Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Posted on Wednesday, August 15, 2007 4:43:17 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)  Comments [5] | 
Categories: ArcGIS Devt | Blogging

As I sit here looking at my little $10/month hosting account, I'm seeing that ArcDeveloper.net is taking up a lot of space, and getting relatively little traffic. In addition, I believe that the vast majority of the "1279" the registered users are actually spam accounts which never activated because their email addresses were bogus. And you can bet I'm enthusiastic to dig in there and clear them all out. 

On the bright side, Google Analytics shows a consistent 100 or so visits a day, with 70% of the traffic coming from Search Engines - at least it shows that people are searching for what the few participants are discussing.

arcdeveloper-analytics

And I know from talking to some of you that it has been a good resource from time to time. But, as ESRI is now fully supporting .NET 2.0 (a primary reason for starting this up), and their forums are threatening to add RSS feeds any day now, perhaps this site's time has come and gone.

The question for me (and I guess for you) is - should I keep it going? I've got a lot of other stuff on the go, and so promoting/maintaining the site is just not happening. The wider ESRI Developer crowd has not jumped in either - I'm guessing it has too much overlap with the main support forums.

If people think it's still useful, please let me know in the comments, or via the Contact link at the top of this page. Is there anything else you'd like to see on the site? Different forums? Should it be running on different software (Community Server does many things "ok", but nothing really well in my opinion - and it's a pain to administer).

What would drag me in is one or two simple forums:

1) Agile Development and ArcGIS - which would cover things like Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration, Automated builds, WiX, Sandcastle, and all the other good "goo" that goes around a successful development team.

2) Quick Hits - killer questions and  simple solutions. Kinda like a light-weight community blog where you can post questions that just are not going to get any play at the ESRI forums, and where people without blogs can post how-to's.

Another option would be to kill Community Server all together and slap up a semi-secured wiki (i.e. read-only for public, editable for email validated users). Much more free-form, but that also has it's uses.

Anyhow - let me know what you think the future of ArcDeveloper.net should be. If someone else wants to take over the site (and move it to their hosting account) I'd be up for that too.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007 8:06:38 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
I come here to learn things, not because I have a specific problem that I need a solution for. So for me, a blog that presents approaches to specific tasks that you run into on your day to day work is fine. But if I must choose from the 2 options above I like the 2nd better: Quick Hits. "Post a Recipe" for a situation or problem you solved. Or "Post a Challenge" for questions you have been wondering about the best way to solve.

Regards,
Duarte
Wednesday, August 15, 2007 8:20:42 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
I actually had my first geoblog on that site ("Talking Java GIS") don't suppose those exist any more? I overall loved the idea of it, but it never really seemed to build a community(for more on community see: www.gisdevcafe.com/2007/08/15/where-is-the-gis-community-does-anybody-care/

What I think would be great would be a format more similar to codeproject.com. I know we discussed this a little bit at last years developer summit, but it would be great to encourage articles from users as well as have forums. Also, I think the idea of a lounge, a place to just talk non gis development technical would be great. I don't have allot of time, but if that is the direction you decide I would love to help with that.

Aaron W. VanWieren
www.gisdevcafe.com
Wednesday, August 15, 2007 11:56:22 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
The question is: what are the ESRI and EDN pages good or not good for. They are definitely good for getting support and help through the EDN forum. But they are inadequate in terms of community building and sharing code and know how. The “Code Exchange” is pointless for developers who want to share sources or run open source projects. And the information you can find here is soly contributed by ESRI itself.

Thus, I think it would make sense, to have a place that acts as:
- Meeting place and reference of various projects based on ESRI software,
- Platform to publish articles from Mini-Howtos to In-Depth Features and Announcements

In short: something similar to what Eclipsezone.com is to the Eclipse community

Regards,
Alexander Karnstedt
http://mauszeig.wordpress.com
Monday, August 27, 2007 9:14:19 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
I think you need to advertise it more. I read your blog but I didn't even know it existed until this post. Or maybe I am blind that is a very good possibility. And yes a lounge is almost a must for a community to grow. Even though esri supports .net 2.0 now what about 3.0 and 3.5 vs2008 is in beta already. The other suggestions above are good also.

blizzardice
blizzardice
Sunday, September 02, 2007 2:41:29 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
I truly like your blog and the ArcDeveloper.net blogs.
I use this daily.

I think that blogging is the best thing that happened to ESRI.

we can't stop this now.

the more bloggers will come the easier it will be to use those component.

and about the API - this ain't trivial to use it bloggers can help with samples and tricks.

more about the traffic (probably: google-analytics) it think this one buggy.
I have mine analytics and google - and they show different details.
way differet about 23 in google and about 500 on mine (hits)

I hope you will continue the good job.

Shani.
Comments are closed.