What CAN We Blog About???

Ok so we can't write about:

  • Politics
  • Personal Stuff
  • Observations About Life
  • Etc.

I was told that we should only write about code. Well, in a further censorship of the blogging community here, Jesse and Julia think that we shouldn't be able to ask questions of the community in our blogs, or use the contact pages to ask people questions.

Well, I have a note for anyone that reads my blog: Anyone is MORE THAN WELCOME to use my contact page to ask me any kind of question you see fit to ask. As a member of the .NET community, I find it important and appropriate to use any and all means necessary to spread the .NET love. And feel free to ask questions in your blog. I personally find it extremely interesting to watch other .NETers on their journey to OOP nirvana.

We've gone round and round about what the .NET Weblogs are, and what the focus is. I've already censored myself about my views on everything else, I WILL NOT censor myself on the programming topics I write about. It's a journal of your personal experiences with programming. To quote John Adams, "Will you whip it and beat it till you break it's spirit?"

By blogging here, you have a responsibility to your community members to help them out. This anti-social mentality will only turn away readers who may learn something from what we all have to say. If you can't handle that responsibility, don't blog. Go back to moderating the Forums and the Newsgroups and let us talk about our experiences.

20 Comments

  • Thanks Robert. I'm new to the world of .NET and after about a month of skulking about the .NET Weblogs feed, I decided to ask one of the bloggers about the best way to get my hands in .NET. I asked a pretty general question, shouldn't be much of a stretch to give me even a canned response, and ... nothing.





    If you're blogging on a specific topic, and then don't want to answer questions regarding that topic, why even bother having a contact page?





    I'm glad to see the entire community doesn't shared the closed-door policy. Thanks.

  • Ah, another 1776 fan, I presume. :-)

  • No one is censoring anyone. It is just a request. Feel free to do what you want, but please think twice before posting questions that would be better suited for a newsgroup. Why? Well, because if you don't then the .net weblogs main feed could very quickly turn into a newsgroup quality feed, and then no one will want to read it anymore. I already know quite a few people who have unsubscribed from the main feed and only read individual feeds, since the overall quality of the main feed has been significantly degraded from what it once was.





    Again, posting questions for discussion is one thing, but asking what is wrong with a specific line of code or code block in a blog posting is just lame when there are other resources that are designed specifically for that type of thing. It is up to individual bloggers to decide what is best suited for the individual mediums, but all we ask is that you think before posting. I don't think that is too burdensome a request.





    As far as your comments go:





    "By blogging here, you have a responsibility to your community members to help them out. This anti-social mentality will only turn away readers who may learn something from what we all have to say. If you can't handle that responsibility, don't blog. Go back to moderating the Forums and the Newsgroups and let us talk about our experiences."





    I think you miss the point. The point is that a lot of bloggers here do not want to moderate forums or newsgroups. Why? Not because they don't like helping people, but because they don't have a lot of spare time in the first place, and what little time they do have left during the day they would rather spend with their wife and kids than some people they have never met. Those bloggers that do have extra time and want to help people out hang out on those newsgroups anyway, so by posting there instead, you won't be spamming anyone, just posting to those who are able and willing to devote time to help you out.

  • Well your response was a lot nicer then mine was going to be. :)





    I agree totally with you. I still to this day get people emailing me (from the contact page no less) about a problem I posted a while ago. I'm not against helping them out when I can. This is another resource for developers to use, I see no reason not help out people. If a person doesn't have time or can't help the person send them to another resource, there maybe some that you know about that other people don't.





  • Jeff: Hope that wasn't me who didn't answer(I recall someone asking me that and I answered as a blog post to his question)


  • This brings up a couple questions. Are blogs going to be like emails where everyone is going to have 10 just to get out the information they want? Does the MainFeed need to be like TechEdBloggers.net where only .NET topics are feed to it?

  • <Adams> "... and the three, Franklin, Washington, and the horse, fought the entire Revolution singlehandedly.


    <long pause>


    <Franklin> "I like it."

  • stupid UrlEncoding....


  • Actually, HtmlEncoding ;)





    I think you missed the point.





    Broad thought provoking questions are O.K. Part of blogging is sharing what's on your mind and getting feedback on it





    I think what Jesse was getting at is questions about how to property page a datagrid are not necessary. There are many other viable (and I would even say better :D) resources for these kinds of questions.

  • If newsgroups were frequented by the same type of people that read and write the blogs on this site, putting a question in a newsgroup would be a good idea. The level of intelligence and maturity on newsgroups can not be compared to this community.

  • right.





    Well, Scott, unfortunately what came across was a community-disrupting post telling those who don't know better to basically go to hell. What gives anyone except you the right to tell people what they can and can't talk about if they're only talking about PROGRAMMING. it seems to me that property pages relate to .NET (seeing as how it is called VS<b>.NET</b>. We already can't talk about ANYTHING else.





    Hey SirShannon - AMEN!

  • The reason those intelligent people hang out here is because they aren't pelted by annoying questions like "what is a null reference exception?" Keep wasting their time with things like this, and I they will leave, or at least go back to their old blog roll.

  • Jesse,





    You're gonna need a ladder to get yourself out of the hole you keep digging yourself. What you did just now was make yourself seem like an arrogant, self-important jerk, who doesn't have "time" to answer "annoying" questions from people who are unfortunate enough not to know as much as you. So, as I said in my first post, go back to your blogroll. You're no longer on mine.

  • I used to spend hours a day answering newsgroup postings (go to google groups, and query my name and you will have more than enough posts to read for the next couple days / weeks / months). Unfortunately, I can no longer do so because I am busy helping out people that have such a need for help that they are willing to pay for it. I wish I could help people for free all day long (I am literally behind my monitor from 9:00 AM to about 2:00 - 3:00 AM on a daily basis). The fact of the matter is that you can easily spend 24 hours a day answering newsgroup postings and get nothing done at the office, but this doesn't pay the bills, keep food in your stomach, or gas in your car.





    As Julie pointed out, no matter how much help you have given to the community, there is always a group of people that doesn't seem to appreciate it. They just get addicted to the free advice and code samples and want more, more, more of your time. They think, "can't you just answer one question for me?" Yes, but then Bob and Jim and Jill and Billy all have their own questions they want answered and you have to draw the line somewhere. It is quite unfortunate that when you do decide to draw the line, some people act as if you don't have that right and are somehow rude for not donating yourself out of house and home.

  • Years ago, Microsoft had a service called "Members Helping Members". I was among the first to sign up. It seemed like a good way to expand my skills - helping others.





    The I think I took three before I quit. One was a simple question about data environments and queries, and at the time that stuff wasn't well documented beyond the examples, so I was happy to help. But then the other two basically wanted me to be a PSS engineer and write their programs for them.





    If you have a question, and I have the time, I'll find it on one of the newsgroups I read. If you know me, or were in a class I taught, or whatever, fine - ask away. If I can help, I will. But if you just want me to do the work for you, forget it.





    That's what Jesse is talking about - there are lots of people who say - "Hey, look, this guy seems to know something. Let's see if we can trick him into doing some work for me..."





    Its not arrogance. Its called protecting your most valuable asset - your time.

  • It was not what you said but how you said it. Your message did not say any of these things. you did not explain your reasoning as you did in this last post. You just said people's posts were boring and that you didn't have time to answer annoying questions. And you assigned this viewpoint to the entire community, which is not accurate. I may not get to you right away, but if you ask me a question, you're in the queue.





    My time is not any more valuable than anyone elses. If they take the time to ask then I am obliged to take the time to answer. I'm sorry you had a bad experience. Don't make blanket statements that can be interpreted by others as applying to the entire community.

  • They didn't apply to me and I wanted to make note of it. Sorry if you didn't like that.

  • If the major issue is the .NET weblog main RSS feed, why not enforce some kind of category across all the blogs?





    First off, I don't think anyone here is talking about comments. These are not part of the main feed AFAIK. Very few blogs here even have their own individual comment feed.





    So why not have 'questions' category and it can have it's own separate .NET blog feed? This should take care of any diluting of the main feed right? (If I'm asking something impossible forgive me... I'm not a blogger here so I'm unaware of the technical details needed to accomplish this. But I do see such things on individual blogs so I'd think you could do this here.)

  • Robert,





    You seem to be taking this all just a little too personally. No one called you "stupid" or "boring", and no one asked you to "censor" yourself.





    What people have asked, INCLUDING THE PERSON WHO CREATED THIS SITE, is that bloggers on weblogs.asp.net keep in mind the main focus of the site, which is .NET. That shouldn't be so hard to do, IMO. And in the meantime, I hope that you can hear that from an outside perspective, it appears that you take any suggestion that bloggers here should stay on-topic as a personal attack. Not meaning any distrespect, Robert, but it's not always about you. ;-)





  • LOL. Thanks Andrew. You're right, it's not about me. I wasn't taking offense for me (cause if you think I'm boring, don't read my stuff) I was taking offense for all the newbies who are still getting the hang of this stuff. The topic is .NET. Asking about property pages or exceptions *IS* on topic. You answered the first part of my last comment while ignoring the second. "What is a NullReferenceException" is no different from "I'm having problems implementing the Builder design pattern". I felt as if Jesse's comments would be taken as the mood of the entire blogging community when looked at by a newcomer, and I wanted to portray that this was not the case. I was not personally hurt by anything that was said.

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