Recently my friend Steve (managing editor of SSC) posted to his blog about The Bad Karma Project that has to do with the state of blogs here on SSC. Going back to the time when we added blogs to the site I was ambivalent about it at best, thinking dedicated blog sites did a better job than we ever could, but it is a service that people find value in it and I think Red Gate has done by the community to continue to maintain the service, but....it's badly in need of upgrade and while that seems to be in progress, it also seems to have been that way for a while!
For me there are four key improvements needed that I believe would be good for the bloggers as well as the overall community:
- Provide support for an offline writer. I'm not always connected so it helps to be able to write when I want to, but almost all of them have a built in spell checker and I make my share of spelling mistakes. Community benefits indirectly, potentially more posts and less typos - possibly not the greatest argument I've put forth!
- Filter the aggregate feed to only show posts that make sense to the audience. Mostly everyone that currently blogs here does so about SQL posts, though I have my share of non-SQL but career related posts. Filtering the feed might be an improvement for the community to reduce the noise.
- Encourage community members to add their blog URL to their profile and include it as part of the aggregate feed. More posts!
- Highlight blog entries of value in the newsletter, or maybe just pull the the aggregate feed in. All bloggers write to be seen.
Free, unsolicited advice about changes that I think could be made to SSC, and as a blogger I'm probably biased on all of them.
