OneAndOneIs2

These are the slides and (mostly) the commentary from the presentation I gave yesterday. The full presentation is available from here should you want it - it's in OpenOffice format.

You'll have to imagine the many interruptions for questions and corrections by yourself ;o)

As the title says, this is a presentation on why we as Linux users should consider being bloggers as well.

That's a buzzword-heavy sentence, and I know that many people are of the opinion that there's no real meaning to the term "Web two" but there's a definition on Wikipedia, so it must be true.

Web 2.0 was a term coined by O'Reilly in 2004, and refers to the use of the web for collaboration and social networking. When the web became a platform capable of supporting digg.com, youtube, myspace, and the like, it had entered the Web 2.0 era.

Of course, the FOSS (Free (as in speech) and Open Source Software) community has been using the Internet to collaborate and create for far longer than this, so you could say Web 2.0 is just the rest of the world catching up with the geeks. For this reason, amongst others, the Web 2.0 platform is one that a Linux user can feel very at home with.

Blogs are an important part of the Web 2.0 concept. Some popular tools for blogging are:

Blogger.com, as owned by Google. It's got a lovely WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface that's very easy to use, and gives you a wide range of formatting options: Color, font, text size, you name it. You can either have a blog hosted for free at <yourname>.blogger.com or you can use blogger to publish to your own web site, should you have one.

The biggest downside of blogger.com for a conscientious Linux user is, it's a proprietary tool. There's no source code.

Most of the SLUG members who have blogs use Wordpress, which IS open-source. Wordpress also has a WYSIWYG interface, but a slightly less sophisticated one than Blogger, and for some bizzare reason, you only get the buttons to make use of the formatting when you're in the "Code" view: So you can see what you've done, but not what you're doing.

Still, it's quite friendly and popular, and you again have the option of having your blog hosted at <yourname>.wordpress.com or hosting it at your own site by installing your own copy of wordpress on your webserver.

Bucking the trend, I use b2evolution to generate my blog. It's open source: Based on the same "b2" package as WordPress, in fact. But it has no WYSIWYG option, and no free hosting: You have to install it on your own web server.

It's not the easiest to use: You really need to have at least a basic understanding of HTML, and being able to muddle through with CSS and PHP is an advantage. But it's powerful, and also has the advantage of being able to host multiple blogs out-of-the-box. So if, say, SLUG wanted to do its own blog hosting, b2evolution would make the task simple. . .

All blogging software makes at least some effort to adhere to standards when generating content. They don't always succeed, but they do try. I do my best to keep my blog strictly compliant, but even with b2e and myself working together, slip-ups do happen. If you see this little W3C button on a blog, it should be a fully-compliant site: Clicking on the button will tell you for sure.

If you've ever had an issue with a web page not working with your browser, it's worth considering that the more standards-compliant websites there are, the more pressure there is on web browsers to be compliant as well; Breaking the catch-22 of "They won't make their browser compliant because most web sites aren't, and web sites won't get compliant until the browser is"

So now that you've seen some of the tools available to a blogger, the question is "Why should you use them?" And it's true that if you say "I'm a blogger" most people will either give you a blank stare, or they'll ask why you waste your time with one of those.

The main reason for this is that there are a lot of bad blogs out there. There are the bloggers who, a few years ago, would have heard a funny joke and emailed it to their friends. Now they put it on their blog instead. There are the bloggers who boost their ego by putting their lives online, and who blog such riveting information as their breakfast that morning and how many minutes late the bus was. There are bloggers who can't be bothered to keep in touch with their friends and relations, and write a blog because it's easier than emailing and phoning.

But there are worthwhile blogs as well. Some that you're probably familiar with, even if you've never thought of them as blogs before, include Slashdot, which doesn't generate content of its own, but simply links to others' content and provides the ability to debate it; and Groklaw, which generates large amounts of well-informed commentary on legal matters affecting the FOSS community.

Whilst you're unlikely to reach such lofty heights as those blogs, it's important to realize that even people who have only just decided to install Linux have worthwhile things to post.

I don't know *anybody* who has put an installation CD into a PC and installed a 100% fully-working Linux right from the word go. Screen resolutions, graphics drivers, networking issues: There's always some problems that need to be solved. And the chances that you're the only person who's going to suffer that problem are virtually non-existent.

Blogging about your experiences installing Linux and the problems you had and how they were solved is a very worthwhile thing to do. I doubt there are any long-time users of Linux who haven't solved a problem once, then been faced with it again some time later and been unable to remember how to solve it: Had they blogged it, they could search for it very quickly and easily. And had they blogged it, anybody else with the same problem would also have found out how to fix it.

There are new users coming to Linux every day. There are always Linux novices around, and what they really need is basic information. Easy to follow explanations of how to do basic things. You don't have to be an acknowledged expert in a field to have something worth writing about.

There have been any number of worthwhile presentations given at LUG meetings where the opening statement was along the lines of "I don't know that much about this, it's just something I've been playing around with recently." Because they were being given to people who knew nothing about the subject, the fact that it was only a basic overview was what made it a really good presentation.

All of those presentations were good, and were useful to all the people at the meeting that day. Had they been put online, they'd have been useful to the whole world.

Because the whole point of software being free or open source is that the source code is available, there's a perception that "Source code is all that matters" and the only way to contribute to the FOSS community is by writing code. This is most visible in the occasional jibe you hear of "If you don't like it, fork it and do it yourself"

But the simple truth is, most Linux users are not able to understand or gain any benefit from having the source code available. They need instead supporting documentation that gets them up & running as quickly and easily as possible.

Good software without good supporting documentation usually results in failure. I've encountered several projects that I was simply unable to use because there was no guide on doing so. Somebody had spent a lot of time on the software, but it was all wasted on me because I couldn't do anything with it.

Even such simple-to-use software as Firefox has hundreds of Howtos online, and there's a "For Dummies" book on it at the local library. All the most popular distros have extensive supporting documentation. The source code is *not* what matters to most end users.

A bit of local trivia for you: Horsham has its own micro-climate. This is due, I'm told, to being a low-altitude town between the North and South Downs hills. Last year when the country was brought to a standstill by feet of snow, you could stand in Horsham park and see blizzards on the horizon in all directions. But Horsham itself barely got a sprinkling.

The huge, globe-spanning system that is the climate is broken up into many such sub-systems of 'local weather'. And in the same way, the FOSS community is a global organization made up of a huge number of overlapping smaller communities.

There are the distros. There are the Gnomes and KDEs; the Firefox fans and the Konqueror fans. Linux and BSD. Free vs. Open. You name it, there's a sub-community for it.

Blogs can be tools for building such communities. As a simple example, here's a comment left on my blog by 'Ray'. As you can see, Ray has his own blog, which I also read and sometimes comment on. Ray is also a moderator of the LinuxQuestions forum, which often refers questioners to useful external sites. And shown here is one such example, where somebody was referred to my blog to answer his question.

Another example of a micro-community can be seen in responses to another type of post I make to my website: I'm learning to code in C, and every time I write some code, I post it to my blog with some commentary.

Now, one advantage of FOSS is that the code is open to peer review, and other people can see it and suggest ways of improving it. But I somehow doubt that I'd get much feedback from Sourceforge if I put up a function that gets a line of text from the user.

But I do get that feedback on my blog posts: Some of my readers are also coders, and they leave comments on the code I write. It's Sourceforge in miniature, but it's more useful to me precisely because of that.

And smaller doesn't necessarily mean unimportant. No matter how simple or basic you might think a matter is, there are people out there who want to read about it. These are some of the referrer logs for my blog: These are the search terms people have been looking up when they've come into my blog. There's my most recent C exercise from chapter two: Two dozen people so far have come in looking to solutions to that trivial problem. The ever-popular explanation as to why you don't defrag Linux was first posted in August last year, it still gets over a hundred visits a day. This shows just how big a demand there is for information about such simple things.

Should you decide to take up blogging, here are a few tips to bear in mind: Try to write frequently, but not to the point that it becomes a chore. If you're bored when you write the post, people will be bored when they read it. When you have something to say, say it. When you have nothing to say, say it.

Don't save posts: If you've already posted once or twice, but you're on a roll and you write yet another entry, don't save it for the next day to even things out. Post it. Often, if you're writing a lot, it's on a subject you feel passionate about. The next day when you've calmed down, you might decide to delete that impassioned post rather than publish it. That means you still haven't posted that day, and nobody else gets the chance to see what might be a very worthwhile post.

Just because it's a rant, doesn't mean it's not worthwhile: I've been on the front page of Digg.com four times, and it was always for something that started life as a rant. To say nothing of the therapeutic value of writing down exactly what's annoying you and why.

Don't stick to a single topic. There's a temptation to re-write one popular post a hundred different ways, but that just makes you seem monotonous and uninteresting. Write new things that interest you. If they don't interest your regular readers, they can just stop reading: It's better to write it and have it ignored than to not write it at all.

Make an effort to write in clear English. Firefox has a spelling checker built-in to help here. Don't try to be clever and write in elite or SMS style, it just makes your post look like it was written by an immature teenager. No matter how good the content, it can't survive bad presentation.

Don't worry about putting up content that not everybody will like. I tried keeping a non-geeky blog once, it meant I censored myself every time I did something in Linux. It was no fun: I threw it out and started again with a defiantly geeky blog, and it was suddenly easy to write plenty.

A good way to get people in to your blog at the start is to write useful content that you can link to when people ask questions. They get valuable information, your blog gets exposure, and there's always the chance that you'll get the ego-boost of having other people suggest your blog as a good place to look before you get the chance to do it yourself.

Lastly, give some thought to publishing under a Creative Commons license.

I don't have to convince anybody here about the value of the GPL to the FOSS community. Well, a CC license is the blogger's equivalent: A 'copyleft' license that uses copyright to give other people rights to use your work. As an example of how this can be good for you, as well as for others, here's an article I wrote a while ago, "Linux is not Windows"

It was published under a CC license that permits derivative works, and as a result you can also find this article in Czech and Brazillian. I could never have written these translations myself, but other people did it for me, for free, without even being asked.

Blogs can grow very quickly. I started my b2evolution-based blog in January 2006, and that month I had a little over 200 visitors. By March I was up to two thousand. You can probably guess which month saw me on the front page of digg.com, since when I've sat at around eight thousand visitors a month.

What's more, should you search for CC-licensed material devoted to Linux, as you can see from this screenshot, two of my articles show up in the first page of results.

Not bad for a simple, non-coding, Linux enthusiast. And if I can get so far up Google's rankings, anyone here can as well.