SQLServerPedia

We’re up to 13 syndicated bloggers (I’ll add another announcement in a day or two about the latest) and a few questions have come up.  Here’s some answers:

Can I syndicate my blog if I’m blogging at a group blog site?

We’d love to, but so far, all of the group blog sites have said no.  They want exclusive rights to their bloggers’ content, and they’re not allowing bloggers to syndicate their content anywhere else.

This comes back to a point that I hammer home in my How to Get Started Blogging series - you really want to own your own blog content and your own brand.

Can I syndicate a non-English blog?

Not yet, but we’re looking at solutions for that.  We’d like to end up with different RSS feeds for each language, and users could pick which language they’d like to subscribe to.  It’s not too technically difficult, but it’s just a matter of resources.  I don’t want to do it until we’ve got a really good user experience.

Looking down the road, I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up with separate RSS feeds by technology, too, like the SQL Server engine, SSRS, SSIS, SSAS, etc.  The RSS feeds are already getting pretty big.

Can I write about things other than SQL Server?

If you want to write about things that are fairly close to SQL Server, yes.  For example, if you’d like to write about querying with Crystal Reports, database development with Data Dude, or data mining with Excel, then it’s a topic that our audience will probably find interesting.

If you want to write exclusively about Oracle or MySQL, it’s probably not a good fit, but articles every now and then are good.  Jason Massie’s MySQL Cheat Sheet for SQL Server DBAs is a good example - it’s technically about MySQL, but it’s interesting for SQL Server DBAs.

We’ve been approached by a few people who want to start up syndication sites for other types of technology, and I’m more than willing to tell you everything I know about getting started, but I’d rather not be the one hosting it.  There’s a fair bit of management involved.  (I think I’ve done maybe ten hours of real SQL Server work in the last two weeks - the rest has been PHP, MySQL and emailing!)

Do the blog posts link back to each blogger’s home site?

Not yet, but that’s a top priority.  We’re trying to bring on PHP/MySQL help to enhance the aggregation process.  Ideally, I’d like to have every blog entry have a link that points back to the blogger’s site that says something like, “Read More Articles by Tim Ford.” I’d also like the author’s name to hyperlink back to their blog.

The blog aggregation plugin we’re using, FeedWordPress, has the ability to set the blog permalink to the blogger’s original home site.  the problem with that is the bloggers will only get search engine exposure while the post remains on the first couple of pages of SQLServerPedia, which at this point is only a couple of days.  The longer your stuff is on SQLServerPedia, the more exposure you get to web searches, and believe me, it’s huge.  We’ve got posts from a year or older that get hundreds of hits per day from Google, and if you looked at the post, you’d never believe it.

Can I link to other web sites?

Absolutely.  In a perfect world, everything you would need would be at SQLServerPedia.com.  In this perfect world, I would also be driving a Porsche 911 Targa, and Chipotle burritos would make me lose weight.  We’re not quite there yet, so when you find something really useful on another site, you should tell other DBAs about it.

However, please don’t write one-sentence articles that say things like, “Wow, this post was really cool - go check it out!”  Try to add value to the post.  Tell a story about why it’s useful to DBAs, your experiences with the T-SQL code provided, or the pros and cons of different solutions.

If you just want to share links, I’d suggest doing a weekly link post on Friday like this.  I don’t syndicate my weekly link posts on SQLServerPedia, but other bloggers are welcome to.  Come to think of it, that’s a great lead-in for the next question:

Are you just trying to rip off blogger content?

Absolutely not, and the very thought makes me pretty pissed off.  Let me lay out the evidence:

1. I preach loudly that you need to own your own blog.  Other syndication sites won’t even let you copy your content somewhere else, as some of my readers have found out the hard way.
2. We don’t put ads on the blog posts or in the RSS feeds. We could - but we don’t, and we’re really hard-core about this.  We have the technology to do that right now with just the flip of a switch, but we won’t do it.  (Yes, it says “Powered by Quest” at the top of the page, but I’d hardly call that an ad - you can’t even click on it.)
3. I heartily encourage syndicated bloggers to link back to their own site. I do it all the time - in fact, on every single syndicated blog entry I do, I post at least one link back to an article on my own site.  (I’ve done it twice above in this one blog post alone.)
4. Bloggers don’t have to syndicate every article on SQLServerPedia - they can pick and choose what they’d like to syndicate.  I’m writing a “how-to-blog-for-syndication” series that will cover how to do this in a way that will bring the most visitors to your blog.  I’ll talk about what kinds of entries you should write for syndication, which ones you should keep on your own blog, and how to join them together in a way where everybody wins.
5. I spend my own personal time advising bloggers how to write better articles. I’m the biggest personal-brand cheerleader I know.  Whenever a blogger has approached me with a question about how to reach more people, how to write a better article, or what kinds of information people are interested in, I’ve invested my own blood, sweat and tears to help make them better. I thoroughly enjoy helping people, not fleecing people.
6. The evidence is right there on the home page. Check out the SQLServerPedia home page where I link to each of the syndicated bloggers.  The link doesn’t go to their blog feed on SQLServerPedia - it goes to their personal blog.  I’ve done the exact same thing with every single announcement I’ve put out about new bloggers, too - I link to their site, not ours.
7. We’re spending our own money to make the syndication process even better. We’re in talks to bring a full time PHP/MySQL programmer on staff to make it even smoother, like putting an automatic link in every syndicated post back to the blogger’s original post.  If we can figure out how to have a single set of comments appear in both places, we’ll do that too.

That’s way more than I should probably devote to a topic like that, but I want to make it abundantly clear that we’re in this for the community, and we’re in this for the long term.  I’m the guy who tells you to run your blog under your own personal name because you want to build up your online reputation.  I only have one reputation, and I won’t screw it up by shafting bloggers.

Everything I’ve got so far personally, I didn’t gain by taking from others - I gained it by giving to others.  I’m not rich, but I sleep great at night.