Eric Fleischman's WebLog : Brett's Blogging experience

Brett's blogging update: welcome to 2006!

efleis — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:08:00 GMT

Thought I'd post a quick update to Brett's foray in to the blogging world.....

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"Brett" Unplugged - Still no posts

efleis — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 02:18:00 GMT

I thought I’d follow up our last post with a quick update as to Brett’s foray in to the blogging world.

Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen a few areas of motion:
- We’ve had some further category refinement. This should come as no surprise, categories are the fundamental stumbling block.
- A little bit of a setback in the area of links. Brett learned that one can link to other blogs from his own blog, which of course opens up the inevitable “who should I link to” can of worms. Hopefully no categorization of links will be done, for that can do nothing but set us back even further.
- Brett indicated (on more than one occasion) that I’d not get more than one additional post out on him, because before long, there’d be a post up there. It’s now the second week of June. This was uttered in early May. I’m not holding my breath.
- A lot of mockery. Over a multitude of forums, Brett has been mocked for his lack of progress. But I think this mockery really serves as a form of encouragement
- Michael Kaplan talks about Brett some.
- Adi Oltean briefly added Brett as a blog he doesn’t read, but that has since been removed.
- Category disablement came to light. Brett had me make some late-night modifications to my blog to see how changes over time would react. This was mostly done in the area of category rename and deletion. He came to the conclusion that while cateogires can be deleted, this is not ideal as they are no longer listed (rather than just deprecated). Perhaps a concern to raise to the blogging owners, you know, when he has an actual post.
- Perhaps some progress. Brett learned that you can update the category of a post after the fact, perhaps allowing him to start blogging w/o a final category list. This was a major win, a step forward.
- A potential bug has been found. It’s been reported that some RSS readers actually crash when pointing to Brett’s blog as they don’t expect an empty feed (who subscribes to an empty feed?). While I wish I can report this as a rumor, sadly I’m told it is true. I’ll get some links to bugs that are filed as they are filed.
- Brett was asked to write a post for a team blog, a single post on an area he is knowledgeable. That post isn’t done yet.
- He grew frustrated that he can’t control the order of his categories.
- When showing this list to Brett for his thoughts, he also added: “And it is worth mentioning that not having a place way to indicate a blog is in a \"funny\" category, is vexing me considerably.”

Looking ahead, I predict more issues:
- At some point he’ll realize that writing posts in Word and pasting in to the CS admin page doesn’t lay out well. That will be an 11^th hour post deterrent I am sure.
- There will be one or two major category finds, perhaps a few added, I also predict some consolidation.

That’s all for today, catch you with the next update in August or so.

And sometimes, blogging really is that hard

efleis — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 05:27:00 GMT

Time for an aside….hang on. This post is going to sound absurd. I swear to you it is true.

I have this friend who asked to not be identified…..let’s call him “Brett Shirley” for the time being. And just to put it in perspective, let’s assume this “Brett” character is a developer in the AD/ESE group. Someone once described “Brett” like this.

“Brett” has been talking about blogging for some time. In fact, several months ago he even created himself a placeholder blog, which he would set up for his entry in to blogging. Great idea. Motion in the right direction. But where are the posts?

The only way to describe our current state of affairs is with a timeline.

December 2004 (early in the month) – “Brett” creates initial blog and selects a theme and title (subtitles have come and gone, nothing that fits has yet been found). He begins talking about what to post about and what he is going to discuss in this blog. There is some discussion among a small group of people about what topics “Brett” might enjoy blogging about.
December 2004 (late in the month) – While looking at the blogging admin tool, “Brett” discovers categories! This throws him in to a funk for several weeks. Time is spent investigating how to categorize “Brett’s” blog in to a series of consistent and all-encompassing categories (note: no posts have been written at this time).
January 2005 – Category refinement. “Brett” tackles the o-so-difficult task of ensuring that his posts will fit in to the categories. There is some progress. But January was such a short month, who could expect him to finish?
January 2005 (late in the month) / February 2005 (early in the month) – In a seemingly unrelated event, “Brett” forgets to renew his personal domain name, where he hosts the master copy of his posting disclaimer. It takes several weeks to recovery from this (and find the 5 minutes required to register his domain name again).
February 2005 – Real progress. The categories are looking good. A nice theme is up. “Brett” starts to talk more seriously about what to blog about. It looks as if a post is forthcoming.
March 2005 – Setback! We were so close, yet so far. During the migration from the old blogs.msdn.com engine to the new one, “Brett’s” selected theme is removed. Tragedy! Theme investigation begins.
As a related aside, at this time the truth comes out regarding the categories: they were not actually solid. “Brett” was only convinced that the theme was good. In fact upon loss of theme, the words uttered were “All 2% of my work is gone!”
April 2005 (early in the month) – 1-2 weeks are spent on theme investigation. “Brett” is primarily disappointed in the loss of the old theme because (and I quote) “I have nothing else orange in my life, so an orange blog seems ok.” There is discussion around asking the blogging PMs how to port the old theme to the new engine, but it is decided that it would probably be seen as absurd for someone who has a blog without any posts to ask for help in porting a theme.
April 2005 (mid month) – A new theme is selected and implemented. Categories are going through minor refinement on a day-by-day basis. In mid April “Brett” realizes that he has no category for humor, which makes him think that perhaps he really hasn’t given categories enough thought. Still no posts.

I’ll update you as to the “progress” of “Brett’s” foray in to blogging as the weeks pass by.
Perhaps you want to subscribe to his RSS feed in the event that one day he posts something. But don’t hold your breath.

“Brett”, just FYI, notice the category that this post is in. It’s that easy to create them. Why you are spinning on this, I have no idea.

As a final note to this tale, as I sit and write this, “Brett” is on the phone with me. He said he was going to ruin my fun and blog about this, but he had no idea what category to put it in…..