I started keeping stats in 2010 and it looks like 2010 was a “better” year for hits and posts, most likely because I blogged a lot about Lotus and Eclipse stuff more (about twice as many posts) that year than 2011. This site generated 88,815 hits for the year in 2011 and 68,443 in 2010 (minus three months of logging statistics).

The home page is by far the most active hit, probably because of my blog URL on all of my social site profiles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc).

I did have a fairly good year of video viewers on YouTube with 6765 views of for the year. I am glad to see some WebSphere Commerce videos in that top 10 list but it looks like the Lotus and Eclipse ones still reign.

Recent Blog Posts

22

Putting yourself in a YouTube video, is it worth the fuss? Thu, May 24th 2012 10:01a Bob Balfe I have done close to 40 videos on YouTube and I have heard on several occasions that I should put a video of myself down in the lower right corner of my demonstrations. I have mixed feelings about this. One, I think having my face in the video and seeing me speak may be good to ‘connect’ with my viewers but I can’t get passed the space it takes on the screen. The real-estate is hard to deal with already and I kind of feel having me on the screen would just be a kind of narciss [read] Keywords: laptop

108

Killer App for iPhone: Group Text! Thu, May 24th 2012 5:01a Bob Balfe I am finding more and more I have to use group texting from my iPhone. I have a group of friends, a softball team to coach and a pretty big family. All of these “lists” have to be created manually and since many of my recipients phones don’t support group messaging the “list” gets lost and I have to recreate it. The iPhone also does not let you add people to the message once the original message is sent. I really think this should just be a feature on the iPhone, ma [read] Keywords: application applications iphone

13

Using Campaigns and Coremetrics to drive sales on your web site Wed, May 23rd 2012 7:11a Bob Balfe In this video I show how you can use campaigns in WebSphere Commerce to track content and product sales in your website. Campaigns allow you to tag things like web activities with the campaign ID and then pull reports about the performance of that web activity on your site. Web activities in WebSphere Commerce are scheduled content for your site. In this video I use a web activity to promote four products on the home page of our store. I also use a promotion for all furniture (a 20% discount) an [read] Keywords: websphere

25

Quick Tip Video: Getting The XPath In Google Chrome Mon, May 21st 2012 12:21p Bob Balfe In this video I show how easy it is to get the xPath from Google Chrome. You can use the xPath when processing the DOM tree in your code. I use the javax.xml.xpath in Java to process DOM tree; the API is very powerful and easy to use. [read] Keywords: google java xml

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Official contributor on The Smarter Commerce Blog Fri, May 18th 2012 7:30a Bob Balfe Smarter Commerce Blog! Ok, maybe it was not as grueling as I am stating. I want to thank the Smarter Commerce Blog editors for giving me a chance to contribute on their blog, hopefully I live up to the quality that has already been going on over there. This morning, in lieu of the Facebook IPO, I posted my first blog entry entitled “Using Social to grow your customer base”. While Facebook and all of the big social networks play a big role in your online presence there are still a lot [read] Keywords: community facebook mobile

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Why your blog isn’t getting enough hits, top 8 tips! Thu, May 17th 2012 10:30a Bob Balfe I just read this blog post “7 Secrets to Effective Corporate Blogging” and I think this is also a great list for the regular bloggers like myself. As a matter of fact I guess I am doing their last tip right now by “stealing their idea” and adding to it, plus one more tip! I have been blogging for just over six years and I have seen a lot of hits on some posts and not nearly as many hits on other posts that I thought would be good reads. I have learned a lot over the years [read] Keywords: administration collaboration lotus notes application blogging community development eclipse facebook java linkedin twitter

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Partner Spotlight: Trifecta Wed, May 16th 2012 5:10a Bob Balfe I had the pleasure of working with the folks from Trifecta in a recent customer engagement and I am happy to report they are an excellent partner. They really know their commerce. Having several key members of the company come from the IBM lab who built WebSphere Commerce is a much added bonus. These guys know the product in and out and their work clearly shows their leadership in this space. You can see some of their craft with the sites below (Burt’s Bees, Wacoal, and Tandus Flooring). T [read] Keywords: ibm mobile websphere

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My two most popular posts this year Tue, May 15th 2012 7:51a Bob Balfe It’s not often I get more than a few hundred hits on blog posts. I actually average between 200-400 hits per post but for some reason these two posts have received a lot of views. The statistics come from PlanetLotus.org, an aggregation site where most of my Lotus brethren follow. What is interesting is the Searchandizing post is really just a video and has nowhere near the video views as the blog post views. My blog actually does not have as many hits as the PlanetLotus post does, meani [read] Keywords: lotus planet lotus planetlotus planetlotus.org websphere

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Must have links for the virtual eCommerce world Mon, May 14th 2012 8:40a Bob Balfe I often get asked both internally to IBM and external how I keep up with the many trends in the eCommerce world. When I made the change over to the WebSphere Commerce team I wanted to be running in the new space (to me) very quickly. I created a few things that have helped me get up to speed very quickly in this industry and now I use these tools to not only learn new things in this space but evangelize best practices, stories, and direction. So below you will see what I currently use to keep in [read] Keywords: admin administration ibm lotus eclipse email linkedin twitter websphere

122

Oldy but goody article: The Java XPath API Thu, May 10th 2012 11:30a Bob Balfe If you Google “Java XPath” this is one of the first articles returned. Clear and concise explanation for how to use the API: XPath expressions are much easier to write than detailed Document Object Model (DOM) navigation code. When you need to extract information from an XML document, the quickest and simplest way is to embed an XPath expression inside your Java program. Java 5 introduces the javax.xml.xpath package, an XML object-model independent library for querying documents with [read] Keywords: ibm google java xml