Internet Communities Are Selfish. Deal with it!

The Community?

I was reading Heli‘s blog post called The Oracle Community this morning, which directed me to posts by Jari Laine and Denes Kubicek. I think everyone that is involved in any type of community hits this issue at some point. For internet communities, it’s probably a much quicker realisation.

Very early on in my internet participation I read about things like the 1% rule and the 90:9:1 rules. I like to think I can make a difference and encourage more people to get involved, but the reality is, that’s not going to happen.

The latest example of this is the Oracle Developer Choice Awards. There are some great people nominated, some of which you might not have heard of, but all worthy of nomination! In fact, being nominated is fantastic in itself, regardless of who wins. So with a well publicised vote and some great people to vote for, you just know there will be a massive number of votes right? Wrong! The number of votes is pitiful. This can only be because people can’t be bothered to vote. Like I said, it’s not for lack of advertising!

I had my own little epiphany last year before OpenWorld 2014. 🙂

Examine Your Motives

It’s kind of easy to rewrite history. I’ve been pushing out content for over 15 years. I’ve been involved in the Oracle ACE Program for over 9 years. So I’m all about community right? Not really. If I’m brutally honest, I do all of this shit for me! I like to do it. I find it fun. It’s part of my learning process. If nobody read my stuff I would still do it. I was doing it for years before I was even aware of a community.

Having said that, once I became part of the community, great things started to happen, so I am extremely grateful and I would recommend getting involved to everyone, but it would be wrong for me to make out I’m some sort of altruistic saint of the internet. I’m as selfish as all those folks that read everyone else’s content and can’t be bothered to vote for them!

Do It Because You Love It!

So this all comes back to the message I keep pushing. Do it because you love it!

Doing it for the money? I don’t think so! There are certainly easier ways to earn money, and much more of it. 🙂

Doing it to “get famous”? Famous with whom? Other speakers? 🙂 I walk around conferences and nobody knows who the hell I am until I get on stage and show a picture of my website. 🙂 My hit rate in a single day is more than many “famous” blogs have had in their entire lifetime, yet the vast majority of the people reading my content haven’t got a clue who I am. 🙂

If you write good content, people will find you eventually, but many of them will be selfish arseholes, just like me!

Conclusion

I push community really hard these days. I think it is a very positive thing for the individuals involved and the people who get to experience their content, but you will only stick with this stuff if you enjoy it. Forcing yourself to be involved when you hate it is not going to work out.

You’ve also got to manage your expectations a bit. When I started my YouTube channel I kind-of expected to be inundated with people wanting to be in a cameo at the start of the videos. In reality, getting people to send you a 2 second video of them saying “dot com” is like trying to pull teeth! 🙂 Yet another example of my unrealistic expectations. 🙂

If you are one of the nominees in the Oracle Developer Choice Awards, well done for a great achievement, but the result doesn’t matter and the number of votes is not a measure of your worth. You contributions and how you feel about them personally is all that matters!

I hope this doesn’t sound too damning. It’s not meant to be. It’s just a reality check. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. This is not a post where I am fishing for complements. I’ve not got time to read them anyway. I am too busy watching videos of kittens on YouTube and refusing click the “Like” link against them… 🙂

Site Maintenance (20th Sept 2015 22:00 GMT)

DiagnosticsJust a quick heads-up about some work going on tomorrow on the website.

My hosting provider has decided my server needs to be put into a new rack, so somewhere after 22:00 GMT tomorrow (20th Sept 2015) the server will be switched off, moved to a new rack and switched on. They say the process should be complete within 4 hours. I’m hoping this is a massive overestimate. 🙂

If you are trying to use the site around that time and it’s not there, DON’T PANIC! I’ll be doing plenty of that for both of us. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

WordPress 4.3.1

WordPress 4.3.1 has been released. Downloads and changelogs in the usual places.

Hopefully, by the time you read this your site will have automatically been upgraded and you’ll have nothing to do, except maybe update a few plugins. 🙂

I’ve noticed the navigation from the previous release would sometimes go a little “squiffy” in Chrome. Hopefully that will be sorted now. Of course, if it was a Chrome thing, maybe not. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Fedora 22/23 and Oracle 11gR2/12cR1

linux-tuxAs always, installations of Oracle server products on Fedora are not a great idea, as explained here.

I was reading some stuff about the Fedora 23 Alpha and realised Fedora 22 had passed me by. Not sure how I missed that. 🙂

Anyway, I did a run through of the usual play stuff.

While I was at it, I thought I would get the heads-up on Fedora 23 Alpha.

The F23 stuff will have to be revised once the final version is out, but I’m less likely to forget now. 🙂

I guess the only change in F22 upward that really affects me is the deprecation of YUM in F22 in favour of the DNF fork. For the most part, you just switch the command.

#This:
yum install my-package -y
yum groupinstall my-package-group -y
yum update -y

#Becomes:
dnf install my-package -y
dnf groupinstall  my-package-group -y
dnf group install  my-package-group -y
dnf update -y

This did cause one really annoying problem in F23 though. The “MATE Desktop” had a single documentation package that was causing a problem. Usually I would use the following.

yum groupinstall "MATE Desktop" -y --skip-broken

Unfortunately, DNF doesn’t support “–skip-broken”, so I was left to either manually install the pieces, or give up. I chose the latter and use LXDE instead. 🙂 F23 is an Alpha, so you expect issues, but DNF has been in since F22 and still no “–skip-broken”, which I find myself using a lot. Pity.

Cheers

Tim…

Windows 10 Again

DiagnosticsI wrote a few months ago about having a play with Windows 10 (here).

I’m visiting family today, catching up on all the Windows desktop (and mobile phone) support that I missed while I was away.

I purposely postponed the Windows 10 update on the desktops before I went away, but now I’m back I did the first of them.

The update itself was fine, but it did take a long time. Nothing really to write home about.

I’ve installed the latest version of Classic Shell on the machine, so the experience is similar to what they had before, Windows 8.1 and Classic Shell, which felt like Windows 7. 🙂

I’ve also switched out their shortcuts from Edge (Spartan) to Internet Explorer 11. They already use a combination of IE, Firefox and Chrome, so I didn’t want to add another thing into the mix. Also, the nephews use the Java plugin for some web-based games, so it is easier to leave them with IE for the time being. Maybe I will introduce Edge later…

So all in all, the user experience is pretty much unchanged compared to what they had before. I guess I will see how many calls Captain Support gets over the coming weeks! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

WordPress 4.3 “Billie”

WordPress 4.3 “Billie” has arrived.

I was on my blog admin pages doing something else and I noticed the update was available before the auto-updater kicked in and updated the site automatically, so I gave it a nudge and now I’m upgraded.

Like most of the recent WordPress updates, there is little new that interests me, but it’s always a good idea to be up to date, so whatever… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…