April 18, 2003 — originally posted on artima.com
Here's my dilemma: what should a blog post be? Some of the entries I've seen here are about the author's philosophy of programming. Others are news items. Being an inexperienced blogger I'll have to try various things to see what works best. Oh, and how do you measure success of a blog entry? I suppose the amount of feedback. By that measure, Ken Arnold's post "Are Programmers People?" is the winner of the Artima.com blogs so far. But that measure of success suggests that successful blog posts should be controversial, and rehashing an existing controversy is an easy way to get feedback. Not that I'm saying that that's what Ken is doing - just that it's easy to "win" by trolling for flames.
I'll take my own approach for now, which today is thinking aloud while reminiscing on a recent conference.