In addition to wanting a spiffy new URL, and the ability to customise my own 404 not found messages, the transfer to nsrd.info has also been about a desire to offer more than just a blog about NetWorker.
I’m sufficiently cognisant of the talents and efforts of others that I don’t want to needlessly duplicate efforts. For instance, I’m reluctant to start a general help forum simply because there are already several ways of doing that. There’s the NetWorker discussion group at Backup Central, and far longer reaching than that, there’s the NetWorker Mailing List run by Stan Horwitz over at Temple University. If I add a third resource into that mix, I’ll just be potentially diluting the process a little more.
What I want to do with this site is expand the amount of information that it presents, but keep it primarily within the scope of being an information site. The blog itself has been running for just under a year, and every day I see nice solid numbers of people coming in on the basis of searching for error messages, or failures, or answers to questions. So while I’m reluctant to start a general purpose NetWorker discussion forum, the direction I want to take the overall nsrd.info site is one of being an information repository. That is, a site that when people are looking for an error in NetWorker or details about a particular feature, what they’ll find here is an article or posting that discusses that specific thing.
In short, I want the site to be about answers, not questions.
No one person has all the answers, of course. Not even in my wildest dreams would I consider myself an unchallengeable expert in NetWorker. So based on a suggestion made some time ago that I meant to follow up on but never quite got around to doing, I’m going to start looking for guest contributors. Note that I’m using the WordPress term there – contributors. For a while at least, I want to retain the option of checking what people are going to publish, but only for two reasons:
- Sub-editing – Dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, so to speak.
- To confirm publication schedule.
As of this morning, I’m turning on the user registration system to the blog. If you want to be a registered user, sign yourself up. If you want to be a contributor, sign yourself up and then send me an email so we can get the ball rolling.
The next step is the micromanuals; the first one will be available in just a couple of days. I don’t see these as being published anywhere as recently as blog articles, and you’ll understand once the first one becomes available. These are (I’m hoping) going to be deep dives on very specific topics within the NetWorker frame and/or topics you won’t find a lot of information on within the formal documentation.
The next will be setting up a discussion-styled forum, but not aimed at general discussions, but a “factbase“. Not a Wiki, nor a classic question/answer discussion board, but somewhere in-between. This will be about snippets of information too small for a blog article, plain facts and experiences. It may sound a little vague at the moment, but I’ll be aiming to get the ball rolling on that one before the end of January, and we’ll see where that takes us.
The blog will continue, of course. I’ve got some more articles in the works right now, and notes jotted down for more into the future. (Hopefully other people will have some notes and thoughts and be charitable enough to offer to share those thoughts with the rest of us too.)
Finally, a happy new year (and new decade) to you all!