Tag: Blogging

SAS Administrator Series on SAS Users Groups Blog

If you’re a SAS platform administrator and you subscribe to the SAS® Tech Report you probably noticed the following snippet in the November 2012 issue:

And take a look at the new series for SAS administrators on the SAS Users Groups blog. Christina and I plan to give administrators information that includes talking with IT, storage and IO subsystems.

Waynette Tubbs
Editor, SAS Tech Report

I’m really looking forward to following this series of blog posts and hearing about the experiences and opinions of lots of other SAS platform administrators. There have been a few posts already and I was also excited that I was recently able to contribute something too: IT skills or SAS skills–what’s more important?

It sounds like there are going to be lots of great topics from a number of different contributors, so be sure to bookmark it as another resource for SAS platform administrators.

Second Birthday

It’s PlatformAdmin.com’s 2nd birthday this week!

The past 2 years have gone very quickly I must say. I set out with a goal of writing a least 1 post every month. Not very ambitious I know, but realistic for me nonetheless! I’ve never been much of a writer. I’ve always been impressed by people who appear to write so well, and even more so by those that have the stamina and skill to author and publish a book. Maths, Science & Computers have always been my thing ever since way back in school and I have generally avoided writing unless I had to. I do remember reading a blog post by Joel Spolsky a while back where he said that “Writing is a muscle. The more you write, the more you’ll be able to write.” It sounded pretty reasonable to me. As a training course instructor I’ve always found that one of the great benefits of teaching was that I necessarily had to learn much more of the details for whatever I was teaching. I’ve found that the same appears to be true about writing publicly accessible blog posts. The fear of being asked tough questions or being challenged on topics turns into the pleasure of learning more!

Well, I’m pleased to say that Continue reading “Second Birthday”

Some PlatformAdmin.com Milestones …

My platformadmin.com blog has seen a few milestones of late:

  1. It had 1st birthday recently (boy that year went quickly!)
  2. … then, thanks to mentions from Waynette Tubs in the June edition of the SAS® Technical Report, and Andrew Ratcliffe in his excellent NOTE: blog, it saw a fair bit of extra traffic this month. The unique monthly visitor count for platformadmin.com topped 1000 visitors for the first time! I got especially geeky excited when I saw it hit 1024.
  3. … and finally, in a lesser milestone, the number of total spam comments deleted over the past year topped 1000 too – would have been happy not to have seen that milestone, but I guess it’s probably peanuts compared to what other blogs get :)

Thanks to all the readers out there, and special thanks to those that comment, tweet, retweet and say nice things about platformadmin.com on other sites/blogs too.

Happy SAS platform admin-ing to all.

Cheers
Paul

PlatformAdmin.com also available via SAS-X.com

This platformadmin.com blog is now available via the new aggregator SAS-X.com, along with many other great SAS related blogs. It’s well worth checking out. If you’re wondering how it’s different from sascommunity.org planet there’s a Q&A item about it at the bottom of the SAS-X.com about page.

PlatformAdmin.com now has a Blog Roll (and roll of rolls)

Thanks to Andy Ratcliffe for adding platformadmin.com to his blog roll on NOTE:.

This was a timely reminder for me to add a blog roll to this platformadmin.com blog, something I had been meaning to do for some time now, and so I was prompted to make a start on it. You can find the initial blog roll in the column on the right hand side of this page.

My intention with this blog roll is not to list every SAS related blog I read because there are already a few other better, more definitive blog rolls available. I will just add a few of my favourite ones, especially those where I have seen some platform admin related content in the past. The ones I am starting off by adding are:

  • NOTE: The blog of RTSL.eu: Andy Ratcliffe’s blog has a number of articles on architecture, admin, backup, DI, BI, OLAP etc.
  • real business intelligence for real users: Angela Hall’s blog is a veritable encyclopaedia of SAS BI related information useful for SAS platform administrators – not to be missed!
  • The SAS Dummy: Chris Hemedinger’s blog has many articles of interest to admins managing SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office installations.

If you are after a more complete list of SAS related blogs and RSS feeds I would also recommend the following:

… you might think of this as a blog roll of blog rolls! :)

BTW if you are daunted by the amount of SAS related information out there I would highly recommend Google Reader. I switched a few months ago and since then have been able to skim read a lot more resources, in a lot less time, from any device at hand (iPad, Android phone, MacBook, Linux notebook etc.) and being a web app all the devices are always in sync with each other. I’d be lost without it now.