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The blog has stalled. Do we think it's worth keeping it going, or should we say au revoir and c'est la vie?

After my earlier neglect I did ask everyone that had expressed interest in writing or had received grants whether they would write something, offered to help, and so on. Brett has continued using it as a grant motivator as well.

I wrote some posts myself to have some new content at a regular interval, but I've stopped (other than an election notice) because there's no point having it if it's just me writing (I can write elsewhere if I want to) - it's the community, not just one user.

I don't know where to go from here. Nag more? You're meant to want to write, not be pressured into it. Bribe more? Same here. Make it easier to contribute? How? Say "the end"?

The site is considerably busier than it was when we started the blog, we're no longer in beta, we have a very active meta, I gather that there's a fairly active chat room, the quality of writing in questions and answers seems pretty good, so in theory it looks like the blog is viable. In practice, I don't know that it is.

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  • 3
    Is it really much overhead to just keep the blog and post things as they come in, even if it's not on a regular basis?
    – OghmaOsiris
    Feb 2, 2012 at 23:32
  • 1
    I'd like to point out that there are other blogs cough Stats cough that languished for far longer between posts. That said, DO MORE POSTS! Even an episode review regular feature would be awesome. Or posting highlights from the watch-alongs.
    – Aarthi
    Feb 2, 2012 at 23:33
  • 1
    I thought we were going to do a blog transcript of the ST TOS episodes we commented on.
    – Jack B Nimble
    Feb 3, 2012 at 0:01
  • @OghmaOsiris the text at blogoverflow.com/getting-started is a bit out of date, but based on that and the conversations with Rebecca Chernoff when we started, StackExchange only want active blogs. We are linked from the site, and appearance matters.
    – Tony Meyer
    Feb 3, 2012 at 2:47
  • @Aarthi are you volunteering? I'm happy to help out with anything if you'd like to do a regular episode review. (Not a good fit for me, because (a) we need other writers, and (b) NZ usually gets episodes after the US, so the posts would appear dated).
    – Tony Meyer
    Feb 3, 2012 at 2:48
  • @JackBNimble happy to help anyone that's willing to do so...
    – Tony Meyer
    Feb 3, 2012 at 2:49
  • 2
    We've got a blog?
    – Reinstate Monica - Goodbye SE
    Feb 3, 2012 at 9:57
  • @Aarthi I'm working on the watch along recap. I'm trying to figure out how to write it up since there's not a minute by minute recap in the chat. Any suggestions?
    – OghmaOsiris
    Feb 3, 2012 at 17:53
  • @OghmaOsiris What I've seen work in fandom: post occasional screencaps to illustrate any particular lolarity or moments that people would mock and/or love on. If you need me to, I'll try to drum up some examples that I've seen and liked.
    – Aarthi
    Feb 3, 2012 at 17:55
  • @Wikis (and comment up-voter) how can you be active on meta (which AFAICT you are) and not have seen all of this: meta.scifi.stackexchange.com/search?q=blog ? There's also a link at the bottom of every page (no, I don't look there either), and after a post the blog steals the chat link in the header of every page (this was all the time back in the heady just-started days).
    – Tony Meyer
    Feb 4, 2012 at 8:23
  • @TonyMeyer: dunno, I have just never seen it before. The quality of it looks really good, but I think it should be a lot more prominent. Apparently I'm not the only one who missed it.
    – Reinstate Monica - Goodbye SE
    Feb 4, 2012 at 12:20
  • @Wikis feel like contributing something?
    – Tony Meyer
    Feb 8, 2012 at 3:00
  • @TonyMeyer: sure, but I think it first needs to be made more prominent. How do other sites do this?
    – Reinstate Monica - Goodbye SE
    Feb 8, 2012 at 5:55

2 Answers 2

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Please nag more! Or if you lack the time and energy, please ask someone else to nag. In any case, thank you for all the work you've done in these past months.

The level of activity in chat and in meta shows that we have plenty of energy. So, people, write 'em blog posts!

Yes, that includes me. Got a few reviews I'd like to share. Now I gotta git and write them.

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  • It's possible that this post may have been a combination nag and guilt trip. Although it was serious also.
    – Tony Meyer
    Feb 3, 2012 at 2:49
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One problem is lack of managerial oversight, so to speak :)

I know I wouldn't mind chipping in; but leaving aside my overall poor writing skills, I also greatly suck at choosing the topics to write about. Not so much from lack of imagination as from a combination of "I don't know what people whould be interested to read" and "I don't know which topic I can write on in a way that people would find interesting to read". I'm sure (or hope?) others exist with such a problem.

Therefore, my suggestion is to do some blog project management.

  • Come up with topics that you/CHAOS/mods/prior blog posters think would be a good idea to cover.

  • Have a Meta question asking for what should appear on the blog, and source topics from that.

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  • Management, meh. I don't think I'd contribute to the blog on spec. But I could do reviews of books I've just read now and then.
    – user56
    Feb 3, 2012 at 21:38
  • @Gilles - lol... management is for inferior writers like me who don't LIKE to work without a spec/ :)
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Feb 3, 2012 at 21:42
  • I'm certainly open to doing this - e.g. we could have a planned post each week and then fit in the self-schedulures alongside. The grants could probably fit in with this (e.g. plan to have a post about the grant topic some suitable amount of time after the grant).
    – Tony Meyer
    Feb 4, 2012 at 8:26

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