| Date: | July 4, 2006 / year-entry #222 |
| Tags: | non-computer;things-ive-written-that-have-amused-other-people |
| Orig Link: | https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060704-00/?p=30643 |
| Comments: | 7 |
| Summary: | Go figure. |
In our internal blogging discussion mailing list, somebody asked, "How do you guys manage your blogs? I mean stuff like revising old posts, managing links, categories, etc." My reply:
For some reason, people got a kick out of that last sentence. (Episode 1.) |
Comments (7)
Comments are closed. |
The questioner’s expectation is hilarious. Microsoft employee expects post blog-posting management overhead. Is this based on their own work environment – post-product shipped work ‘managing’ it (e.g. QFE’s Windows Updates),
Well, it’s not an unreasonable question. I mean, writing a "popular blog" means dedicating some time to fight off the spammers and slashdot effect every once in a while, and it also involves making sure to stop allowing new posts on threads after a while.
Obviously the aspect of "feeding" the blog is where most of the effort happens, but there is still overhead, and to some people that’s the hurdle to get over.
Of course a blogger isn’t subject to requirements to fix bugs in old blog entries, but there are reasons why it would be really nice to do so. For stuff that is misdocumented in MSDN but almost properly documented in this blog, where it is better for programmers to read old blog entries and reduce the amount of experimenting, a bug fix would be as useful as the original blog entry was in the first place. Of course it’s not a responsibility, just a help.
(An ivory tower idealist might hope for MSDN to be fixed too. Today Microsoft gave me two more examples showing how silly such hopes are.)
… like coming in on a federal holiday just to post on your blog? ;)
Maurits: Surely you realize that Raymond has an autoposter – That’s why all posts show up at 7AM sharp. It feeds from an async queue which is several months long.
It’s a valid question. When I started my blog, I didn’t think I’d be posting anything much about gay rights, but I was wrong. So I added a category for it, and then I had to go back and identify all the posts that belonged in that category.
When you come down to it, it depends on the kind of blog you’re running, and how you categorise your posts. Raymond’s categories are very simple, although I still don’t quite get the difference between “Non-Computer” and “Other”. My blog has something like a dozen categories, but still rather general ones like “Politics” and “Gay Rights”. I’ve seen other blogs that have more like a hundred very specific categories like “Bush” and “Rush Limbaugh” and “North Korea” and “Iraq”, such that any given post – like “Rush Limbaugh reported that Bush compares North Korea to Iraq” – is likely to fit into several categories.
>Surely you realize that Raymond has an autoposter
What?!? He’s *not* just a really really really punctual guy?