What should be in a BLOG?

"The great thing about standards is that you get to choose a new one each year" --Tennebaum


In my travels through the blogosphere I gather some thoughts to share:

  • If you are a developer, and your blog is on a development-oriented blogging host site, shouldn't you be blogging about development-oriented stuff? I mean, I visit Microsoft weblogs - hosted blogs, and most of them have what I am looking for - technical content about development with Microsoft technology. But some of them don't. Instead, they have lists of MP3 tracks, why your car wouldn't start, your dog had puppies, you "found religion", or whatever other non-development oriented subject. Sure, I suppose its OK to throw in a post or two on off-topic items. But if that's what you really want to do, I think you should start a personal blog somewhere else. I won't be reading it. Not because its no good -- but because that's not the kind of content I'm looking for.

  • Have you noticed that some people's blogs consist of nothing more than links to original stuff that other bloggers have written? I think its OK to link to other's work, but more proper to do so when you really have something to add. I mean, if they needed a mirror site, they'd probably set one up, no? Here's what I mean: I search for something I need, and I find 50 "Me too"'s pointing to the real one. Typically none of them have much if anything to add, other than to point to the original person's work. Reminds me of the Simpsons cartoon character writing "I will search Google before asking dumb questions" 50 times on the blackboard.

  • Engaging in public put-downs of somebody else's blog entry on your own blog is really uncool. Unfortunately, I've seen more examples of it than I care to count.

  • Spam, spyware delivery, popups, and so on simply don't belong on blogs. Neither do "Chain blog" schemes. I doubt this opinion needs any amplification.

  • Has basic Netiquette disappeared, along with good taste in music? With UseNet, we used to watch as our favorite newsgroups dropped into the Black Hole of the signal-to-noise ratio. Netiquette dictated that if you wanted to say something, it had to be useful, and you were to say it succinctly. Blogs seem to be the opposite of that -you have long ruminations, off-topic posts and comments, "Me-Too-isms". I'd rather listen to Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations, or Tatum, Trane, Miles, Bird -- classic stuff that has passed the test of time -- not the noise these dweebs put up that will be forgotten forever in a year or so. And at any rate, I don't clutter up my blog with links to it. Hey, I'm the Program Manager of XYZ - and here's my MP3 list, ain't I cool? Jeesh!

Comments

  1. Anonymous8:31 AM

    This is my simple take on this - I hope I haven't missed the point. Broadly I agree with your sentiments in that there are annoying blogs out there. I keep links to my trusted blogs in my favourites and as I discover more I add to them. This my way of accepting that the internet is a free-for-all and homogenising content is a personal journey which is occasionally irritating.

    As my dad says, 'When you drive, you must assume everyone out there is an idiot'. It's a little unfair but there's a distribution of abilities, personalities, reactions, etc.

    In my experience, forums are a lot worse than blogs - the attitude of some in the asp.net forums is neither pleasant nor productive, especially when you consider they are moderated and I tend to visit them less often now. Maybe that's just down to having a collection of my favourite blogs to hand?

    Cheers
    Mike

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m
Read more