In the “I doubt anyone cares but I’ll mention it anyway” department…
I registered cciecandidate.com today. The CCIE Candidate blog still lives at ethanbanks.net, even if you hit cciecandidate.com; there’s no changes to bookmarks required. Register.com had a price I couldn’t pass up – free for a year, so why not.
Part of the reason I grabbed the domain is because I hope to do something with this site more than the blog once I have my digits. I keep going back to the “open-source CCIE” idea in my mind. People could submit mini-labs and even full-scale labs that would be subject to peer review. Open-source CCIE audio lectures. The idea is to provide quality study materials that would help a candidate on a tight budget make real progress towards passing the lab.
I’d like to do a CCIE candidate wiki as well, as I can’t find a good one. (If you know of a good CCIE wiki, let me know.) The idea behind the wiki is to create the main headings based on the Cisco blueprint, and then create sub-topics under the main blueprint headings that would contain a technology overview article, an IOS command references article, and then some kind of “real world” command output article that shows the command in action. Arguably, a CCIE wiki is not needed, since cisco.com and the Doc CD has much of what I’m talking about. I guess it’s more an issue of targetted organization. I’d like to be able to pop open a blueprint heading in a wiki, get an idea of the tech, wrap my brain around the commands I need to care about, and then see some command output that I could use as a starting point for my own lab work. A wiki organized in such a way would help bring focus to a blueprint study topic. It would also help divide big topics (like BGP or QoS) into bite-size chunks.
I have ideas, whatever they might be worth. I’m not sure where they are going to go yet. This blog sees around 100K raw hits a month now, which translates to around 800 “visits” a day on the average. When I post a new article, there tends (naturally) to be more traffic for a given day, what with all the readers banging on the RSS feed.
I’m open to ideas, I guess. I know I want to keep the site going after I get my digits, but I know I have to do something other than just blogging. Once I’m an IE, I won’t have as much to blog about! :-) Ideas of what else you might like to see on this site are, of course, welcome via comment or unicast. Keeping it technical is my greatest concern.