Fri, 03 Oct 2008
/SW/website/blog:
On The Value of Blogging
Blogging as a pop culture phenomenon came about just in the last
couple of years. But for those of us involved in high-tech, this has
been going on for many years, even decades. Who remembers "News Groups"?
I certainly do, and probably made my first post to a news group around
about 1996, just about the same time e-mail was becoming a common tool
in big corportations.
It is probably no big surprise, but the high-tech community were
among the first to discover the vast potential of various electronic
networking technologies (e-mail, news groups, web-pages....) for the
sharing of information.
As someone who has run Linux on all of his computers since at least
2002, and dabbled for several years before that, I have been heavily
using and contributing to the Open Source software community for quite
some time now. One of the things one quickly notices about the community
is its geographic distribution. In getting one recent bug[1] fixed, for
example, I (just at the moment, in Vietnam) worked with two other
people, one in Sweden and one in the UK.
Virtually all communication is electronic in this community. Software
documentation is sometimes good, sometimes not so good.... But whether
trying to do a fresh install & configure, or sort out a bug in something
newly upgraded, one *quickly* learns to be grateful to all the people
who have made their notes and answers and ideas available in a public
place so that search engines can find them. Forum and e-mail list
archives are treasure troves, but the very best stuff are the notes /
tutorials / how-to's that the author's are kind enough to publish. There
is so much information out there that I very rarely have to ask for help
on an e-mail list (Open Source "customer support").
So I have gotten quite used to how my friends and collaborators in
Open Source, and now myself, live a rather "public" life, running
web-sites and blogs, and making copious contributions to forums and
e-mail lists (search google for "debian ckoeni@gmail" and you will get
200+ hits of my own contributions since I started using ckoeni@gmail for
list e-mails). It's actually a way of giving back to the community,
after so often being helped by others doing the same thing.
As one can see from the dates, this particular blog is fairly new. I
used to keep my notes in a typo3 Content Management System, but adding /
editing was not nearly as convenient as my current setup[2], and
something had to be "important" or I needed to feel like I had "free
time" before content was added.
My current setup using the pyBlosxom[3] blog engine with mirrored
copies on my website and my desktop removes almost all the overhead from
editing blog content, so I find myself creating content / notes on the
fly, as I work. This makes my notes more complete and accurate, and I am
finding it also seems to organize my work flow and make me more
organized. I also still have access to all my notes even when not
internet-connected.
The discipline of writing a document about my work, as I work, seems
to spill over into injecting more discipline and structure into my
work. Perhaps it slows me down a bit, but I think the quality of the
result is better. And I do not get stressed out trying to remember
everything, because its all written down....
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=497016
[2] http://blog.langex.net/index.cgi/SW/blog/
[3] http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/
posted at: 05:14 | path: /SW/website/blog | permanent link to this entry
