[linux-elitists] Homepage vs. Blog

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Mr. Lesher!

Thanks for your email. I just want to keep the record straight about my 
homesite.

On Wednesday 18 April 2007, Tilghman Lesher wrote:
> On Wednesday 18 April 2007, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> > On Wednesday 18 April 2007, Aaron Burt wrote:
> > > On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 10:47:03AM +0300, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> > > > Hi all!
> > > >
> > > > I remember we had a lot of fun discussing my anti-qmail page. Now you
> > > > might want to discuss this:
> > >
> > > <snip>
> > >
> > > I give most folks the benefit of the doubt, so last time you did
> > > something like this, I very carefully did not point out that you
> > > appeared to be whoring your blog by trolling this list with blind
> > > items.
> >
> > 1. http://www.shlomifish.org/ is not a "blog" of mine - it's my home
> > site. My blogs are:
> >
> > http://www.shlomifish.org/me/blogs/
>
> Whether you categorize it as a blog or not, it still is.  Just because it's
> better organized than the average blog doesn't make it any less a log of
> your thoughts at a particular time, posted to the web.

Just to keep the record's straight: as you may know since the Internet boom 
circa 1996, many people started their own personal web sites. These sites 
were called "homepages", or later-on "homesites" (which is the word that I 
prefer because homepage is just one page). 

Now, blogs were a later phenomenon. What a blog (also known as "public 
journal", "weblog", etc) is is:

1. A stream of posts on certain topic, ordered by date.

2. Usually has an RSS feed.

3. Should have comments. I left Advogato from this reason among else.

4. Normally either personal, random or dedicaed to a certain topic.

5. Usually flat and non-hierarchical.

Now my homesite on the other hand, and several other homesites as well is:

1. Organised in a tree. The top categories are 

	A. "About myself"
	B. "Humour" (actually many writings, some of which too long to fit into a 	
	   blog entry).
	C. Puzzles.
	D. Computer Art - images I created with explanation how I created them. (I'm 
	   not much of an artist, but it may still have some value).
	E. Software - home pages for resources about my software projects. Also 
           contains some documents and resources, pages where I criticise some
	   bad software, and some of my old DOS-era programs.
	F. Presetnations - mostly about computers. Normally span more than one HTML 
           page.
	G. Essays - written in HTML or DocBook/XML, they are also organised in a  
	   hierarchy and updated. I admit that they have been the focus of most of my 
           concentration now.
	H. Links, recommendations, a site map, a FAQ, information on building 
           the site from sources, call for help, etc.

2. Has a central navigation menu and sub navigation menus. Most blogs are flat 
or at most have tags which are completely different.

3. Has many resources that are not normally present in blogs. How many times 
have you seen a full 10K word story posted to a blog? Or pages that only 
contain links.

4. Many of the pages there are constantly updated. A blog entry normally 
remains mostly static after a while, while my the pages of my homesite are 
very dynamic.

5. There are no comments in any of the pages. It's a static HTML site. Had it 
been a blog, I would have made sure to give a nested comments facility. I 
admit that I often post a notice about them to mailing lists, news sites, web 
forums, etc. But they are not blog entries.

-----------------------

As I told you, I do have some weblogs, and write in them often. But my home 
site is a completely different and much more impressive beast.

So I guess that you have been trolled.

>
> Note that this would be different altogether if someone (else) had posted a
> relevant news article and you had commented by pointing to your anti-Apple
> page.  Then you would have some relevant commentary, not shameless self-
> promotion.
>

Shameless self-promotion may not necessarily bad. And I was not trying to 
promote it, I was trying to get some help with it, hear opinions and/or start 
an interesting discussion.

A few other things I worked on recently, which you may find interesting are:

http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/education/introductory-language/

http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/education/opinion-on-the-technion/

They may be more on topic here.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif@iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

If it's not in my E-mail it doesn't happen. And if my E-mail is saying
one thing, and everything else says something else - E-mail will conquer.
    -- An Israeli Linuxer