To Blog or to Forum Post, that’s the question…

I’m not really sure why I’m so driven to do this, but I’ve always been a spread-the-news kind of guy for the VFP community. Any time I see something cool, or that I think others may be interest in, I make a post here-and-there to all the most popular FoxPro sites to spread the word.  So, about a month ago I cranked up this blog for the purpose of doing just that, thinking this would be a good way to go.  Now, I don’t want to compete with the existing forums, because it’s easy enough to go there and make announcements, but I have to visit UniversalThread, and  Foxite, and the ProFox and VFUG lists too, oh, and even Fox.Wikis.com, oh, and sometimes use my FoxCentral.net account. I usually have to hit all those sites with a bunch of cut-and-paste to work all the places I want to reach. Plus, after posting to forums and lists, if I need to tweak the info (corrections, add details, etc), it’s too late to edit or just too much work. And, any conversations (comments) about the topic are now spread out across all the different places and there’s no one place other readers can visit to take it all in. Plus, the formatting and image posting in a blog is much better.

So, I’m trying to decide whether it really adds any value to put this info in a blog post and try to get an audience following the blog, or just keep it old school and post in multiple places.

Your opinions please.

3 thoughts on “To Blog or to Forum Post, that’s the question…”

  1. My advice is to keep the info here and create hyperlinks in the forums. Whenever I need a solution, I seek in the forums, but also on the internet. Thanks to search enignes like Google your information will be found and will, or will not, be of use.

  2. Mixed feelings. Sure you can find some great blog posts, yet it also makes little islands of knowledge and spreads the community out instead of bringing it together. Sure RSS feeds help, but then you have a ton of stuff in your Inbox. I don't know how people read it all or just not get distracted by it (I have enough distractions already). Also, some blogs are just for marketing or someone trying to make themselves into a guru (some deserve that title, some don't). But blogs are here to stay, I guess. There are pros and cons to all of it. But you have competing forums, too, just like blogs might be "competing" places to get info. With so much info out there, it will just never be organized like each person would like it. Yeah, like PValenca said, it's the search engines that ultimately help us find the info.

  3. Matt, I agree with the first commented – post here and link in forums ( you might want to paraphrase a bit in the forum) – 1) some forums are not indexed by google,hiding the value

    2) your blog becomes a global resource instead of a forum post which be closed. This way others users can link to your post

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