I had an unexpected, but much welcomed, tweet today from the team at Opsview who would like to make use of some of my writing about Opsview on their own Labs blog. I can honestly say that I wasn’t expecting the blog to be read and picked up in this way but I am pleased that I can hopefully reach a few more people with the data appearing on the Opsview Labs blog as well.
Whilst trying to make the home page and blog page look the same I managed to break the wp-admin section of my blog. Thanks to the guys at Loho.co.uk they have migrated my whole site to a new platform where I can administer the site more efficiently and I have been able to remove the faulty theme. Hopefully I can fix what I broke but for now its going to be the standard WP theme.
Having spent a long time ignoring this blog or simply linking to amusing things on the net that I found through sites like stumbleupon.com I think its time to try and focus what I am writing about and see if I can get a good set of useful articles written.
Having thought about it for about 5 minutes this morning I decided that it should be something related to what I do on a daily basis but also something that I have interest in otherwise what’s the point? Visualization was a first thought but I already read a good blog about vmware (http://www.techhead.co.uk) which I would probably end up plagiarising and isn’t the reason for this. The other thing that I am keen on at the moment in the world of technology is network monitoring and the technologies you can use for it.
Now I will say now I’m quite biased when I am looking at setting up a monitoring solution as I don’t really want to say for the extra hardware or software I use to monitor everything. This does mean I will look for a good open source application(s) to carry out a task and which I can customize rather than paying for a boxed product that does some of what I want to do but not everything.
Now I still like sharing interesting pages I find on the web but I may need to split the blog into 2 sections to look more professional… Still haven’t decided yet but don’t worry the random site links will still be there!
So what’s my first entry under the new incarnation of the blog? I think I will write up the “Howto” on building an open source monitoring machine that can keep an eye on your network. Expect it in a few days.