On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 12:20 PM, Kevin Fenzi kevin@scrye.com wrote:

On Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:10:19 -0400 Jayson Rowe rowe.jayson@gmail.com wrote:

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Greetings!

Welcome.

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I saw in the Fedora Weekly News today that there were issues with finding folks to help maintain the Fedora Blogs. I'm a System and Network Administrator for a software company by trade, and I would be more than happy to volunteer my time in any way help is needed (for that project or others).

The thought is appreciated, but I'm not sure that would be sufficient to keep blogs.fedoraproject.org going. The thing is that there is just not much advantage in us running our own blogs, unless we have missed something. It would be like wordpress.com making their own Linux distribution. Wouldn't they want to leave that to projects that have that as their focus?

I can admit that in this case there are other organizations that mostly share Fedora values that are available to use but on the other hand there is a reason that almost half of the Fedora syndicated blogs are currently hosted by Fedora infrastructure. That number I am sure would continue to grow over time to an even higher percentage and is currently biased in a low direction by the existence of many bloggers who already had things in place prior to the existence of blogs.fp.o.

Why would a Fedora contributor prefer to choose blogs.fp.o?

* They don't already blog and only intend to blog about Fedora related business so blogs.fp.o seems a natural place.

* They are somewhat reluctant to blog but are encouraged to by the Fedora Project and that encouragement is an easier sell when the Fedora Project provides the contributors with the tools to do what the project is requesting.

* They don't want 12 accounts with 12 different organizations to contribute to the Fedora Project when one account with Fedora can do the job.

Outsourcing services can be attractive in ways, but there is often a cost paid by the user in the end. It seems to normally be a win from the perspective of the outsourcer but not such a win from the perspective of those who get passed off to be someone else's problem.

Sorry to vent a little about this here but I really think blogs.fp.o has more value than it is being given credit for and I'm sad to see it being retired. (And I accept that even if it was given the credit I think it deserves the decision to retire it would probably not change.)

John

On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 11:57, inode0 inode0@gmail.com wrote:

Outsourcing services can be attractive in ways, but there is often a cost paid by the user in the end. It seems to normally be a win from the perspective of the outsourcer but not such a win from the perspective of those who get passed off to be someone else's problem.

Sorry to vent a little about this here but I really think blogs.fp.o has more value than it is being given credit for and I'm sad to see it being retired. (And I accept that even if it was given the credit I think it deserves the decision to retire it would probably not change.)

The problem with venting at the last minute is it just seems to start a long venting return. I didn't wake up 6 months ago and say "Hey lets see how I can screw with contributors because they really need an enema." I looked over the facts and realized that while we had some users of the service we had few long term users. Those who had opened blogs but never posted had said they went to a better hosted blog with more of their friends on it. We also had done crap for security updates and chosen a branch of code that was deader than Hoffa. The only thing that has kept it clean has been a lot of heroics from Ricky Zhou patching stuff and finding crap at 2am in the morning because someone said "hey you got a spammer on deadblog43".

In the end, this was not a foregone conclusion. I laid out what was needed to get this going again. 1) No last minute heroics. 2) More than 1 person running it, conversant in it, etc. 3) A laid out plan of what was going to be the sucessor, who was going to support it, how they were going to train others, etc

This was said on multiple lists about 6 months ago in order to avoid a last minute "Ooooh Fedora screws contributors again." emails and week long heroics to keep it up again. If you and/or others have a problem with my decision from then, y'all have had multiple months to work on 2 and 3 because 1 is non-optional.

On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 20:57, Jayson Rowe rowe.jayson@gmail.com wrote:

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In the end, this was not a foregone conclusion. I laid out what was needed to get this going again.

1. No last minute heroics.
2. More than 1 person running it, conversant in it, etc.
3. A laid out plan of what was going to be the sucessor, who was going

to support it, how they were going to train others, etc

This was said on multiple lists about 6 months ago in order to avoid a last minute "Ooooh Fedora screws contributors again." emails and week long heroics to keep it up again. If you and/or others have a problem with my decision from then, y'all have had multiple months to work on 2 and 3 because 1 is non-optional.

I didn't mean to start anything - just offered to help if I could :-)

I *will* try to attend the IRC meeting tomorrow at Kevin's invitiation!

Ugh. I thought I had put that in my reread and send tomorrow pile versus the "SEND" button. My deepest apologies because emails like mine can be a big turnoff for someone volunteering. My sentence comes across as blaming you and I take responsibility for being a general "ass" when I should not have been. I hope we can meet online or at the meeting and I can try to make up for this.

On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 9:52 PM, Stephen John Smoogen smooge@gmail.com wrote:

On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 11:57, inode0 inode0@gmail.com wrote:

...

Outsourcing services can be attractive in ways, but there is often a cost paid by the user in the end. It seems to normally be a win from the perspective of the outsourcer but not such a win from the perspective of those who get passed off to be someone else's problem.

Sorry to vent a little about this here but I really think blogs.fp.o has more value than it is being given credit for and I'm sad to see it being retired. (And I accept that even if it was given the credit I think it deserves the decision to retire it would probably not change.)

The problem with venting at the last minute is it just seems to start a long venting return.

Vent was a bad word choice on my part. What I was doing was more singing a dirge. Tthe last line you quote I hoped would indicate that I understand and accept the decision, I'm just really sad that the blog hosting didn't work out.

John