Monday, July 7, 2008

Blogs, Tutorials, and Beyond

As part of the grand blog idea, I wanted to include various coding tutorials, with the selfish goal of testing my own understanding and forcing me to learn things I don't (but want to) know.

I've never been a fan of tutorials via blogs, though. Don't get me wrong; if I Google a coding topic and find a blog post providing a tutorial, I'm certainly appreciative, but what if I want to browse all available tutorials by this person? What, am I supposed to scroll through every story about this person's dog or new baby in order to find the occasional how-to article? Of course not. It's like we've taken a step backwards with this trend of tech professionals providing tutorials in blog posts. What ever happened to the ability to browse?

This is one of the reasons I didn't want to limit this site to a simple Blogger blog; I wanted to potentially have a browsable page of tutorials, vlog "episodes", or whatever the case may be. Blogger may provide functionality to add widgets or whatever -- it seems to allow a lot of customization -- but then this brings up the issue of which web technology to use. As far as I know, Blogger is based on PHP, and I'd rather Dimitri and I use ASP.NET (and I'm sure he'd agree). I was researching several ASP.NET blogging/community site options prior to Dimitri "taking the initiative" and creating this site, and we may make the transition to one of these at some point in the future.

No comments: