Ideas of March

Over the past years I've done several talks at conferences on how to contribute to the community. The ones that most stood out to me so far have been the talks in Chicago at PHP|Tek together with my friend Lorna Mitchell, and the one in Paris last year at Symfony Live. In all those talks, I tell people that a good way to contribute to the community is to write blogposts.

But with the growth of Twitter, Facebook and other social media, it seems many people (to some extent even me) have put blogging on the backburner. And while Twitter is a great way to quickly ask questions and get solution to problems, it doesn't persist this knowledge for later re-use. Twitter does not keep a long archive of tweets, and even if it would, figuring out the conversations is very hard.

So it would be good to save knowledge for later. So that Google can find it. So that the rest of the community can find it. Like I did yesterday with my blogpost about stalling SSH connections. Not every blogpost you write needs to be an elaborate journalistic masterpiece.

But even I have written less on my blog in the past year. I've always meant to write more and I have a huge list of topics I need to write about. I just need to actually do it. Chris Shiflett has now given me a good reason to actually do so. His Ideas of March initiative is a very good one, and is a good reason for me to pick up on the blogging again. So yes, I hereby pledge to start blogging more again.

Will you join us? You're definitely in good company. Not just Chris is doing it, but also I just noticed Chris Cornutt has joined the initiative and Lorna Mitchell has also joined. And I'm sure many more will join! So will you?