-------------------------------------------------- From: "Olin Lathrop" Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2010 3:26 PM To: "Microcontroller discussion list - Public." Subject: Re: [OT] piclist.com archive up but no updates or full text search > Rolf wrote: >> Well, there's a surprise. >> >> I send this response, go to bed, and this morning I'm all eager to see >> what people think, and, I'm a little surprised that there's no reply's >> to this mail, > > In general, people greatly overestimate how much the world will care abou= t > their little pet project, when in fact most don't give a crap. You seem= =20 > to > have fallen into this delusion more heavily than most. > >> Then I look at my apache logs, and they are huge. >> >> There have been a few 'people' who have inspected the site, > > I looked at it briefly out of curiosity. My external IP address is > 129.44.190.252, which should be in your logs. My first impressions were > that the nice calendar view James has is missing. You couldn't browse,=20 > only > search, and the search seemed to have no date range, just a specific date= .. > I concluded it was useless for me and got off the site. Perhaps there wa= s > more there, but first impressions are everything. If you can't convince > someone there is value there in the first 20 seconds, it doesn't matter=20 > what > else is available after digging deeper. > > Since you were doing this on your own, I wasn't going to comment, just > ignore it. I suspect many of the others that checked out your site did=20 > the > same. There was no point beating you up about something you did on your= =20 > own > for fun that wasn't being imposed on us. > > However, now that you took the extraordinary step of complaining about=20 > lack > of feedback (when that in itself is actually clear feedback) and didn't=20 > even > wait 24 hours ("Ooh, ooh, looky me world!"), you are going to get comment= s > people previously decided to withhold. > > I guess there are several different ways people used the PICList archives= =20 > in > the past. I used it on occasion to see exactly who said what to whom=20 > when, > and sometimes to see if anything interesting had developed after a few=20 > days > in a thread I wasn't monitoring. While that was occasionally nice to=20 > have, > it's not nice enough to get off my butt and help do anything about=20 > restoring > it. We each have to chose which volunteer activities we will help with,= =20 > and > which we will leave for others to do for us. This one for me is in the > second catagory. > > James did mention something about advertising on his site, but when I=20 > asked > for details I got no response. That could have been a possible source of > support for his efforts, but if he can't even get back to legitimate > customer inquiries then it leaves his sincerity suspect. Oh well, I'll > still be just fine either way. Jeez Olin, you really are a grouch sometimes... keeps me amused though I=20 suppose... (when it's not bugging me..) :-) I don't think he was "complaining", just maybe gently poking us for some=20 feedback (which you appear to have taken him up on in your own inimitable=20 manner) I think it's good that anyone will take the time and trouble to do this kin= d=20 of thing as it means the Piclist is more likely to survive in the future. I was also interested in the response to the advertising question, I=20 thought that was quite a good idea if done correctly. I'm the same about th= e=20 archives, I don't really use them at the moment, but I think it's a great=20 knowledge resource to have and I'm sure some people find it very useful. I= =20 may test it out and see how good it is at searching/providing relevant=20 knowledge on certain subjects - many of the threads here I have often=20 thought should be saved in some kind of FAQ for different subjects. Sorting= =20 the wheat from the chaff would be hard going though over years of archives= =20 (maybe there could be a "useful" flag attached in future :-) )...=20 --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .