10 Feb
2018
10 Feb
'18
6:45 a.m.
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