Huddled Masses

Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’

After some time out of commission, I’ve cleaned up the PowerShell Bloggers feed pipe and made it work again. I also added a few blogs (there’s now 23) and fixed it so it cleans out the media links (mostly people’s avatars, it makes it readable on the Yahoo! page) and it also assigns the “author” tag so that everyone’s on similar footing.

[groupwoot]

Incidentally, the one other thing this does that makes it better than just copying the OPML, is that it filters using a regular expression to only show the posts that are actually about PowerShell … if you think I’ve missed someone, or if I need to tweak the filter or the feed’s output further … let me know.

Normally I post responses as edits at the bottom of a post, but apparently Don Jones was offended by this post, so I figure, as a gesture of peace, I’ll post this as a fresh story, with just a link to the original post and the comments posted by Don and Karl. Apparently Don Jones heard about my blog (someone had to tell him, so apparently he hasn’t heard of the PowerShell Pipe), and he’s taken offense at my criticism …

The frustrating thing is that he’s upset at my post, and yet he lambastes me without even having the decency to mention me by name (or even by nickname ) . Although Don says in his blog that I didn’t make “much in the way of actionable, constructive comments” he actually fixed several of my largest concerns, and in his post he specifically addresses most of my remaining issues: specifically detailing the level of relationship between the common members of the community and its paying members, and adding a statement about the 501.3c incorporation. They’ve also fixed my biggest problems with the script repository, (although, the search is still broken — it turns out that it does work, if you click the “Go” button instead of hitting enter). There is a privacy statement at the top of their sign up page now, which I may have simply not noticed missed when I signed up — I’m used to seeing a link for the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, rather than having a simple statement on the page. I commend Don for keeping that simple.

The clarification of ownership and the privacy statements are vital, ‘cause now I can encourage you to sign up. Actually, signing up is basically a prerequisite for getting anything out of the community, since unlike on this blog where there is an open comment form that anyone can fill out, the contents of which are emailed directly to me (yes, Don, I got your note this morning, thanks) — it really is impossible to provide any sort of feedback on the PowerShell Community site without first signing up. As a personal side note, considering I had already signed up on the community site (despite the lack of a privacy policy), and that he posted a comment on my blog, I’m rather surprised Don said I was so hard to get in touch with. :’(

Now, all of that said, I will repeat three of the things that I said before, which are still true.

I expect this to succeed

In fact, go, sign up now! ShellTools have jumped on board 100% since I last posted, actually shuttering many of their forums in such a way that half my Google searches last night returned hits on pages that no longer exist on PowerShellLive.com (kind of frustrating, by the way). Karl’s started a blog there (no content yet) and is moving everything he can to the new community.

It is a commercial junta

For those of you who don’t speak Spanish, the word junta comes from a Spanish word meaning ‘council’ and it’s use in English refers to governing councils which rule after taking power by force. Don said this:

The community is not a “commercial junta.” The members of the business league do not control community content, only broad direction through an advisory board.

I never said they would control content. In fact, it’s quite clear that those of us being asked to “help” (translation: give them our scripts and answer questions on the forums to build traffic for their website) are the ones expected to provide all of the content, in the form of blogs, taking the time to add links on the community site to any content outside the community, and writing scripts. Nevermind the fact that we were already providing this content on our blogs and various forums already … please come join the central one. We weren’t asked should be in charge. The “business league” sprang upon the scene without so much as a “do you think it’s a good idea” to the community at large (the only people clued in were the MVPs and financial sponsors which were felt to be crucial to it’s success) ... I think it’s quite fair to call it what it is. You tell me: am I wrong? (Oh, in case I’m not being clear, tell me means fill out the comment form at the bottom of this page).

To be clear (especially for those of you who aren’t familiar with Latin American politics and the implication of the word), a Junta isn’t necessarily a greedy dictatorship that interferes with personal liberties — usually you have a Junta as a transitional government with the idea that you will eventually have elections and democratic rule. Sadly, it doesn’t always work out that way — sometimes a Junta gives way to a military dictatorship instead … which eventually leads to another coup d‘état and another temporary military junta … who said politics are dull?

They launched it too early, and with too little content

Personally, I’ve been sort-of waiting for the site to mature before diving in. That’s the answer to the question Don asked: Will you help… or just sit back? When it comes to participatory websites, I prefer to wait until they have some of these glitches worked out and at least have the various sections working before I jump in. I think PowerShell Community (the website, and the amorphous collection of users and developers) could have benefited a lot from a short invitation-only stealth period during which they could have build up some content (scripts, links, imported blog posts … etc) and a structure with “civilian” moderators for the forums, etc. as well as ironed out some of the bugs. It seems to me that they sprang the site out barely formed in order to forestall any other efforts to create a central PowerShell site.

With that as background, I will add that the attitude of entitlement doesn’t help. There seems to be some expectation that since Microsoft and it’s other commercial partners have declared this to be the community site, not only will other sites shut down and join the community for the greater good (farewell PowerShellLive, so long Scripting Answers) but apparently we the users ought to be contributing as well, and ought not to put our opinions on our blogs without first submitting it to their forums. All I’m saying is: eventually this expectation of participation may be realistic, but you’re not there yet.

My point is: just because you pay a prominent MVP to run the site, and convince all of your partners to join a business league doesn’t automatically mean the site deserves effort from the rest of the community — particularly when it’s easier to continue doing what we have been doing. Honestly, I figure that posting my opinions on my blog is at least as helpful as posting in the community forums, since my review post will actually boost their PageRank™ My original post was a gut reaction on the first day the place opened, and honestly, I thought that they’d appreciate the link, even with negative feedback. I guess I was wrong.

More ideas

I’ve posted a comment on Don’s blog, but it’s the last time I’ll do that until they remove the captcha that asks me to prove I’m human every time I post a comment — even though I’m also required to log in as a member of the community first. That’s just adding annoyance on top of roadblocks, and makes me assume they don’t really want to get feedback on their blogs anyway.

Now that the script vault on the community site is improved, I’ll probably be submitting some of my scripts on their site too, just to help people out — although I take a bit of a dim view of the fact that scripts I post there have to wait for a moderator before they show up. So many roadblocks …

I’m unlikely to submit links to their links section just because quite honestly, I’m lazy, and I feel that putting links in my delicious and diigo sites (not to mention Furl, Blinklist, Simpy, etc) or linking them from my blog is more than enough effort to help people find things (after all, how many people browse community link lists instead of using Google when they’re really looking for something). I would be willing (if asked) to help develop a tool to automatically include links from delicious (which has a ton of links, but isn’t moderated) or from the Diigo PowerShell group which I already moderate (and would be more than willing to let Don or others also moderate) ... That seems like the best way to manage link collections to me — since Diigo has tools for moderation and for link submission that are built into the browser as extensions.

The Microsoft-funded PowerShell community site was launched over the weekend, complete with 501.3c non-profit status and everything. Of course, in reality it’s a joint venture between Microsoft and Sapien, with Don Jones at the helm and Microsoft MVPs as the only other contributors at this point (where “contributors” is loosely put — they’ve made the mistake of not making sure they had lots of content available at launch, so the script repository has things like this one liner … Copy-Item $Profile "$(split-path $profile)profile-backup.$((Get-Date).ToString(’MMddyyHHmmss’))" with a five star rating .

There’s no community quite as easy to build as a commercial junta, I guess. Several major commercial players are on board — even the upstart ShellTools has lent their logo in support. One must assume this will succeed to some degree … especially since Microsoft has been MVP-deputizing all the big PowerShell bloggers who’s support will determine whether this will remain an empty site where these commercial backers can get some extra advertising, or will actually become a true “community” site with active involvement from people without financial incentives .

On the down side, PowerGadgets (among others?) is conspicuously missing, and it remains to be seen if these guys can all play nice with each other. They are, after all, competing in a couple of PowerShell-enhancement spaces, and I haven’t yet seen any sign that any of them are going to shut down their (Microsoft | ShellTools | Sapien) PowerShell forums and route traffic to the “community” site. I also can’t find an RSS feed except on the individual blogs (and so far, only Marco Shaw seems likely to actually blog there).

One last thing, which I was at first not going to say, but after surfing the “blog” section and forums and finding them decorated the same way, I can’t hold back: That is quite honestly the ugliest web site I’ve seen in a while. It’s roughly the color of the swirling brown stuff in the bottom of the toilet after you throw up, and there’s more bits of scrolling, pulsing, and throbbing flash and javascript than I’ve ever seen outside of MySpace.

Update

It turns out that Sapien (Don Jones’ company) is, in fact, going to close their PowerShell Forum and move their PowerShell-related blogging to throw their whole weight behind this new site. So that means all three of the Bloggers listed on PowerShellCommunity.org will be actually blogging there. Nevermind that this makes it look, for now, even more like a Sapien spin piece than an community-driven site, it’s certainly a guarantee of some success, since one presumes that some of the traffic on the sapien forum will actually move to the new location, and all of these guys have been fairly consistent bloggers.

Update

Well, just for the record … I’ve been flipping around on the “community” site and I have a few more gripes. There is a script repository, but it’s not searchable, it’s practically empty, has no download links, and displays scripts double-spaced and without highlighting. Plus, posting scripts requires registration — on a site which as yet has no privacy policy and appears to be partially owned by Microsoft (there was a rumor about a 501c non-profit, but there’s no trace of that on the site, even on the “About us” page which merely says it’s run by Don Jones —an MVP, author, speaker, blogger and corporate ).

Just for kicks, compare their scripts page to the PowerShell Central Scripts site (note that I help out with PowerShell Central, and it’s independently run by Brandon Shell (another MVP) and also has no privacy policy, but then, it doesn’t require you to sign up). Oh, and for now you can access the scripts interface directly … but don’t tell Brandon I told you about it

Feedback Works

They’ve fixed a lot of these problems …