> From: Grant Taylor cctalk at gtaylor.tnetconsulting.net > Sorry if this comes across wrong. ... I'm replying in an attempt to > provide a counter point for a discussion of reality. So please don't > take this as an attack on you, or your laudable appeal.
No problem! > When I write things for my personal site, I want them first and > foremost to be on my personal site. Right, but my question is 'why are you writing them?' Is it just because you enjoy writing, or do you do it in an attempt to convey information to others? (Or perhaps some motivation I haven't guessed?) Because if it's the latter, my point is that people are more likely to find it, when they're looking for info on a topic, if it's part of something like the CHWiki, than they are on individual Web sites. Not only can it be included in an organized way (so that one can start with the home page, and hopefully click on a few links to get to the topic one's interested in), but Google et al (the _only_ way people are likely to find a writeup in a personal Web-site) are likely to show the CHWiki page on a topic fairly high in their search output. (I just tried a few samples to verify that claim, so it's not just a supposition on my part! :-) I'm not sure how their display selection algorithm works (and I gather they are always tweaking it, both in attempt to make the results more useful, but also to prevent people from gaming it), but it does seem to like sites that have a mass of content. So if you're going to put all that work into writing something up, _and_ the goal is for people to use it... > Since I'm going to write for my site first, and I'm having to make time > to do so ... I think it's more important to get things recorded > somewhere, even if it's not the ideal location, than it is to delay > getting them recorded elsewhere, if ever. I agree it's better to have stuff online in a private site, than not at all. I have done this quite a bit myself, e.g.: http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/V6Unix.html http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/multics/MulticsPanels.html http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/DECIndicatorPanels.html so I do understand going that way. (The last two could easily be moved to the CHWiki, if I had the time/energy...) But speaking of the time to write things, that's another advantage of using the CHWiki - if you want to mention some technical term/concept, on the CHWiki you can just link to it with '[[xxx']]', and if some novice reading the article needs to know more about that topic, they just click on the link; no need to write explanatory text yourself. E.g. my 'Bringing up V6 Unix on the Ersatz-11 PDP-11 Emulator' page would probably have benefitted from that, and been a bit less long-winded as a result... Noel