Starting a blog, part 2

Question

We had a meta post a while ago with some good ideas for possible blog entries. Another user expressed interest in starting a blog, so as we've covered the first two bullets on the checklist, I'm posting this to cover the last two:

• Recruit contributors. Who will write entries for the blog? Starting a blog is a bit like going through the buffet line. Be realistic – don’t let your eyes be bigger than your stomach. Think seriously about if and how often you will be able to contribute a blog post, including research/prep time.
• Plan a schedule. Given the results of steps #2 and #3, think about a rough idea of a schedule for the blog. Will there be one post a week, posted Mondays? Will there be posts on Tuesdays and posts on Fridays? You don’t need to be pushing out posts daily, but I would say at least one post a week.

Post an answer if you'd like to contribute; mention what sorts of posts you'd like to write and how often you think you'll be posting. You can see the existing SE blogs on the Blog Overflow homepage; there's a good number more than there were back in June

Answer 1

If there was a U&L blog:

• I would write an article now and then (see below).
• I will not promise any particular schedule.
• I am willing to be an editor, i.e. review people's posts.
• I am not willing to nag people for content or manage publication schedules.

---

I have a series of posts in mind inspired by questions that are asked on this site, but presenting a topic viewed through my own biases or giving a broad introduction rather than being driven by a specific question. Things like

• packages that I install on every Linux machine
• an introduction to bulk file renaming
• a grab-bag of simple zsh functions
• what's a command line and why should I care

Answer 2

I've had a blog for as long as I can remember. I also enjoy teaching people who are new to a subject how "it" works. I will have a busy schedule come school time but I can definitely find time for regular posting.

I prefer writing broad articles on how things work. When writing an article (anywhere) I try to think to myself: "Will a Windows user be able to pick this up, read it, understand most of it, and think damn that makes sense?". If I can achieve this I'm happy with my post.

As for when posts should happen, I think we should look at when the site gets most of it's activity and plan to post a day before. This allows user to possibly post a question or two about the material (if they have any) along with some links to the blog post. When we get the increase in traffic, we will theoretically get more views seeing as there are more ways of getting to the blog post. Just my opinion.

I also think that posting on a weekly schedule at this point is fine. If we find it's too much, we can tone it down and vice-versa. However I do think it's important for people to write a post because they want to, and not because they are forced to. On SU, they have a post in meta every week where people debate on a question to use for the week's blog post. We could have a similar thread with topics that would be good candidates (ie U&L Weekly Blog Post Brainstorm). Then users can post if they want to write about it or not and some important things to include.

UPDATE: I'll be able to help proofread all articles weekly and provide minor editing. I can also help with the design of the blog (if we're allowed to have our own). As for writing articles, I think the idea expressed above is a good place to start.

Answer 3

Just a thought: one way to generate potential posts would be to encourage people to turn (theirs or others) answers into posts.

For example, you read a great answer about X, so you upvote it and leave a comment to the effect:

Would you consider explaining some of the {history,background,way this works with Y} in one of the U&L Community Blog Posts? $BLOG_ROOT would be happy to QA/edit the post for you before it was published.

Answer 4

Since we seem to be answering/updating this question again:

I'd be interested in contributing. I'm not sure how often I could do it, due to school and robotics taking up a lot of my time. But I could probably manage something every 3 or so weeks.

Things I've been thinking about:

• Getting started with a version-controlled dotfiles directory
• Getting started with Arch Linux (my favorite distribution)
• Interesting things going on in the GNOME community
• Let's go decentralized
• What's in the data stack (an expansion on @slm's question about storage)

Things that I would maybe do, but am not sure about yet:

• What the hell is Plan 9, and why should I be interested? (wording TBD; I'm not sure how interested people will be in this)
• Getting started with systemd/why systemd is awesome (maybe - I'm not all that much of an expert on systemd yet)
• Current state of Wayland on the desktop and beyond (should arguably be an edit to our existing What is Wayland? question)

Edit:

Ok, I'll bite. Since people seem to want me to do it, I'll volunteer to schedule, nag, beg, bribe, coerce, threaten, impersonate, tear hair out, burn bridges, set ultimatums, macromanage, micromanage, edit, shamelessly promote, etc. for the blog. We can try it for a while and see how it goes.

Answer 5

I plan to build an LFS system soon, but with some form of package management. This can either be a series or one looong post.

I can also write on some random topics:

• simplifying Debian CLI package management - using wajig
• multiple ways of running JHBuild (pros and cons)
• etc.

This is what others can help me contribute on:

• contributor-of-note: this would be the equivalent of my own series, only better; this would be a celebration of specific people who do significant work (coding, visual design, translations, infrastructure, release, ...) in the Unix & Linux field; someone can come with a better name

• project-of-note: this would be the equivalent of my own series, only better; this would be a celebration of specific projects (why they rock, sample usage, mention of competitors, ...).

I can probably contribute about one post a month (since I can take my existing posts, and polish them for inclusion), but later on I would expect that to slow down (say maybe once every 2-3 months). But of course I've pulled these figures out of...

Answer 6

I can help with the administrative & editing duties. I have experience doing that from the Cooking.SE blog.

I'm also willing to write some articles, though I don't have any ideas. (Unless I finally do that NTP thing.)

Answer 7

I've been blogging for about two plus years, and I just made my first blogoverflow contribution this week. I'm taking a Computer Science course this semester that's focusing on VI and Unix (we're coding remotely over SSH) and I've done some blogging on that. I'd be glad to have some of my posts cross posted as guest posts.

Answer 8

Perhaps small groups of 2 or 3 people (at least 2) for different distros and / or skills, such as the use of databases, or the proper use of the terminal. Educate showing what one can do well is very good. I'm still very new to this stack Exchange .. but some opensuse / debian and mysql, I can write of...

I know I'm a noob in this stack exchange but if you want it.. I'm here.

Answer 9

Just adding my name to the list. I too maintain a technical blog outside of SE but would be interested in doing articles under the guise of SE.

Topics that I would like to cover:

• Taking Answers that I've written and expanding them
• I'd like to do multi-part series on topics such as:
  • Samba
  • User authentication within Active Directory
  • Setting up LDAP
  • Setting up printing and CUPS services
  • Setting up Nginx + Jetty and reverse proxying
  • Dealing with SSL certificates
  • Basics of compiling C code
  • Techniques for Debugging errant processes under Linux
  • Building RPMS
  • Setup and maintaining your own Yum repositories
  • Setting up a Koji build server
  • Using Mock to build packages
  • Building your own Linux module
  • POSIX

I'd also like to do some longer running series where we cover a variety of topics. These might be 10+ part series where we dive into some topics in a much deeper way, exploring various aspects of how the Linux Kernel works, how you can gain access to various bits of it's state, etc. I haven't full fleshed out this idea as of yet.

Another idea for the longer format would be taking some hardware and interacting with it either through the USB or the GIO, these would be more hobbyist in nature, but the common thread would be in interacting with the physical world from a Linux platformed box such as a Raspberry Pi.