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IBM DeveloperWorks for Storage has migrated here

By Tony Pearson posted Fri November 29, 2019 01:34 PM

  

Originally posted by: TonyPearson

Inside System Storage with Tony Pearson

Well this week is Thanksgiving Holiday here in the USA, and I personally am thankful to all my readers of this blog. Here are the rankings pulled last month. Thanks to all of you, this blog has been ranked #1 since 2011 and has remained number one every since.

Rank Blog Author(s) Views since 2013
1 Inside System Storage Tony Pearson, Chris Vollmar, and Lloyd Dean 70,727,894
2 Notes from Rational Support Kelly Puffs 58,290,641
3 Application Performance Management APM Community 54,762,369
4 Asset Management Maximo Community 54,736,719
5 Application Integration Middleware Support Maryam Ahmed 35,120,243
6 Keep on Learning Susan Visser 24,442,013
7 Thoughts from Support Andrew McC 22,749,612
9 Chris’s AIX Blog Chris Gibson 22,236,874
10 Ingolf’s z/VSE Blog Ingolf Salm, Jens Remus 21,135,352

While I have been blogging for over 13 years (since September of 2006!) the number of views were not started tracking until mid 2013. Of 70 million listed above, this blog got about 15 million views in the past 12 months.

(Internally, IBM values each blog at $5.00 USD per thousand views, or 0.5 cents per view, in marketing value to the company. At that rate, this blog provided about $75,000 USD in marketing value to the IBM Systems and IBM System Storage brand these past 12 months!)

Sadly, IBM has given notice that this blog, and thousands others on IBM developerWorks, will be going away at the end of this year. At least this blog will retire as a champion, joining the likes of retired athletes Mark Spitz, Rocky Marciano, Joe DiMaggio, Michael Strahan, Pete Sampras, and John Elway.

If you read blog posts through an RSS feed reader, you may not have noticed the ominous IBM warning that looks like this:

IC Sunset The developerWorks Connections platform will be sunset on December 31, 2019. On January 1, 2020, this blog will no longer be available. More details available on our FAQ.


For those who have not read this FAQ yet, here is the TL;DR summary:

Q.Why are these Connections pages going away?
A. IBM is consolidating major content portals to improve the customer experience.

Q.What will happen to the information that is currently published on developerWorks Connections? Where will I be able to find it?
A. Existing content and posts will be reviewed by the content owners and moved...

Q.Can I receive a copy of all of the content that has been published?
A. Unfortunately due to technical constraints of this product, we are unable to provide that service...

Over the past 13 years, this blog has been moved from one software platform to another. We went from Roller, to Akamai, to IBM Connections. Each time, the developerWorks team had lined up a new software platform, and helped to move each individual blog from old to new.

In the process, we lost some of the formatting and external media, like photos and graphics. I have found in some cases new-line characters that separate lines were removed, causing some words to get merged together. I use a spell checker to find them.

This time is different because [IBM Connections software was sold to HCL Technologies] and I suspect IBM did not want to pay to have them continue.

(The phrase "consolidating major content portals to improve the customer experience" reminds me how countries like Russia and China simplify news for their citizens by having a single state-run newspaper and and a single state-run television station. Can you imagine an American say they want fewer choices, fewer television channels, fewer radio stations, fewer books to read?)

Instead of thousands of individual blogs focused on specific topics, each reflecting the un-edited voice of the blogger in his or her own style and personality, the alternatives proposed for new content are now reduced. Officially, IBM recommends community/multi-author blogs in fewer, broader categories, where posts are reviewed, edited and censored by a committee. These are available today for a handful of broad categories:

  • www.ibm.com/community/

    For IBM Community blogs, there are 12 broad categories: Automation, Business Analytics, Data Science, Governance and Integration, Hybrid Data Management, IBM Cloud Pak for Data, Internet of Things, Marketing and Commerce, Middleware, Security, Supply Chain, IBM Z and LinuxONE.

  • www.ibm.com/mysupport/

    For IBM Support offers Fix Central, Notifications on individual product lines, and IBM Support Guide.

If neither of these two alternatives strike you as the most obvious place to move "Inside System Storage", you are not alone.

Many of you have told me that particular blog posts helped you close a deal, address a particular client situation, or inspired you to learn new skills. If you want to download any of the posts from this blog, or the posts of any other blogs on IBM developerWorks before they disappear, you can do this from your browser and use "Save As" to create an HTML file for each post or view.

(Or better yet, I have done much of this for you, which I have collected in a series of books, Inside System Storage Volume I through V, available from my publisher Lulu, available here: [Books published by Tony Pearson].)

If you run Red Hat Linux like I do, the "wget" command can help automate this for you. Here is an example script that pulls down monthly HTML files (all the posts for the month in a single HTML file) for the year 2018, resulting in 12 HTML files in total:

for i in `seq 201801 201812`;
do
echo "Processing month: $i"
wget -O $i.html "https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/InsideSystemStorage/date/$i?lang=en&maxresults=50"
done

Chris, Lloyd, and I are reviewing various options, in discussions with marketing and other teams, and hope to announce something before December 31.


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#StorageManagementandReporting
#PrimaryStorage
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