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Category Archives: Blog Updates

Blog Updates

Updates for my regular readership of two people plus 5000 spambots:

  • I stayed away from the blog for a long time because I made the mistake of sharing my last post, on HPE/Juniper, on LinkedIn.  Imagine the panic when people actually read it, including SVPs at Cisco.  I’m fairly open with my thoughts on this blog, and I don’t want to limit my career prospects.  In retrospect, I think I should embrace frankness and keep sharing blogs on LinkedIn.
  • I changed the WordPress theme for this blog.  I think this new theme is a bit more readable.  Hopefully you all feel the same.  The previous theme had a weird issue.  When I shared the post on LinkedIn, instead of the title in the auto-generated preview, it said “posts navigation”.  That looks cheesy.  Rather than try to hack the HTML and figure out why, I switched themes.  The new one doesn’t have that problem.
  • However, before I did this I attempted to share the latest blog on tech field day.  LinkedIn seems to have cached it with “posts navigation” as the title, so I’ll probably republish it with a different permalink, leaving the old one in place for anyone who might have been directed to it.  So if you see the article again, I’m not going crazy.
  • I hope to get back to doing some technical blogging.  I love the perspectives and reflections, but something can’t keep me out of the lab.  Look for a few blogs soon.  (And I have a great history of promising to do something for this blog and not delivering on it, hope that doesn’t happen.)
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Cross-posting on SubStack

I started this blog in 2016, and I never advertise it.  Partly this is because I don’t really care if people are reading it.  Partly it’s because I’m concerned some of my views might controversial in the industry and I don’t want to blast them far and wide.  When I started this blog, my goal was to provide clear technical explanations.  Ironically, given the title of the blog, my first big hits were articles about configuring Junos, such as the article on Juniper’s inet.3 routing table and the article on RIB groups.

Over time I started publishing memoir-type pieces, like my 10 years a CCIE series and TAC Tales.  I also started publishing reflections on the industry, business, and the corporate world in general.

The platform I’m using is WordPress on DreamHost, which requires a fair amount of maintenance.  Overall it’s been a good platform, and I like that I can make summary pages which collect my article series and make them easier to find.  I hate having to pick and customize themes and sometimes I have database issues.

SubStack is becoming a more popular platform and seems to be a lot easier to manage.  The subscription model works well also.  So, I imported the content of this blog into SubStack at https://subnetzero.substack.com/

For now I will cross-post between this blog and the substack to see how it goes.  I encourage any regular readers (if I have any!) to sign up there.  At this point I have no plans to charge for it.

If you have any thoughts, feel free to comment!

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Theme changes

I mentioned several weeks ago I would be playing with the themes on this blog as my old one is broken and I don’t have time to fix it.  Pardon the changes in appearance while I play around.  I was getting tired of the tiles anyways, so maybe going back to a linear format will be more readable.

Incidentally, the new themes all lack the star ratings of the previous theme.  Frankly, they didn’t do much for me other than let me know someone was reading.  Feel free to comment if you like/dislike the theme I’m trying.

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Blog Updates

A lot of the blog posts I write begin with “I’m just too busy to blog these days!”  Luckily, I have dozens of drafts so often blogging is just a question of cleaning up something I wrote a long time ago.  However, I’d like to keep things up here even as life becomes more hectic here at Cisco.  (I don’t know how things can get more hectic but they seem to each day!)

I don’t have many comments on this blog.  I think this is largely due to the fact that most of my readers are spambots.  However, I know there are a few out there who actually read and enjoy some of the posts.  For years I’ve required users to enter a name and email address to post a comment, and while many users just fill out fake information there, I’ve always thought it kept spam down.  This policy probably keeps genuine comments low too.  So, I’ve flipped the setting to allow anonymous comments.  I’ll test it for a few days, and if the spam is out of control I’ll flip it back.  My spam filtering software gets the vast majority of spam comments, so I hope it will continue to do its job with anonymous commenting.

The performance on this blog is also slow.  I’m looking at moving to a more fully managed offering from my hosting provider since I don’t have time to muck around with WordPress trying to get it faster.  I also need to get a certificate installed because people aren’t as happy with un-secure web sites these days.

So, a few things going on here!

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