Should we start a blog?

Question

7 years ago, we asked about having a site blog. The idea sort of just stopped and was never followed through. Unfortunately, since then, BlogOverflow (the site supposed to host site blogs) has been shutdown.

I brought up the blog in chat, and it was suggested by a couple of users that we give it another shot, potentially on Meta. This spawned a conversation about the practicalities and possibilities of starting and hosting a site blog.

However, going by the guidelines laid out in the BlogOverflow announcement post, a site blog needs to have clear support and involvement, as well as a clearly defined scope and purpose. Without these, it's highly likely that it'll fail fairly quickly.

So, this is an interest check: Should we consider starting a site blog? If so, how should it be hosted?

Answer 1

Yes, hosted as multiple Meta questions

Rather than each blog post being an answer to a single question as caird coinheringaahing suggested, we could create a new question for each blog post. This has a few advantages over a single question:

• You can sort the posts by newest, rather than active/oldest/votes being your only options
• The blog post visible in the sidebar (in featured or hot) will change, rather than users only seeing the one question, so it's easier to know when a new one's been posted

Reasons for making the posts answers included reducing clutter, but in my opinion having them tagged as blog would allow them to be seen and sorted easier, and the added number of questions wouldn't be enough to push other questions off of the active page or anything like that.

The first and third downsides in caird's suggestion apply to this suggestion too, but I don't think they're nearly significant enough (for either suggestion) to outweigh the benefits.

Answer 2

Yes, hosted as a Meta question

This is the opinion I posted about in chat. Essentially, we create a single question to "host" the blog. Each week (or however regularly we choose), a specific user posts an answer containing that week's blog post. This would create less clutter on Meta than posting a new question for each blog post, and would make the posts easier to follow (sorting by oldest and/or active, or accepting the latest post). Additionally, hosting it here would drive more traffic to the blog, rather than hosting on some external site.

A couple of potential downsides:

• This would be (yet another) abuse of the SE system to set up something for the community. Therefore, it's not unlikely that we'd experience some unusual behaviour on SE's side of the equation (similar to the Sandbox, but at less of a scale). Hosting it on a dedicated blog site would provide software that's a better fit
• The default SE sort (sort by votes) could (and probably would) jumble the posts out of order
• We might just run out of things to talk about. We're a pretty broad community compared to most on SE, but we might not have as much to talk about as other sites. The scope definition from the last attempt had a few ideas, but a major objection was the lack of topics to talk about.

Answer 3

Yes, hosted externally with a chat room to coordinate posts

The StackExchange platform doesn't really lend itself well to formats that aren't Q&A (we know that very well), so why struggle within this environment when we could use a dedicated blogging platform?

Candidates include (by no means is this a exhaustive list):

• WordPress
• Tumblr
• Weebly
• Medium
• A github repo (posts would be markdown files)
• Blogger
• A custom site created by us and hosted by us

Downsides

• This wouldn't be a part of our community here - unfortunately, history has shown that branching off from the main stack exchange tends to lead to that thing "fizzling out"
• Also, it wouldn't be as accessible to new users who might not know the link
• Unlike card's suggestion to have potential posts here, an external site means that people can't choose what they want featured
• And obviously, there's the fact that we might very well run out of things to talk about.

Answer 4

Yes, hosted in main site with questions having a special tag

This is somehow like Redwolf's suggestion

We will create a tag named blog in main site and we can write the blog in a self Q&A style.

Like a blog post on creating esolangs with python:

Title: How to create an esolang in Python?

Question: (Write like an asker, don't include a lot of things there)

Answer: (Broadly talk and describe on the topic)

Main site is better than meta, because meta is about to talk on Stack exchange site features, and main site is directly on-topic (In my humble opinion)