18 popular testing posts you might have missed in 2006

Its been a little over a year since I rolled out QAInsight.net with my just starting, blogging beginner, writer wanna-be Hello world post. If you're a recent subscriber or just happened to stumble upon the site you most likely missed my top 18 Quality Assurance & Testing related posts in 2006. Why 18? Why not? Why do you find defects when a developer says "only a tiny change was made, you don't need to test it"? Because that's just the way it is. None the less, here's the 18:

A wonderful year it has been, I've learned a ton about blogs, blogging, testing, QA and QAInsight visitors.

How do I feel about blogging after 1 year of doing so?

First off, I haven't lost that initial thought the day I started dreaming about blogging: I really don't care to write about "Quality Assurance" process or methodology, I prefer to talk about "Testing". I feel "Quality Assurance" has been driven into the ground and I'm just plain tired of hearing about it. Don't get me wrong, process and methodology is important but it just gets old when you hear the same thing over and over, each with a little, unique twist to it. I'll leave that to the other guys, testing is my love.

Second, writing about testing doesn't drive hoards of people to your site. Duh... it's boring unless you are in QA and are sincerely interested in improving your testing.

Third, when writing about testing it often requires technical details with detailed steps. It is REALLY REALLY hard to show personality and humor when doing this (at least for me).

Fourth, I enjoy creative writing far more than writing technical posts. Writing a testing post requires note taking, procedural step documentation, and just plain TIME. Creative writing I can spit out in 20 minutes with little thought or fret. For example, my post Death toll rises due to FireFox got a TON of hits and I wrote it on the fly without having to think like a robot. People gobble this stuff up! I love writing like this, and will be doing more of it in the years to come.

Fifth, leaving comments on other blogs or sites and those comments just happen to point to your site will help drive traffic. For example: Six reasons why Robert Scoble is Mini-Microsoft. Granted, calling somebody out on something helps too.

Sixth, Google Adsense drives traffic. When you write a post, Google notices, your content is indexed quickly, and can be found through Google search.

And last but not least, the blog software Dasblog is the way to go. It works and it works well. If you're thinking about about starting a blog, do yourself a favor and set yourself up with Dasblog.