New Blog Concept – Technical Tips Each Week

I’ve been thinking a lot about my lack of blogging, and I’ve decided to take on a quest that will make sure I do a better job blogging here. Because I am a ‘Jack of all Trades, Master of None’, within the Open Source Community, it’s been apparent to me that I’ve a lot of good practice mucking up. Because of this, I learn something new all the time.

So I came up with this idea, a very quaint, probably mostly recycled idea of blogging about technical tips I’ve come across in my travels. Simple tips to help the new and the experienced with different “geeky” solutions I’ve discovered over the years. Sometimes I feel like I don’t know anything, and I have a simple solution to provide, other times I feel like I’ve got some great information to share.

Either way I look at it, both types of solutions will help. Here’s my thoughts on why:

• Sometimes simple solutions aren’t that simple.
• Providing a detailed post about something simple can help newbies grow into better contributing members of the F/OSS society of which we’re all a part.

• A lot of times, good solutions are available, but sometimes it’s hard to find them.

• Sometimes, because the solution is so simple, the knowledgebase isn’t available. This is generally because no one felt it was important enough to write down.

• Others will benefit by having solutions written down and detailed.

• I regularly search the web for a solution to something that I’m trying to solve. Usually what happens is that I find many people having the same problem. When the person says they solved it, they never provide any details. This DRIVES ME NUTS!!

• I believe I can write clear solutions to problems I’ve had. In addition, I plan on making sure that links are either saved locally, or the links are from well known sites that are fairly stable on-line.

• It never hurts to have more information about a problem/solution.

• I’ll benefit from writing down the stuff I did.

• I’d like to be able to share information with others about something I’ve done.

• I may get nostalgic one day, and want to read about how little I knew a year or two ago. That’ll be fun to see my progress.

• I may have to reinstall something (in fact I used this very blog to fix my Xgl when I recently rebuilt my box), and can use this blog as a good reference to what I did.

• My family will have a good record for genealogy and others will have a good historical record. (This may sound a bit weird to use a tech blog for something like that, but a lot of my descendants who wrote down things they liked in a journal became interesting to me.)

I am most definitely sure that there are many people out there who blog just like this, so how is mine going to be different? It isn’t really, mostly my experiences will just be different than others, possibly providing a better/different perspective on a problem. I believe that by providing a detailed answer to a problem I’ve had, others can truly benefit.

To help me with my goal, there are a couple of things I’d like to ask the community who reads this blog:

1. If you find my solution to be in error, please post a comment and let me know. I’ll fix it, and even give you credit for the repair.
2. If you like my solutions, please link back to me from your site. It’ll help others find the solution too.
3. If you have the solution on your blog, please provide me a link in a comment. I’ll occasionally go back through old posts and add links which are useful.

Please feel free to let me know your thoughts on my plan. I’d like to hear of some good tech problems others have had as well.

Cheers,

Herlo