Software Developers With Blogs...

Answer 1

Cymon's Games, reviving the type-ins. New program every Friday. Wednesdays or Thursdays are Editorial or Learning Resource day, and news... at least once a week. I'm still working out the schedule somewhat. Still working out lots.

Could use a webmonkey to help me with a redesign, actually.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, it's Cymon's Games are C/C++ programs, tho PDCurses, Allegro and hopefully SDL and OpenGL one day are used to extend the programs.

Answer 2

I have a blog discussing mostly web development. It serves several purposes:

• A funnel for traffic towards my startup (and gives good conversion rate to boost).
• Show prospective clients a taste of my experience and skills (I do freelance and contract work while bootstrapping my startup).
• An outlet for work related frustration / experience and sharing solutions with the development community.

I started writing in the blog when I had more free time than I do now, and it certainly paid off on several levels. The amount of time it takes away from your programming is up to you, but marketing and networking are a viable part of any business and demand some time allocation. Spam is not a problem if you use something like Askimet.

Make sure this is something you want to do - that you have some writing ability and the desire to communicate your thoughts online. The one thing I was pleasantly surprised to find out was how the comments in the blog contribute and improve the quality of the articles, and encourage me to keep coming up with new post ideas.

Regarding readership statistics - this a personal peeve of mine. Watching google analytics graphs can be as addictive as a good strategy game. Seeing which links and posts give the best conversion and participation, planning keywords and topics and timing them with other networking efforts is pretty fun ;).

Answer 3

The corporate site for my startup prominently features my personal blog. It's more a vision and values thing than a point of purchase thing. Now, my blog for this community where entrepreneurs and engineers get together to develop great web applications is all about goal conversion. However, that community is free so that blog doesn't exactly help in sales either.

Answer 4

I blog mainly to provide myself with a place to dump my thoughts. I don't really have software which I promote on there, I do have one project which I've been working on which I do often blog about, but mostly I blog about what ever is taking my interest at the time.

I use Google Analytics and Feedburner to monitor my traffic, although at the moment it's not properly set up. I'm just too lazy to get it fully configured :P

Answer 5

I don't have one personally (none that I admit to at least :), but slightly off topic I think the "Top 100 Blogs for Developers (Q4 2008)" has a good list of blogs worth evaluating, and together they cover most subjects you'd want, and most of them discuss the pros and cons of blogging about your profession from time to time.

Answer 6

I started my blog when I had something to say. I write when I have something to say. I haven't had too much to say so far, so many of the questions don't apply to me. But I use google analytics to measure traffic.

I think a lot of the other parts of your question will depend on your specific field and how you use your blog. If what you are saying is useful, over time people will pick up on it. Smart people who may be evaluating your product may use it as a reflection of your software. As long as your blog doesn't suck, it should help. I doubt it will increase sales by a largely measureable amount, but it does give you more credibility.

Answer 7

I blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/jaredpar.

I aim for 3-4 posts a week. The posts consist of pretty much everything I run into during my programming day. It can range from libraries I work on, features I own, common problems I see on SO, problems I got wrong, frustrating issues, API design, gotchas ...

Pretty much anything related to programming :)

IMHO, blogging is very beneficial to my career and doesn't take up much more time not blogging. Mainly because I'm constantly tinkering on my own time. Blogging just allows me to write about what I'm otherwise doing. It also forces me to research a topic more thoroughly before I write about it (well, usually forces me :) ).

At first it took look a bit more time. But after a few months of consistent blogging 3-4 times a week I settled into a cadence and it's just part of the routine now.

Answer 8

I have a blog for my company

blog.itbix.com and a personal blog where I write about programming and other stuff that concerns me

cyrilgupta.com

I don't write my personal blog for any profit, or popularity, and I usually average 5-10 posts a month depending on how much time I have on hand.

On my company's blog I announce new products, upgrades, fixes, etc., in a very off-hand sort of a way.

I think the company blog has helped me make my users more aware of what we are doing. As for my personal blog... Nobody ever reads it :).

Answer 9

We have a couple of blogs for our company, but I also have a personal blog.

http://www.stephenbaugh.com/blog

Basically just a place to share some personal reflection, but recently I have had to extend it to support a number of wordpress plugins I published. Until then everything IT that I commented on was published in my "geek" category.

Until a few months ago I was publishing daily, and had reasonable traffic volumes with some months up to 25k visitors. But having got caught up with a number of project and Christmas this has dropped off and I am about to start again for the new year.

Answer 10

I work for Quest Software, makers of stuff like LiteSpeed, Toad, Spotlight, etc. My official job title is Subject Matter Expert, and one of my job duties is to blog. I think I'm the only paid-to-blog guy to answer so far, heh. Here goes:

How often do you write?

Usually only once a week, but I'll write several blog entries at once and schedule them in advance. I also do video podcasts, and the same schedule applies - I only do it a few times a month, but I'll record enough videos to release on a regular basis (every Monday and Thursday.)

I've heard from writers who block out a specific window every day to write. That doesn't work for me, and I've read blogs that sound like the writer said to himself, "I gotta write a blog today. Let's go crank one out, whatever it takes, no matter how much it hurts." It hurts to read those.

What do you write about?

Mostly about database administration in general. If you write about your own product continuously, you're not a blogger - you're a technical documentation writer. That stuff goes in press releases, not blogs.

Do you talk about competitor programs?

Only if they trash-talk ours, and I need to respond to clarify things. Otherwise, that's taboo. The products should speak for themselves.

Do you give away plans of new features that you are adding? Are you worried your competitors will read you blog and implement the features you are planning?

We patent significant new features, things that are really groundbreaking, so we're not allowed to talk about those until the patents clear. I'm currently writing a two-week series about the process of developing a new product and getting user feedback on it, but not about the specifics of the features.

How do you monitor who's reading your blog?

I don't - that sounds so Big Brother. I use Google Analytics and FeedBurner, but in the end, the only real statistics that matter are the users who tell your managers, "I read that guy's blog, and he does a great job of representing Quest to the public."

There's three types of readers:

1. Your faithful readers who devour every post via RSS
2. Drive-bys who find a specific post in Google and rarely visit again
3. People who find a specific post via a link-sharing service like Digg or Reddit, and come in a mass crowd all at once - then rarely visit again

If you're worried about monitoring "who's reading your blog", you're going to be surprised - #1 makes up a very small percentage of readers. #2 is staggeringly large after you've built up a lot of content.

Do you have any idea about how many reads each blog entry gets?

Yes. Will I tell you? No, but your best bet is to use Google Pagerank. It's in the Google Toolbar. That'll help you compare one blog against another.

Do you get lots of comments? Are they helpful?

Yes, because it helps drive product direction.

Have any been severely critical of you?

Blog readers do a decent job of distinguishing the difference between people and products. If a product has a bug, they don't call me a moron. Every product has bugs. The fact that I'm a moron has nothing to do with it.

Is spam a problem with comments?

Just like it is with email. You have to protect yourself with things like Askimet and Captcha.

Do you think this helps your sales in any way?

Yes.

Can you attribute any sales directly to your blog?

Yes.

How much time does this take away from your programming.

Few programmers make good bloggers. Few bloggers make good programmers. If you really want to increase sales via blogging, or increase mindshare, don't bother your programmers - get marketing people. That's what they do.

Having said that, I'm a DBA and a former programmer. Sometimes it works.

Overall do you think it is worthwhile?

Absolutely. In the SQL Server software market, for example, all of the big players have community web sites, bloggers and experts. We all help interface with the community to make our products better. If you develop software in isolation from the community, you stand a higher chance of building software people won't want, or software people will have problems with. If you stay in closer touch with your end users, you get more feedback and build a better product.