There’s blogging nowadays and everyone has to be writing stuff on the web all the time about what they have been doing. Sometimes even to the cost of not actually doing it properly.
Payments from a big site, advertising, visibility or pure ego satisfaction are the reasons behind the proliferation of not-very-good information.
I try not to blog about anything I am not an expert on, but many people seem to be desperate about writing a post and having it linked to newsfeeds aggregators, to the point that they don’t care if they are publishing, well, bullshit.
In the free sofware community, but probably everywhere, this new trend is somewhat harmful, because people browse the web looking to fix problems or to learn about and improve their open source OS and they need to find sound technical information.
I am not sure yet if skilled developers waste too much of their time blogging, instead of coding, even if this thought crosses my mind sometimes when reading Planet Gnome. What I am sure about is that there is a whole bunch of newbies out there writing poor howtos, pretending to save the day of a fellow GNU/Linux user, but not teaching him any real knowledge.
I want to share a couple of examples of this behaviour I have seen in the last days. I won’t link them though, just copy the URL in a new tab (ctrl-c, ctrl-t, ctrl-v, enter):
- http://www.unixmen.com/linux-tutorials/567-internet-connexion-is-very-slow-on-karmic-koala-solution-#JOSC_TOP
This guy is for sensationalist titles. The real solution to karmic being slow on the web is actually changing the dns servers to opendns. Mmmh… Funny that doing that could to some degree effectively slow browsing down or break connectivity if one takes a laptop to another network, which restricts outgoing traffic. By the way the real problem was about ipv6, something that can be fixed once and for all at the network level or by disabling ipv6 altogether.
The next story is funnier, but involves two blog posts:
- http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Productivity-Sauce-Dmitri-s-open-source-blend-of-productive-computing/Ubuntu-9.10-on-SSD
And just one day after:
- http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Productivity-Sauce-Dmitri-s-open-source-blend-of-productive-computing/Three-Simple-Tweaks-for-Better-SSD-Performance
I hope my comments as “Andrea R” are still there.
The story for the first article is “I bought a SSD and Ubuntu is faster on it”. Good for you. Now, on Linux you can really alter the system to take advantage of a peculiar device, so I suggested three things to try: disabling the readahead service, any re-ordering IO scheduler and try some filesystem that has optimizations for flash memory, in a one-line comment.
The day after the guy has a whole new post about optimizations for a SSD. Hilarious. Also, since the filesystem suggestion required too much effort, he puts in the evergreen noatime mount option instead. That’s less than 24 hours of condensed experience for the world!
Clearly the tweakings suggested are done in the worst possible way and upgrades will undo them.
Surely there is a lot of this kind of blogging and the magic word seems to be “Ubuntu“, possibly the latest release. So, fellow user, here is a suggestion for you: don’t just copy stuff you don’t understand on the terminal, get some real insight of a Linux based system works. Then you will be able to recognize and avoid this kind of poor information. Maybe run Arch or Gentoo for a year: the level of documentation, howtos and even forums are really high.
Oh and until you’ve done that please refrain from teaching others how they should configure their systems.
Well, I hope this was worth reading. I’ll be back when I have some time to publish a cool script for a vpn on top of ssh with some cool features, which took me a lot more than one day to write and test. 
on November 26th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Great post.. Andrea. I quote on everything.
on November 27th, 2009 at 3:20 am
“not-very-good information”, “much of their time on blogging, instead that coding”, “This guy is for sensationalist titles.”, “get some real insight of a Linux based system works”, “Well, I hope this was worth reading.”
It was indeed worth reading. The grammatical errors alone kept me laughing for hours. Perhaps you should go back and take another course in modern English before degrading the work of others.
on November 27th, 2009 at 3:31 am
I couldn’t agree more. I’m sick of reading howto’s that fail to explain anything and are just a set of instructions. Ever tried setting up Samba with LDAP without any prior knowledge? 99% of guides out there fail to explain how they integrate with each other and just tell you to “unzip the schema here”, or “change this config file like this”.
I laughed at the guy telling people to change their DNS servers to OpenDNS if their internet is slow, without any troubleshooting at all.
on November 27th, 2009 at 11:25 am
hehehe. great post. keep up the good work.
on November 27th, 2009 at 11:47 am
amen
on November 27th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
As a person who blogs on the topic of Ubuntu, you may consider me one of the problem people. Not surprisingly, I disagree with you on your premise shared here.
I find it interesting that you read these posts that you believe are hogwash, comment on them, and then blog about your annoyance at the level of expertise that the blogger had rather than providing a post that shares your particular expertise. Heck, once you’ve posted your more in-depth, thorough information, thank the person that you are annoyed with in a comment and link to your article saying that you’ve posted about some performance tweaks that can further improve performance. Doing that would be helpful. Doing what you’ve done doesn’t help anyone and could actually prevent some people who have valuable information from sharing it.
As a web developer, I could complain about how you posted links in your content without actually making them into clickable links which requires the reader to copy the link and manually paste it. As a WordPress developer, I could complain about how your links at the bottom of your theme have the confusing “Next Page” / “Previous Page” rather than the more understandable “Older Posts” / “New Posts” links. Furthermore, I could complain about your ugly permalinks that have “index.php” included unnecessarily and then write a post on my personal blog calling you a hopeless moron when it comes to using a WordPress site.
Doing these things wouldn’t help anyone though. It wouldn’t help me and it certainly wouldn’t help you. Although I may consider myself correct and righteous in such claims, you still haven’t done anything to hurt anyone, so what would be the point? Furthermore, it would just make me a jerk as you could have very good reasons for doing things the way you do them.
I’m looking through your older posts and I find that you really only have one post within the past year that has anything to do with helping people with problems in Linux. I have no doubt that you comment heavily on Linux topics and probably participate in forums, but I have a feeling that it if weren’t for the people creating posts that you dislike, you would never share your technical expertise since it would most-likely not be posted here. So, maybe the posts that you dislike so much are more valuable than you consider them to be since they help pull out better information from those that have such knowledge and don’t otherwise share it.
on November 27th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Yep this was worth reading! I see a lot of blogs with Ubuntu slapped in the title with the most inane advice. I only blog about useful fixes that i have found out and used on my PCs, and I review the latest versions of software/distros when they come out, and my seamingly neverending quest to find the best music player for Linux (needs to work with mp3 players, needs last.fm, be gapless, and not slow my comp to treacle!)
on November 27th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
What is wrong with the noatime mount option? I use it on nearly all of my desktops and a few servers, as the alternative is logging every file system (which negatively affects the disk). No?
on November 27th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
I meant, the alternative is logging every file system action.
on November 28th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
@lefty.crupps: noatime is always fine. It speeds up every setup.
@Janice Mathews: I know I make mistakes. I fixed one of them and I don’t really know how to fix the others. Usually I ask someone to review any long post I write, but this time he was unavailable. My english is constantly improving and I have studied it since I was 8. How many languages do you speak this well?
@Chris Jean: Thanks for the long comment.
This is and old wordpress installation. The theme is based on green marinee. I could not care less about having more beautiful urls or better usability, it’s just a personal blog that gets very little traffic and it’s pretty enough.
I did not make those url clickable because I don’t think those pages deserve any more google rank.
I help linux users all the time and mantain many linux installations. I am a paying FSF member. I taught a few lessons for a free course. I made a customized Ubuntu iso a while back. I use Linux 100% of the time since 2004. I wrote some little howtos as well. I wrote an init script for iptables. I post bugs. A couple of times I found a solution for a bug. I am doing my part.
I firmly believe that you have to learn the basic stuff even before reading that kind of howtos.
I am not trying to degrade the work of anyone. I just get the feeling that many blog post are not made in the spirit of helping people, but actually to get traffic.
Those people know what they are doing. If you blog about ubuntu and you do it to help, it’s fine. If you do it for money (in the end) then the article has to be good or it’s just a waste of people’s time. Also I found funny what happened and though someone could laugh reading about it.
on November 30th, 2009 at 10:31 am
I am posting a comment to get some visitors to my blog… honestly
I don’t know how to disable ipv6 and I will have to go search for the same old “dumb” (forgive that word) blogs for how to do it… anyways my connection is fast enough… yet I will try…
_ATOzTOA
don’t go to my blog (i am stupid)
on December 1st, 2009 at 1:15 am
You’ve made some interesting points here Andrea. If the purpose of someone’s blog entry is to get attention and be picked up by search aggregators etc, then they don’t really contribute to anything.
But if you take a step back and ask what motivates them to blog at all, you begin to get sympathetic. What is the point in making a nice, helpful blog if nobody knows you exist? So if they put a couple of newbie questions in there with some semi-useful tips, to get noteriety, maybe thy can get to the nuts-and-bolts of helping people with some Q&A stuff?
The wonderful thing about Linux (all distros) is that there are so many people out there willing to help people out. My biggest fear about Linux is that one day it’ll be so popular that people no longer want to help the newcomers out.
I’ll take the signal-to-noise ratio of useful/useless blogs over the derision and ridicule you get sometimes in newbie forums of Microsoft forums.
But is bad help better than no help? I don’t know the answer to that. Frankly, there was no bad help (or blogs) when I was a newbie.
And to Janice or anyone else who can’t see the (valid) point Andrea is making without picking on grammar: let’s see you do a blog in flawless Italian before you start throwing stones. I can understand what Andrea is saying just fine.
on December 6th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Hmmm…
I hardly read blogs, and haven’t even thought about starting one, since I’m a minimalinguist.
Maybe I should. If all goes well, I could get paid to troll.
on December 11th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
I agree that there is a significant amount of poorly documented topics out there these days. I think the problem is twofold.
1. Outdated suggestions at the speed of new releases and bug fixes. This is probably the more serious, simply because suggestions that “fix” issues or alter behaviors found in one release, may have been addressed in later releases. Implementing the suggested “fix leaves many users frustrated because ultimately, they either break their systems or go nowhere, fast.
2. Completely uneducated answers, copied and rehashed as fact. This is what irritates me most, and is commonly found in many of the “articles”, if you will. I find it most especially in network and security related topics, where there always seems to be much inexperience. Your example link was a funny and perfect example of the “stab in the dark” approach to fixing “all Ubuntu network” issues.
The first, I must admit, is a challenging one to address. I think it’s important that information about fixing problems (and lots of it) is important, but people that contribute should specify clearly that suggestions pertain to particular versions of software. But then of course, this won’t matter if the consumer of the article doesn’t know enough to care about that. I prefer that people just continue contributing as is.
The second, well… there’s just no way around it. While I applaud the good intentions of most people that fall into this category, it’s a bummer that in many cases, they end up doing a disservice to the community. However, as long as the more experienced folks constructively comment, correct or help refine the more popular posts… things work out for the best.
Thanks for your interesting perspective. I always appreciate a modest rant, and found yours valid and still fairly respectful of the gentlemen who wrote the content.