there are a lot of helpful people out there, the problem is connecting with them in such a way that everyone benefits. With the sale of Nortel this blog might take on some added value going forward as folks try to support their aging, possibly End-of-Life, Nortel equipment. I’ve already started to archive a number of Nortel documents just in case they disappear from the Nortel website as Avaya closes the deal and moves forward with the integration of the product and business units. With that said though I’m also going to start branching out adding some content around Cisco, VMware, Asterisk, etc. It will still be technical I just might hop around a bit depending on which topics interest me. I’m also going to start adding some video… more to come on that.

With respect to the physical appearance of the blog, I’ve was concerned that the previous theme was just a little too busy (although this new theme is starting to look busy again… I wonder who’s fault that is!). I wanted to focus on the content and not just load up every possible WordPress widget under the sun so I decided to make a change to the Fusion Theme by Milenko Popovici. Thanks for your hard work Milenko! I’ve already started to play with the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) trying to tweak a few things – I’ve got to learn somewhere!

On the financial side I thought I would be 100% open with everyone here. While I’m not looking to make money from this blog I am looking to try and break even. To date I’ve shelled out around $263.05 for hosting, while I’ve received around $212.27 in ad revenue leaving me short $50.78 which isn’t all that bad and very acceptable from my viewpoint although you wouldn’t believe the additional tax forms I had to fill out to satisfy the IRS in case they ever audited me. I wouldn’t dare add up the amount of personal time I’ve put into this blog or responding to personal email messages or the wife would probably beat me silly.

While I’m happy to report that visits are up 2,000% this year over last year I’m sad to report that I still don’t rank with respect to Google’s Page Rank (no back links for me). You can see the statistics from Statcounter below for the past 30 days where I’m averaging about 311 visitors daily and over 522 page loads daily.

So I would ask that if you find this blog interesting or helpful please link to it, or Digg it, or share it to whatever social network you might enjoy. Please don’t SPAM or SPIM (I just heard this one last month… SPamming Instant Messaging). If you like the site and content why not just drop a reply saying Hi! When you’ve done that head over to the forums and help spread the knowledge.

You’ll find me on LinkedIn, Delicous, Digg, Blogged, Disquis, and probably a few more that I’ve forgotten about.

Thanks for the support!

Cheers!