Blogging - is there any point?

APLawrence.com - Resources for Unix and Linux Systems, Bloggers and the self-employed

02/22/2003 3:32 PM Blogging

When I first read about blogging, I didn't see how it would be useful for a support and information site like mine. After all, do you care how I'm feeling today? Let's give it a try:

Better, thanks, though still in some pain. I had a nasty fall two weeks ago and hurt my hip badly. Couldn't stand up at all for two days; crutches for two days after that, and limped pretty heavily for another few. I was feeling pretty good until the blizzard last week, but shoveling out of that aggravated things..

See?

But then I realized that I'm constantly thinking about little Unixy things that just aren't enough to bother posting a full article for, but they do fall into the blog idea very nicely. Blogs are very informal (not that I'm all that formal anyway) and it's relaxing to just do stream of consciousness writing. I like it!

Here's an interesting link written by a former Microsoft exec: Advice to Microsoft regarding commodity software.

I've been thinking more about my stale link problems and realize that (as usual) I need a level of indirection to deal with it. In other words, when a link is to be in a page, it needs to be a cgi script that goes and looks up the actual link from a database that I can maintain. This will help in several ways: the same link often appears in multiple places, so it is a pain to track it down and fix it when it changes. Having the real links in one place makes that easier. Secondly, it will let me more easily put up "substitution" pages along the line of "The link you followed is dead, but here's what I can suggest that's like that". Finally, having a database of links will let me be more structured in checking them: I can maintain a "date last verified" etc.

That's a fairly big project but it needs to be done..