• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Top VMware Blogs 2014: How I Voted

Top VMware Blogs 2014: How I Voted

February 25, 2014 By Stephen 2 Comments

top-vblog-2014-2-crop-300x180

Once again, it’s time for vSphere-Land.com’s “Top vBlog” voting. And once again Feedbin and Twitter are full of hundreds of bloggers lamely begging for me to vote for them. And once again, I didn’t base my votes on their begs or my own hunches. Follow along as I explain how I actually voted and why I think you should use the same mechanism. And no, I’m not going to say who I voted for!

I’ve Been Voting All Year

I think most people vote based on gut reaction or knee-jerk response: “I recognize that blog so I’ll vote for it.” That’s the only explanation I can see for this blog being in the top 20, frankly. But that’s not how I vote.

See, I’ve been voting all year, in a  way I think is particularly apt. I have a “social media sharing machine” set up, where I read tons of content and share what I like best. My sharing mechanism is pretty straightforward:

  1. I read blogs through Feedbin, using their web interface or Reeder for iOS
  2. When I see something I like, I “star” it in Feedbin, creating an rss feed of the best stuff I found (yeah, that’s my Feedbin RSS feed and I welcome your subscription!)
  3. IFTTT converts this Feedbin Star Feed into a set of links in my Delicious account
  4. This is then shared on Twitter, Google+ (I’ll explain this later), and LinkedIn also using IFTTT

So I have a fantastic library of links I liked sitting there in Delicious, just waiting to be shared and mined.

Converting Stars to Votes

It’s fairly straightforward to tally these “stars” by site to generate my votes. Here’s how I do it using a Google Spreadsheet:

  1. I use the mobile delicious URL since it’s plain and easy to parse:
    https://m.delicious.com/sfoskett
  2. Next, I use ImportXML to pull in pages of 20 links at a time:
    =importxml(Delicious&"?&page=1","//div[@class='body']")
  3. I only pull in 800 links this way, since Google Spreadsheets is limited to 50 ImportXML actions in a spreadsheet. But that’s pretty good, taking me back about 9 months.
  4. On that same sheet, I use RegExExtract to pull out just the domain name of each share:
    =regexextract(B2,"https?://(.+?)/")
  5. On another sheet, I use the Unique function to grab a list of unique domain names:
    =unique('Delicious Data'!E:E)
  6. Then I paste this as values only so I can sort on the count I generate:
    =countif('Delicious Data'!E:E,A2)

Tada! Now I have a list of my most-shared domain names. I then match these up with the sites available for voting in the vSphere-Land poll.

There is one glaring weakness with this approach: The result is a combination of quantity and quality, since a blog only gets a share if I like it and if there is new content. Someone could have one fantastic post and it would only get one vote, while another might have lots of mediocre but still good enough posts and get lots of votes. I’ll take this risk.

Now that you’ve read this, go vote on your own top picks!

Stephen’s Stance

It would be a shame for people to vote based on a hunch or guess when they could do it much more scientifically. I’ve been “voting” on these blogs all year, and my votes are based on the quality of their content over time, as judged by yours truly.

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From…
  • How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier
  • Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!
  • Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!
  • How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12

Filed Under: Everything, Features, Personal, Virtual Storage Tagged With: Delicious, Feedbin, Google Docs, Google Plus, IFTTT, importXML, LinkedIn, Reeder, RSS, spreadsheet, Twitter, voting, vSphere Land

Primary Sidebar

A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine.

Alan Turing

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12

February 3, 2022

Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion

January 24, 2022

How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier

January 14, 2022

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    It’s Time To Speak Out Against Sexism In IT Recruiting

    May 6, 2013

    Virtualized and Distributed Storage: This Time For Sure!

    September 2, 2014

    What You See and What You Get When You Follow Me

    May 28, 2019

    Why Big Disk Drives Require Data Integrity Checking

    December 19, 2014

    The Ideal pfSense Platform: Netgate RCC-VE 2440

    September 21, 2015

    Generation 3 drobo: Fall In Love All Over Again

    April 9, 2015

    Why Buy a NEX-7? Why Sony NEX At All?

    October 17, 2011

    The Prime Directive of Storage: Do Not Lose Data

    December 12, 2014

    My Core i7 Macintosh SE

    May 25, 2017

    The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: The Rule of Spindles

    August 25, 2010

    Footer

    Legalese

    Copyright © 2022 · Log in