Community Posts for Blog.SF?

Question

A lot of other sites are using blog.site.stackexchange.com to create a blog on their topic with contributions from the community.

The Server Fault blog has mostly been posts from George and I about running these sites and our experiences and thoughts in doing so. This was the original intention of the blog when it was created:

You can expect to find blog posts there related to us documenting our own efforts of running and scaling our network of websites — the same sort of stuff you’ve come to expect from the server category on this blog. We want to actively give back to the community by documenting everything we’re doing on the sysadmin front — both by discussing it on the blog, and asking (and answering!) relevant questions about it on Server Fault whenever possible.

However, since other sites are taking a different direction, I'd be interested if the SF community would like to:

1. keep the blog the way it is so it sort of tells the story our site
2. keep it pretty much the way it is with the occasional guest post
3. see blog.sf become primarily a community blog

Now, if people would really like to see #3, that would come with the requirement that several top users are interested in writing posts, taking the time review each others posts etc. For more on what would be involved see Rebecca's post.

Answer 1

I believe blog.serverfault.com as the voice of this particular sysadmin community has strong value, with updates on how the site works overall and meta-commentary on the site itself or the overall sysadmin community at large. For that, the occasional guest post would be a good thing. So, this is Option 2 for me.

We do have a couple of active bloggers around here, so keeping a separate community blog-site fed should be doable. I'd definitely contribute.

Answer 2

I think that having a dedicated community blog is the right way to go. So ... basically Option 4, leave blog.sf about the site and how we do things "tell the story of our site" as Kyle puts it. Then, if the community wants maintain a blog we should set it up as a separate entity.

That said, if there isn't enough interest for a full on community blog (and they are a lot of work) then I would be open to occasional guest posts if someone wanted to talk about something. In particular I think something like sysadmin1138's recent posts would be a good fit for the occasional community guest post.

Answer 3

People who want to blog already have blogs -- we're not in a demographic that doesn't know how to setup a blog if we so choose. I'd only go so far as to suggest an aggregator of the blogs of active Server Fault users.

Answer 4

I've previously suggested guest posts, so I'd say option 2 is the way to go.

[Sheesh! How many times is it going to ask me if I'm a human? I've typed in about 10 captchas so far, is there a minimum answer length I've forgotten about?]

Answer 5

I don't spend much time reading blogs so am more inclined to read one that I believe is actually relevant. i.e. On a blog related to SF I expect to read stuff relevant to SF, making option 1 my choice. However, if a mix was considered desirable I think option 4 is the way to go. Better to give people an easy way to filter what they read rather than have them ignore the lot.

Answer 6

From my experience of posting on the TeX.SX blog, I'd say it is really nice to allow community members to post on such blogs, because of the public you reach. Sure, I have my own blog which is well referenced and aggregated on Planet Ubuntu with a large audience, but for some topics, it's just much nicer to reach specifically a community of experts.

The blog posts I've made on the TeX.SX blog might not have interested many on my own blog, but they were interesting for the TeX.SX community. All the same, I'm currently thinking of blogging about a new tool to run unit tests against configuration files before you deploy them. I could very well blog about that on my blog, but I think more people would be interested in the SF community because it's specifically a sysadmin subject.

On the TeX.SX blog, we've also gotten in the habit lately of posting whenever a question on TeX.SX led to a new CTAN package. This could be something nice here too, if some questions lead to new projects, Perl/Python/other modules, etc.

So my choice would be 3. or 4. as suggested by Zypher.