Something Ann Gentle said on the Communications from DMN podcast made me think about they way I use blogs and forums. This is especially relevant right now as I’ve got variations of the same question sitting on three forums.

What she said (about 24 minutes into the show), while discussing Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s book Groundswell, was:

There’s this ladder of involvement in social media. Some people like to write blog entries. Some people only like to comment on blog entries. Some people like to review products. Some people just like to read other people’s reviews and act on that review.

I’m an occasional blogger. Sometimes I’ll post every day, other times months will go by and I don’t post at all (usually when I’m up to my eyeballs at work). In some ways I admire the committed bloggers who write lengthy and well thought out posts every day without fail – and sometimes more than one a day. But I do often wonder why they’re spending so much time and thought on this rather than on their paid employment, or their family.

I’m also an occasional blog reader. I use Feedblitz to mail me posts from lots of blogs, but a lot of the time I just read the summaries and never the whole blog post, or I just delete the email without reading anything. My reason for not reading more blog posts is that I know that if I didn’t ration myself quite strictly I could easily spend several hours a day doing nothing else but reading blogs.

What I’m not is a commenter. I rarely ever comment on blog posts and as for forums, I can’t remember ever answering a question on a forum. And this makes me feel bad for two reasons:

1. I love it when people email me, or add a comment to my blog, with a point about something I’ve said in a post, or on a podcast. However, I rarely ever contact the writers/hosts of the blogs/podcasts I enjoy reading/listening to regularly. So they never know I’m out here, one of an invisible audience, enjoying their work. I really should do something about that!
2. I don’t use forums except as a last resort – at which times they often prove invaluable. I have some questions out in forums at the moment as part of my search for the right online help architecture/method for our new applications. And I remember back in 2002 when I was doing some pretty hairy stuff with RoboHelp, I got a lot of help on the Help forums from people like Rick Stone, Rob Chandler and Char James-Tanny. But I’ve never felt any inclination to become an MVP of anything myself and watch the forums on the lookout for people to help.

Am I just a bad, self-centred person?

Well, no, I don’t think so. For me it’s all about a balance of guilt. I hate spending much time at work doing anything that’s not what I’m being paid to do. I pretty much feel like my company has bought my time from nine to five (with an hour off for lunch) and therefore they own my labour during those hours and if I’m writing a blog post or helping someone on a forum I’m essentially cheating my employers. So I make every effort not to be drawn into this kind of thing, and if it does happen I make sure I work extra hours at the end of the day to make up for it. I think this is the generations-old Calvinistic influence showing through.

And when I’m not in work I feel guilty if I spend too much time blogging or preparing podcasts, because I have a wife and kids who deserve some of my time and attention. So once I’ve done some blogging and some podcasting, that just doesn’t leave much time for anything else that would take me away from my family.

Or maybe I’m over-complicating things. Maybe, as Ann Gentle suggests, it simply that there are some people who mainly just blog, some people who mainly comment and some people who never blog or comment.

About six years ago we got a new manager at work and he had trouble with all the names and acronyms we use. He asked me to put together a Web page of terms and explanations for our intranet. But - without doing any consumer research - I thought I’d go one better and, using a vast amount of home brewed Perl and Javascript, I construct a Glossary site that was essentially a Web front end for a little database. Anyone in the company could add new glossary terms and definitions or edit existing ones. I spent quite a bit of time on it (my own personal time because the guilt thing prevented me from effectively charging the company for my work on this), and the end product was pretty damned good and did things like emailing specified addresses every time a change was made (because I was a little bit worried that a loginless system would tempt someone to go in there are write scurrilous definitions). However, in six years, although I know people (mainly new-starts) refer to it, no one but me ever adds or changes anything. It’s exactly like me and Wikipedia. On average I probably use Wikipedia a few times a week and have done for years. But I’ve never ever edited or added a single thing. I’m not proud of this, I’ve just never felt any desire or obligation to do so.

Communications from DMN:
Talking shop with Anne Gentle

I posted my first question on Stack Overflow today and already it’s had a couple of replies. I can see how Stack Overflow could become a little addictive because it has elements of a game built into it. For starters, you build up reputation points, which you get from other people by providing answers, but you need some reputation points before you can start giving points to others, and you can’t comment on other people’s answers until you’re above a certain rep level.

Have a listen to Hanselminutes Show 134 to hear Jeff Atwood, CEO of Stack Overflow, talking about the concept of the site and what they’ve done to make it an appealing place for software developers to hang out. The bit that really struck a chord with me was when he described Stack Overflow as sort of an antidote to Experts’ Exchange, the latter being a site that really rubs me up the wrong way because of its underhand tactics. There are so many times I’ve searched for something technical on Google and found a hit that looks like it might provide the answer I was looking for but I don’t notice it’s at Experts’ Exchange until I get there and discover the details are obscured because the site is run as a private club, which I refuse to join.

I like Stack Overflow. The only thing I don’t like about it is that I think its search facility is very weak right now. If you want to find stuff it’s best to use Google, like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:stackoverflow.com/questions YOUR QUERY

For example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:stackoverflow.com/questions online help

The other aspect of it is that, if you’re not a programmer – or even if you are – it can be an intimidating place for the newcomer. You have to brace yourself and be prepared to be told you’re an idiot and should go away and never darken the doors of Stack Overflow again. But, in some ways, that’s not altogether a bad thing. It’s intended to be a games room for professional programmers – it’s not designed for just anybody to go and find an answer to any old thing. But, unlike Experts’ Exchange, everyone’s allowed to come in and wander around and listen in on the conversations. However, if you try answering a question you’re not qualified to answer, or you start asking questions that should have been asked elsewhere, then you can expect the regulars to give you a hard time.

I was looking for an alternative to the SpringWidgets widget I used in a previous post, to put in the sidebar of this blog. The SpringWidgets one seems to need to load 100% before starting to play, which is no good because you've browsed to another page long before it's finished loading.

I came across EasyListener from Yahoo:
http://next.yahoo.net/archives/32/easylistener

It's a free RSS reader/MP3 player that is incredibly easy to configure. It also set me thinking that what would be good would be, rather than just listing my own podcasts in the player, to offer a mix of other tech writing podcasts, or podcasts that tech writers might find interesting.

I investigated a few options, but by far the easiest way to do this, and configure it just how you want it, is to use Yahoo Pipes. The first half of this video shows how you do it:

http://revver.com/video/1245467/yahoo-pipes-and-how-to-merge-filter-and-sort-multiple-rss-feeds/

Here's the configuration I came up with:
 

As I'm writing this the resulting feed combines four feeds:

• Tech Writer Voices
• Grammar Girl
• A Way With Words
• The ITauthor Podcast

Yahoo Pipes takes the 15 most recent posts (except any where the enclosure is video rather than audio) and generates the following feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/techwriterpodcasts

Note: The above feed actually comes from Feedburner, but it's got the same content as the one from Yahoo. I just dropped the Yahoo feed into Feedburner because Feedburner gives me a nicer URL and generates some nice stats about how many people download and subscribe to the feed.

When I put this feed URL into the EasyPlayer code generator, I get this:

A nice easy way to help promote other podcasts that you enjoy listening to and want to share with other people.

UPDATE:

OK, so you may have noticed that the embedded EasyPlayer widget doesn't work. It seems to be picky about which feeds it'll play with. It's fine with the RSS feed for ITauthor, but it doesn't like the output from Pipes - even though both EasyPlayer and Pipes are Yahoo creations and the feed I produced from Pipes is valid RSS (I checked).

So here's the same feed in the old, slow-loading, and uglier SpringWidgets player:

UPDATE 2:

My default browser is Firefox and, in Firefox, you can see a SpringWidgets audio player above. Internet Explorer, however, all I can see is a big white space. So my enthusiasm for audio player widgets has just taken a severe dip. I've messed around with both of these widgets for too much of my weekend, so I'm going to give up now. I'll maybe try again in a few months and see if I can find one that's less buggy.

:-(

Five years ago yesterday I wrote a blog post in which I mentioned Xenu Link Sleuth. I was reminded of this because someone recently commented on another old blog post of mine, about Longhorn Help, saying that a link I'd included to the Longhorn Help reference pages in MSDN was broken.

I thought it would be interesting to check how many other broken links there were throughout my blog. I remembered writing about a link checker and a quick search revealed it was almost exactly five years ago. More interesting though is that the a) the Web page for Xenu looks just as I remember it in 2003 b) you can still download Xenu free of charge c) it runs fine on Vista and d) although it's a no-frills application it's an extremely thorough and effective way to identify broken links buried deep within a Web site. 

One nice feature is that at the end of the check you can output a report as a Web page that contains list of all the broken links and the pages they appear on (which you can click on to check the page) and another list of all the pages containing broken links - it's useful to have both orders because you probably want to check through page by page, but it's also useful to identify multiple broken links for pages on a particular domain.

Download Xenu from here:

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Download

There's an interesting page about The Story of Xenu Link Sleuth which reveals how the program was written by Tilman Hausherr in 1997.

Incidentally, when I ran it against www.itauthor.com today, Xenu reported that I had 2363 links, and just under 200 of them are currently broken:

I just struggled for a while to delete a symbolic link on my Web server that was causing me problems. The main problem was that I couldn't download it, which meant that I couldn't download the whole of my WordPress installation as a backup. I had to copy directories down piecemeal to specifically avoid copying that file (advanced-cache.php).

I'm not sure what the problem was because the file the symlink was pointing to (wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php) was still there. I had to use ClassicFTP to find this out because FileZilla doesn't show you were a symlink is pointing to. In fact, FileZilla treats symlinks as if they are directories and doesn't show the destination. ClassicFTP does, but doesn't show the ownership or permissions on files, which makes it inferior to FileZilla.

The other problem was that I couldn't simply delete it in FileZilla or ClassicFTP.

The solution I finally found was just to FTP to my Web server from the good old Windows command line. Fire up a command console window, type: ftp <host> then, when prompted, your user name and password. Use ls and cd to navigate to the directory containing the symlink.

Strangely, the symlink doesn't show up when you do an ls. However, if you do delete <symlink name> it will delete the symbolic link successfully.

Job done!