22

Your crazy mad scientist of a Blog Editor is back and wants to keep this blog going:

Bru Ha Ha Ha!!!!

First off, I need to apologize. Like a terrible parent, I have abandoned my child. But no more! I have a little more time to work on this now and want to get things going. Thanks to those of you that have kept this going for while I've been gone.

So what can we do to start getting this back into motion?

Well let's try to get the word out that we're looking for bloggers again. Also remember that we have these resources to use:

  • Introduction: Explains the purpose of the blog, how to write and get your post finished.
  • Blog Editor Room: A place where you can bounce ideas and suggest things to blog about.
  • Meta!: You can make suggestions here. Just be sure to tag it with
  • We have a Trello Board!: If you're interested in blogging for us, we'll invite you to the board, and add your ideas there. If you're already apart of the blog, you should've been invited, and we'll use that for organizing all of our content.

What can I do?

  • Contact me, or get onto the chat and let us know what your ideas are
  • Comment on some of your favorite Questions or Answers on Super User and request the OP if they're interested in blogging for us. Or blog about them yourself!
  • Look at the Community FAQ's and see if there's something that interests you in blogging about.

Got any suggestions? Add them below as an answer.

1
  • 7
    blog.ressurections.attempts += 1; // LET'S DO THIS!
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Jul 8, 2012 at 14:10

7 Answers 7

Reset to default
11

I say we bring back our steady friend...

The Question of the Week

It was a great way to include the community and see some new and interesting questions. We can alternate the assignment of the QOTW to different bloggers each week, and they'd be in charge of selecting the question and blogging about it. That way, no one person is tied to the QOTW each week, and can explore other options when they come up.

3
  • I should get back into that. I can try to spearhead a QOTW rotation assignment sort of thing.
    – nhinkle Mod
    Commented Jul 8, 2012 at 23:20
  • I always enjoyed writing QoTW too :)
    – Simon Sheehan
    Commented Jul 9, 2012 at 21:34
  • 1
    QoTW FTW! QoTW always was a good opportunity for a nice post.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented Jul 9, 2012 at 21:42
6

PowerShell, in the sense of how to answer all of the questions that fit in the following categories:

  • List of music files with a certain bitrate/artist/album
  • Find all files meeting a non-trivial condition
  • Repeat some command for all files found above
  • Expand a bit on the Where clause of Get-ChildItem
  • Some very basic syntax
  • Explain how PowerShell is different from CMD, Bash, etc. (just on the object-oriented side).

Not that this should be a programming tutorial by any means, but just as a very short tutorial on how to get a lot done in a very simple way that would otherwise be hard.

3
  • 1
    you willing to put together a blog post for this?
    – James Mertz
    Commented Jul 9, 2012 at 17:05
  • Yes, it should take a few days maybe? Not really sure. Also, I have no idea what I have to do to actually get it on the blog.
    – soandos
    Commented Jul 9, 2012 at 17:30
  • head over to the chat room and send me a ping, and we can talk about next steps.
    – James Mertz
    Commented Jul 9, 2012 at 18:07
5

I used to really like the categories we had before. Perhaps it's time to revive a few?

  • Interviews

  • WTF Friday

  • Productive Thursdays.

It's been a long time, I think I wrote the last WTF Friday a LONG time ago... Anyone interested? I'm will to spearhead one of these, perhaps the Friday one.

4
  • I've been playing with some of the tiddlywiki alternatives, I might be able to put together a review for productive Thursday at some point...
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented Jul 9, 2012 at 22:30
  • The only problem that I see with continuing with what we did beforehand is the eventual burnout that all SE blogs have been experiencing. I like doing these different topics, but not every week.
    – James Mertz
    Commented Jul 9, 2012 at 22:31
  • 2
    It would be good to bring them back, but as you say we could make them slightly more sporadic in their schedule. I wouldn't see a big problem with a more random schedule.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented Jul 9, 2012 at 22:48
  • Please see my comment to Oliver, I would appreciate having a category day here and there but we might not want to lock us into these fixed slots too much and avoid giving the same kind of content every single week...
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Jul 11, 2012 at 14:20
5

Doing some performance tuning on a machine, things like:

  • Removing startup programs
  • Stopping services
  • Defragmenting (does this even really do anything anymore, even on Windows)
  • CCleaner and its ilk (not sure these ever did anything)
  • Finding the bottleneck during common task (is the slowest component the hard disk drive, RAM, processor, etc., so you can find out what to upgrade and not waste time and money)
  • Driver updates (when are they worth it, if ever)
  • Cleaning out old files (better yet, make a backup, store the old files elsewhere, then delete them, requires finding them, compressing, etc.)

And I am sure much more that I am forgetting. Could be done in a Windows setting, or OS agnostic (but that would be much harder and longer to do).

4

Further to Simon's answer I'm wondering if there are any other categories we would have... just some completely random ideas.

  • Manic Mondays? Similar to WTFriday...
  • Polls, would it be good to involve the greater community and solicit opinions on topics, either for future posts or general computing topics?
  • Tweakers Tuesday
  • Water cooled Wednesday, maybe an ongoing quest to build a water cooled rig...
1
  • Hmm, switching the category every few weeks (like with the Water cooled Wednesday [good idea in summer]) could work out as well as to not be too restricted to the same kind of content every week. See my comment to Oliver. Also bringing them back under a different name doesn't sound bad...
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Jul 11, 2012 at 14:19
3

Not to forget, there's quite a list of ideas on the Trello, free to grab:

  • The What, Why, and How of Userscripts
  • Application Launchers in OS X
  • AutoHotkey
  • Back-ups, better to be safe than sorry
  • Be done with advertisements / cookie hi-jackers / third-party services.
  • Before 1 April: Cover "How to mess up a PC" and delete that question from Super User.
  • Boot an OS from your Hard Disk using VirtualBox RAW access.
  • Cleaning your computer
  • Desktop / Window managers
  • Faster text entry
  • Get started with Ubuntu: Tips for new users
  • How does one create DVD menus?
  • How do I keep track of how much time I spend on my computer?
  • Overcoming Procrastination
  • Registry Back-ups / Indexing / Optimizing / Editing like a Super User.
  • SSD power consumption
  • Super User's Super Computer
  • System setup(hw+sw) for not tech savvy Parents
  • Tips to improve security of computer
  • What do I do after installing Tomato
  • Easiest way to find out whether a computer runs Vista or Windows 7?
  • Setting up a Wireless Bridge between routers using DD-WRT

There are also two unassigned draft to pick up:

  • Comparing multiple players
  • How to make great screen recordings
3
  • 3
    I think we can scratch the iMac 2011 review and the April 1st one :P
    – slhck
    Commented Jul 10, 2012 at 14:23
  • @slhck: Removed that one, but think it's never too early to prepare next year's April. :D
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Jul 10, 2012 at 14:27
  • Trying to open the board I get: "Board not found."
    – Peter Mortensen
    Commented Aug 2, 2014 at 20:55
3

I love Mark Russinovich's Case of the Unexplained series. It just fascinates me how people troubleshoot issues to find the actual underlying cause (and not just bang on it until it works).

These stories are never about the actual issue for me, but about the problem solving abilities of the person who troubleshot the issue. I always liked to believe that that is what separates the users from the superusers :)

Here is a recent escapade of mine which, I think, illustrates what I have in mind: https://serverfault.com/questions/403566/why-does-cacti-keep-waiting-for-dead-poller-processes

4
  • Same here, the whole Sysinternals Suite has changed my view on Windows, a jawdrop when you discover with Process Monitor that you can see what's actually going on... Priceless!
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Jul 11, 2012 at 0:12
  • I just realized this might fit well under the WTFriday category, doesn't it?
    – Oliver Salzburg
    Commented Jul 11, 2012 at 14:02
  • 2
    I don't really know, I used to house such stuff as Productive Thursday back in the days. But I think the notion of those kind of explicit category days are kind of dead, it's perhaps better to not limit ourselves to certain themes but rather have an "anything (on-topic) goes" approach. Or well, yeah, we could perhaps form one or two new ones like Mokubai's suggestion but have to make sure we don't limit the other days too much...
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Jul 11, 2012 at 14:15
  • @TomWijsman: I like that approach
    – Oliver Salzburg
    Commented Jul 11, 2012 at 14:16

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .