What should be in a BLOG?

By
"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!

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

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.

By
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"

By
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

By
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

System.Web.Caching.Cache, HttpRuntime.Cache, and IIS Recycles

By
Recently I chimed in on a newsgroup thread to an OP (Original Poster) who was questioning why he was losing Cache items. This individual would load a dataset from the Cache object into a local object to use to perform processing. He had been using httpcontext.current.cache and noticed that sometimes he was not able to get the dataset out of the cache. He tried switching to HttpRuntime.Cache and it seemed to help. The OP claimed that the application is under heavy hits, and once or twice every month he would see this error. He wanted to know why does the HttpContext.Current.Cache call work sometimes, while some other times does not. A couple of posters replied, one of whom is a respected MVP who usually makes very astute, high-quality posts. He posted," The cache is only valid during the life of the request. how is you[sic] code using the cache?" Somebody else (also pretty astute, usually) responded, "Cache is valid during lifetime of application not request.....". W...
Read more

FIX: Requested Registry Access is not allowed (Visual Studio 2008)

By
Symptom: in Visual Studio 2008, you attempt to add a new WebContentForm and associate it with a MasterPage. You receive an error dialog "Requested Reqistry Access is not allowed". Don't ask me what caused this; I'm guessing that the registry keys involved had their access denied due to removal of a previous version of Visual Studio, leaving the new guy (Visual Studio 2008) in the lurch. Here's the fix: Download "subinacl" here . This is a command-line tool that enables administrators to obtain security information about files, registry keys, and services, and transfer this information from user to user, from local or global group to group, and from domain to domain. After installing subinacl.exe (it will be in the C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools folder.), drop to a command prompt and run the following batch file, which you have saved in the same folder with the filename "FIX.bat": subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudi...
Read more