I started to blog mostly for myself (Dec 2008), and initially that was the audience. After a while I started to find my focus areas and now I have changed the name of the blog twice - and become a tech source magazine like publication with a bunch of writers and hundreds of readers (maxping.org). Money? No, at least not yet - unless $60 from google adsense counts. I recommend to just start doing it and find out how it folds out.

Yes, you can actually see "powered by" link at the bottom of the page too. If you go to about page, you can find a coupon code to get even lower price (and I will get a lower affiliate slice). I didn't do any changes to the page, I just thought that it was a good story and I submitted it to slashdot. They have rejected dozens of my submissions so I didn't expect anything...

The first slashdot day was 2.5 Gigabytes and the second 2Gigabytes of traffic. Then the traffic gradually slowed down, but ended up at double from the previous.

wow, It's surprising how small that actually is in reality

The article was in the slashdot frontpage. It got only ~80 comments so maybe it just wasn't so popular. I am still getting hits from there and all round from the sites that picked it up.

I somehow end up thinking if I ever get to see so many workplaces in RL!

HN has Alexa rank of 7000, while slashdot has about 1000. When I look at HN Alexa rank, a big jump happened in the last month. Anyone knows why? I like HN myself, the philosophy suits me better...

I am using stock Wordpress 2.7.1 (2.7.0 at the time of slashdot effect). I have not enabled any caching plugins at Wordpress. All the pages are generated with php, so I suspect it is impossible to effectively use squid? Here's the website itself: http://www.cybertechnews.org

I am interested to hear your experiences. Ludocraft (one of realXtend developers) hinted a couple of days ago that they are working to get face and expression tracking with web camera to work - and the result is overlayed onto your avatar in real time. (Here's the bit about avatars: http://www.cybertechnews.org/?p=1366)

realXtend (http://www.realxtend.org) for virtual meetings and scrum, skype, google docs

I have noticed that the surrounding brightness conditions should match with monitor, that way it is not so bad for eyes. I am also using lower resolution to make everything look bigger on screen. Taking a hourly break is a great idea as well.

An excellent tool for the brightness issue is f.lux: http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/

I second this, although it can be a bit disconcerting when it suddenly changes the colour temperature. Also, it doesn't affect the mouse cursor for me, which ends up appearing slightly bluey green in the evenings.