Here is the new version 2 card for vSphere in poster size.

Thanks again to Dudley Smith for getting this out so soon.

Here’s a couple of improvements I’d like to (humbly) suggest for Planet V12n in an open forum.

Hackergotchis

Hackergotchis are the small photos you see on some Planets.  I think these are great, and make a surprising difference in the usability and friendliness of a Planet.  Readers very quickly come to recognize the different writers and start to associate with those they like.  They also have the added benefit that we might be able to recognize each come VMworld 2010 🙂

Web site banners/buttons

It would be nice to have a collection of banners/buttons for the writers to display on their websites. Just as the Planet is a great way to introduce readers to new writers, banners like these help our own readers find out about the Planet.  Great free advertising for the Planet, and recognition for the writers that their blog has made it to the dizzy heights of syndication.

What do you think?

At the moment, Planet V12n is very perfunctory.  A place for people to subscribe to multiple RSS feeds at once.  However I think both of these suggestions would help promote Planet V12n and make it more of a reading destination.

Well here it is!

Its been a long time coming. Version 2 of this card has many changes that I’ve wanted to make since writing these cards. It’s taken a good couple of months of hard (and frankly a bit boring :0) work, which had pulled me away from blogging about more interesting things and playing with some of the newly released products.

The best bit is you probably won’t notice much of a difference. A lot of the work is under the covers, to make the most out of the paper real estate.

However, for those curious types who are wondering if anything has actually changed since the last release, here’s a quick changelog that I just pulled together (although there are probably other unlisted tasty tibits hiding in there):

• I’ve resized the content boxes. Hopefully this should make for better results when printing on A4 as the margins are slightly more generous (I don’t have access to any A4 paper these days, living in this anti-conformist land :), so I can’t test this myself. Please let me know if you think its better or worse).
• The line spacing has been reduced slightly to allow for more content to be squeezed in. I haven’t reduced the font size, just the whitespace.
• Previously, the card used a mixture of different fonts. I could never guarantee that these would render properly on everyones PDF viewer, and I couldn’t embed them without potentially breaking font licenses. Now version 2 exclusively uses the Liberation Font set, which is a great free font created under a GPL type license by Red Hat.
• I’ve managed to reduce the PDF’s file size by around 40%, by optimizing the fonts and graphics.
• Since the last version, vSphere 4 Update 1 has been released, so I’ve updated the card to reflect the new limits.
• Extra content covering: PVLANs, dvUplinks & Network VMotion definitions, vDS VLAN options expanded, TPGS, ALUA, Current host load standard deviation, Partitioning advice change, Security levels, Pre-update detection tool, Changed block tracking files, Disk formats, vCenter server settings.
• More web and KB links.
• Firewall updates.
• Corrections, many of which came from the great vReference readers. Thanks everyone!

I’ve been looking back at my website this week, like many follow bloggers recently.

This is the 3^rd iteration of the my site which started over 2 years ago as vmreference.com on google pages, before I moving to my own hosted site and then finally migrating to the current vReference site. Unfortunately I’ve lost many of the statistics, but since my last move only 5 months ago I’ve had around 120,000 page views. The vSphere 4 card has been downloaded over 18.000 times since publishing it only a few months ago, and my vSphere 4 notes have had around 9,000 downloads. I first published the original VI3 card over 26 months ago. Sadly no vExpert for my troubles though :P, but I have got not 1 but 2 links on Eric Siebert’s awesome vLaunchpad honour roll.

Now, time to get back to work on my supplemental page (yeah I hate the name too, suggestion on a SAE please).

A little off topic for Planet V12n, but here’s a tip for my fellow bloggers (and RSS subscription readers) …

Google have just added favicon support to their great online RSS reader, catchily named Google Reader.  At the moment the default is to have them turned off, but to turn them go to Settings > Preferences tab > Misc section > tick Show favicons for subscriptions.

However, I was a little disheartened to see the favicon for vReference just showing up as a regular RSS icon, despite the site having a custom cloud icon.  It seems that if you use the popular FeedBurner service to publish your RSS feeds, then favicons are not supported.  Here’s google’s answer:

Why doesn’t my site’s favicon always show up when my feed is displayed in a feed reader?

There is currently no solution for this issue; FeedBurner may offer one in the future; this topic will be updated to reflect any new capabilities.

However after a little digging, I discovered that if you copy your favicon.ico file to the root directory of your website, then it is displayed properly.  For WordPress blogs, these icons are normally tucked away somewhere in /wp-content/themes/<theme_name>/images.