No, I'm not leaving use.perl, but it seems there are quite a few people who have done. The only thing I want to say about this is don't expect me to read your journal if you leave.
Now the flip side of this is what is doing these journals all about? Mostly it's a purging - people like to pour their hearts out. Or talk about some geeky development thing they're doing. It's not necessarily about people reading what you've written. In fact on issue for me is a record of things I've accomplished over the year.
But the big part of it for me (and why I come back here every day) is the feedback/replies. If you leave, you lose that. At least from me. I don't expect I'm important enough to anyone that this may bother you, but I may not be the only person who won't read your ramblings any more.
I'm sure that the loss of me as a reader doesn't matter to any of the journal authors. But I'm sad to be losing interesting writers.
Obviously I can't speak for everyone who has non-use.perl blogs, but I can explain why I've set mine up.
I'm not leaving use.perl. I'll still be posting a lot of stuff here (or, at least, that's the plan). It's just there is stuff that I'd like people who aren't part of the Perl community to see as well and asking them to come here seems a bit strange to me. Like a party where two different groups of people don't mix.
I'll see how it goes for a while. Maybe I will get a lot less comments. Maybe I'll find that my only friends are those in the Perl community :-/
Re:Not Leaving - Diversifying
gnat on 2002-07-11T17:10:27
On my long-term todo list is to hook up Blosxom with the aggregator Blagg, to allow me to have a single place to post to my use.perl. journal and my O'Reilly Network log.The ORN blog is supposed to be for work-related things, like conferences and Perl, but because use.perl has such a better interface for posting, I never use ORN. And all my friends are here.
What I want to be able to do is mark a post as for ORN, use.perl, or both. At that point my laziness will have been maximized. Of course, it'd take a day of programming to get there, but that's "overhead", right?
I read nvp, elaine, ask, and clintp's journals. I know there's a web site that aggregates every Perl-related RSS feed there is, but I sometimes wonder about setting up a Perl journal-specific Meerkat, just to help me manage my journal reading a bit better.
--Nat
Re:Not Leaving - Diversifying
blech on 2002-07-11T20:05:05
As someone who posts fairly rarely to his general blog and even more rarely on use.perl.org, I'm with Dave here. I made a decision last July or so to only post Perl stuff here, and there's not that much I've done since that I think is of interest.
Other people evidently feel that the word 'journal' is more important than the word 'perl'. Fair enough.
Perhaps what's missing in the wider world of blogs like aevil's, davorg's, ask's, boojum's and my own is the 'Friends' interface and the interconnectedness of the comments interfaces. But the software is getting there for that; I can get rdf of what's recently been updated on Dave's site and he doesn't have to lift a finger. MT has comments enabled by default. With not much time and effort, you could tie things together again even over sites.
I think I've wittered enough for now. But I've got Bad Ideas going now.
I'm with you. I only read something if it's on one of my regularly visited sites (this one's in the top two) or if I see an interesting link to it. I'm sorry to see some people go, but I don't intend to add individual independent blogs to my list of regularly visited sites. So the only way to get me to visit another blog will be to write something interesting and have someone think it interesting enough to post a link here or somewhere else in my immediate vision.
Plus, Slash works the way I think. After I started reading slashdot and this site (a little over a year ago), I started being very disappointed that the rest of the web doesn't allow me to post comments, receive the benefit of mass user moderation, and so on. Cheap slash knockoffs usually cause frustration as well.
The great thing about this site is we have a cohesive community. Separate that across twenty sites and you can't tell who's who across sites. We'll all become schizophrenics. :)
That said, I do believe its appropriate for some to keep multiple blogs if they have multiple interests. My random life details go here along with Perl and other programming because this is the only blog I have. I might start, say, a religious blog some day, which I certainly wouldn't keep here. In that case, Perl and programming would stay here, and I don't know what I'd do with the random life details.
Re:Outer Blogs
Matts on 2002-07-11T15:24:06
Sorry, I do agree with that, I guess I should have considered that. To that end if you do have friends outside of the perl community who would like to read your musings (I don't) then fair enough.
Re:Outer Blogs
belg4mit on 2002-07-11T17:58:07
This seems a flimsy argument to me..
If these people are you friends/family whatever
presumably they are going out of their way to
read a blog as it is. What difference does it
make where it is? To them a link is a link.
Re:Outer Blogs
vek on 2002-07-11T20:16:19
Well yes but some outer blogs could be part of a more encompassing "page" with photos or other misc pages - not just the blog itself. Personally I'd like to stay on the same site with the same "look & feel" instead of remembering "Ok I go to use.perl.org for his blog, foo.bar.org for his photos and someotherfoo.org for his other stuff. Yes technically they're just links but all 3 sites could look different and act differently. That along with the fact that you are more likely (but not always obviously) to write geeky stuff down in use.perl.org journals and perhaps your other non-geek friends & family really couldn't give a rats arse what version of Mozilla you're currently trying out:-)
But why all the whining & fussing? If you want your own blog somewhere else - great, go for it. If you want to just write stuff here - super, terrific. If you want to write stuff here and your own blog - more power to ya. Don't take these journals so seriously, jeez.
