AFAIK no one volunteered. If you are interested you should ping World Engineer in the blog chat room and discuss specifics. I haven't been involved in the blog for a while, there's a trello board full of ideas for posts, so if you are interested the first step is to get access to it.
We'll remove the link from the FAQ later today btw, since it seems the community overwhelmingly supports it.
Perhaps I'll see about that trello thing, I've been wanting to try my hand at writing some blogs considering every blogger I read has written at least one blog urging me to write a blog. That and it's resume fodder.
@ramhound Your deletions triggered a "possible vandalism" flag. Are you just cleaning up some of your answers? We'd hate to think you were quitting on us.
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user55340
3:13 PM
re: writing a "career advice" do people want a single "this is what P.SE thinks?" or a multitude of "different perspectives on career development"?
user55340
Also, writing my version and reading the gamedev.SE (a fair portion of the "what should I learn" questions tend to be followed by "to be a game developer") they had a link to a lengthy forum post with specifics on technology. I believe that even "just read the questions" will lead a person who wants to know what to learn for game development in the right direction.
This weekend I was taking a stab at trying to write my own version of "Don't Call yourself a programmer" that is more suitable to the questions that we find (and try to avert) on P.SE (without the "bad" advice in that blog post - though I suspect I've got my own set of controversial opinions).
user55340
In writing it, I began to wonder what the ultimate goal would be - a single whitepaper of a sort that maintains a single collective community viewpoint or if a multitude of blog posts would be better where it is more clear that each post is a single individual's opinion.
@YannisRizos no need, mistakes were quite routine and I'd say were corrected, and most important I had grown skin thick enough to deal with these in the way like you suggest, "to be constructive about it" :) My point is,...
recalling my feelings back then I find it would be quite hard to keep constructive tone (back then - that's why I mentioned less experience and not particularly thick skin... casual user, I am no longer like that)
my comment there is rather of editorial nature, if you would say something like "it's possible..." instead of "it's not that hard...", I wouldn't post it
Also I must say that I agree the "question" isn't constructive without concrete examples. But I really can't give more details, although I really want to.
user55340
Having been a modish elsesite, the best way I've described being a mod is that of a janitor in middleschool - "bzzt Janitor to Mr. Blank's room, someone threw up." -- Mods are the unsung heros of interwebs that put up with more vomit than most people ever see outside of the health care industry. Be glad that someone is cleaning up after other people because it really stinks when they don't. And they are human and under paid.
@MichaelT I just don't like seeing good people getting called out constantly for doing what we ask them to do. Some mods, including myself, couldn't care less. Others care a bit, and it's understandable that they get frustrated.
And the trend is bit alarming, taking cheap shots at mods in comments is (slowly) becoming a meme...
I think what we're seeing here is the confluence of two very separate problems. Together, I think, they create situations like those Yannis described in generalities.
First: The Silent Majority
I've done my best to consistently remind people that the VAST MAJORITY of our userbase is excellent....
user55340
5:31 PM
@YannisRizos Have you ever read [A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ](shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html) (it was also referenced in Coding Horror). Elsesite, it was required reading for all modish types.
@YannisRizos regarding examples... did you consider giving a positive one instead of negatives? Say, what about the one you mentioned in comments, about the user whose account was deleted by mistake and who handled this nicely. I for one would be interested to learn how stuff like that can be reported without f-words :)
Like every morning I was going to check out skeptics, just to find out that my account wasn't recognized by the site, it worked on all other SE sites except this one, when I looked as a guest I can see my old questions are posted as user5169 , I'm not sure what happened to my account, as far as ...
With the exception of spammers, who either just get their posts spam-flagged to death or are destroyed by a moderator, the by far most common reason for deleting a user is that the user requests himself that his account be deleted.
The guidelines from SE used to be that we moderators should wai...
Interesting looking at quantcast, the number of page views per visit has been in a steady decline (visits going up so page views are going up, but at a significantly lesser rate than visits)
Well, those who do visit previously viewed far more pages
look at the graphs for all of 2012 switch between page views and visits
look by month so you can see more easily the actual trend
The significance has to mean the normal community visitors are viewing fewer pages
I'm sure searchers have an effect to, but the difference in the trend is a bit much to account for just that
visitors is going to increase significantly, that's a given by the fact that it's a collection of historical content which is constantly growing therefore constantly matching a greater number of googlers search terms
That is one plausible interpretation of the quantcast numbers. Though correlation and causation and all that, there are other completely viable interpretations of the quantcast numbers
January had 4.5 page views per person, now we have 3.0 page views per person, that's a decrease of 33%
@ThomasOwens I'm not talking about any judgements, I'm just trying to look for cause; one plausible cause is the engaged viewership are spending less time viewing now than previously
That's always going to be the case though as I said; more content = more search term matches, and the nature of the site is one wherein there is direct correlation between time and content amount
We would hope to convert more visitors into engaged participants though, and the numbers appear that isn't happening at any significant rate, rather the opposite may be occurring
1.2m page views january, 1.7m now, 400k visits january, 700k now, we have 75% more visits, and 40% more page views
that's a statistically significant disparity
But we can only theorize as to what it means. Meh iduno, I just thought it was interesting when I saw the difference in those trends
meanwhile we've doubled the "people" but I don't know how it defines that metric so I'm ignoring it, but if it's the actual unique visitors then that's even more disturbing that we have such a significant rise of unique visitors and a non-correlated trend to total visits which would mean the percentage of visitors that never return has increased
that's percentage not total, obviously the total one-time visitors has increased, but you should hope the percentage of visitors that never return stays fairly constant or at least decreases minimally
@JimmyHoffa It probably bases on IP addresses. In that case, I typically log in from 2 different IP addresses per day. Sometimes 3 if I'm using my laptop at home. I know other users log in from home and work, leaving with two unique IP addresses.
@ThomasOwens yes, but a growing engaged audience would show increases in those numbers to stay in line with eachother (not the same but at the same rate) where those multi-IP and etc situations live in the noise as a part of that rate which both people and visits get increases from
I would think... though like I said, we have no idea how they identify "people" so it should probably be ignored
As someone whose written instrumentation systems in the past I know how subjective and bad measures of "people" can be
Another interpretation of the numbers is that the site amassed the people who would be interested by and large very early in its life and the selection of people who real engagement in this site appeals to are already usurped into it's community therefore while visits will continue to grow, engaged participants simply won't grow except at a trickle. You see the same thing happen in markets as "market saturation" when the vast majority of people who want product X already have it
@JimmyHoffa Perhaps questions on what people vs views in web stats actully mean might be on-topic for Stats.SE. Im not sure though since I don't participate there
I would ask on there presenting the statistical interpretations I (and any of you?) can come up with and ask for details of why what interpretations would or wouldn't make sense, but that's more of a forum discussion question. Perhaps should go dig up a statisticians/mathematicians forum somewhere and ask for interpretations there.
actually, it might be a really good question for webmasters; if I'm thinking of webmasters correctly their job is understanding a websites visits/views/etc statistics (Is that right? WebMaster is a really vague concept heh)
@Rachel At this point I can only say one thing: I wish I could share some, if not all, the details with you. Your input on the actual things I'm talking about would be very valuable. Unfortunately, I can't share the details. One thing I can say is that nothing in that rant has anything to do with Programmers.
user55340
@YannisRizos have you had a chance to massage Shirkley's great wall of text with your eyeballs yet?
@MichaelT that turn of phrase really generates a bloody strange mental image'
user55340
@JimmyHoffa I had a latin teacher back in highschool who would ask of her students "Did you actually read the text or just massage it with your eyeballs?"
user55340
When reading Latin, one can go through and get the gist of the text (skipping the vocabulary you don't know). But actually reading it and understanding what tense a particular verb is and how that changes the meaning of the text is more than a "massage of the eyeballs."
user55340
9:22 PM
(this may explain some of my temptation to write some Lingua::Romana perl code and leave it for someone else to maintain)
@YannisRizos I flagged the SEO question to be moved to webmasters, did they not accept it? I always hate seeing the close-happy P.SE community just declare "Bad question!" when a new poster just didn't know there was a site where it was a good question..
@YannisRizos I'm surprised that's only a beta now; that site is fun reading. I'm going to have to be careful with it, that could be a worse time sink than wikipedia
A few very unconstructive questions survived for a while, and generated opinion heavy answers. AFAIK this has been a recurring theme for the site, and there quite a few rather flame-y Meta discussions about it.
But it looks like a lot better now. Another problem was that when I first started using the site, the two most recent Meta posts where calling out a troll. He is a troll, but the posts were unnecessary, Meta is for content and general behaviours, not individuals.
(all) that said, it's a great site. my spider sense tingled a bit here and there, but it has a solid group of regulars who take care most of the moderation and (at least) try to edit discussion-y questions into something more concrete.
@YannisRizos I'm surprised on those sky scrapers history question nobody wrote the answer that immediately came to mind for me. Sky scrapers are seen in asia (or so I understand) as modern symbols of economic power, which is something large parts of asia are in great struggles for in the past half a century. There haven't been similar power struggles around most of Europe since A) modern sky scrapers became a particular development and B) WWII which likely demolished any overly large buildings
Granted that's only a part of the picture but I don't see a mention of it at all
I'm just thinking, if building sky scrapers were as possible in the early/mid 1800s as they were in the past half a century, Europe might be full of them.
Voted to close that question, my only motivation to post an answer was to point out that Europe has quite few skyscrapers, didn't really put much thought to it. But you should post an answer, your reasoning makes sense.
Oh, I didn't read the Q, just the title; I was thinking more about the fact that all the record breaking towers you hear about for decades are in asia, though he was asking specifically about cities which are known to be some of the most densely populated in the world, so the answer to his question is simply population density more than anything else
Eh, if you voted to close I won't bother writing an answer. Though in response to your rhetorical question; Yes. I would very much like to see a hulking sky scraper next to the eiffel tower. I just think it would be funny. :)
@JimmyHoffa Lots of reasons: 1) Comments aren't really visible (and they tend to go away), 2) Comments aren't searchable, 3) Comments can't be downvoted, 4) Comments are generally not enough for a thorough answer.
#4 tells me though they should have written it in comment because they weren't thorough. #3 I didn't think about though and that is definitely something I should be thinking about..