Dear Gunnar, Thank you for your fine words. The same goes for everybody else as well. This is going to be a bit long-winded so please excuse.
I learnt English in school and there the teacher used to tell us, in fact force us to write essays. The essays would be typically 1000-1500 words on topics like 'my holidays' , 'my pet' etc. These had to be at the most in two or three paragraphs, for some reason she dis-liked small paragraphs. Rightly or wrongly, that is what I learnt . In college we didn't have the need except for a letter or two excusing me for a day for something at home or the other. When working in and with companies the idea was given/planted that all work/intellectual property is there's so you can't talk anything about the work you do, so apart from short note here and there there wasn't much need of documentation. Cut to 2003/4 and blogging was the in-thing in those days. I don't remember the name, but there was a blogging service during that time, very popular, but with the downside (to people in the know) that you couldn't import or export the content. To be part of this new charismatic group called 'bloggers' and 'agents of the fourth estate' , 'crusaders of democracy' and whatever terms of endearment that were being used to people feel like rockstars. While some people made lots of money, others were content with being able to post their ideas without censoring themselves. I hadn't know about Google's 'blogger' till that point. So re-using what I had learnt in school, I applied that and it was ok for everybody else. Then in end 2007 or early 2008 that service for some reason or the other was stopped. And because that content could be imported or exported the content was lost. So searching a new home for my musings, one of the pre-conditions this time around was that content could be imported or exported and luckily blogger was the only service at that point which was free and had this service. https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/open-hardware/ - My first blog post. Blogger became my home and for the next 3-4 years after which I started finding it limiting and realizing it's not free software . Then cut to 2011 and I chaged to wordpress.com and I still continued in my old style of writing. Over the years, there have been few and far instances where people offered or asked me to write and I observed that they would put a photograph or picture or two in the blog post. I still didn't think much of that. Around the same time, I had started covering foss events around the city, the country wherever I was invited to and I started to quickly ran out of web-space for photos. I used flickr and photobucket and quickly ran out of the space allocated to free users. But as these were just random musings and online web-shops quickly become expensive the only thing was left to use community-oriented offerings such as the gallery offerings offered by fosscommunity.in . The gallery service worked great until one time it broke and all the content wiped clean. IIRC, there was lot of spam. Cut to 2016 and after South Africa trip, I had promised myself as well as others on the debconf-discuss that I will share some of the highlights of the trip. I found photos really capture the moment and once you start describing a certain photo you relive the moment all over again. For this purposes, I did get access to debconf gallery page but its usage is only for debconf images. https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/page/3/ - Debconf 16 musings Then cut to 2017 and I started to devote some time to write about Debian . https://itsfoss.com/author/shirish/ One of the first lessons I was taught the importance of having both pictures and short paragraphs. I was told and agree that having photographs are like a break in the clouds. I was told to also make smaller paragraphs and both the pieces of advise helped me quite a bit to mature a bit as a writer. Now as far as me writing technical content about Debian on p.d.o. is concerned, that's a laugh. I do not think that there is anything I write technically which will be news either to Debian or/and DD's. In fact, if people looked at the itsfoss.com articles they will find most are beginner-friendly articles. Somebody shared that ranting about Debian is fine. I disagree with that. Two pet peeves, debian-installer is ugly and needs lot of work (in design) and would be nice if wiki.debian.org got mediawiki instead of the current solution. Now while writing blog posts on both these topics are easy, the rants will remain as they are. It would be useful and relevant ONLY if I were to do something about it. As shared in Debconf, it's a do-ocracy which is important rather than rants and raves . Neither of the two have any easy fixes and would need both expertise and probably hundreds of hours sinking in to have something worthwhile. I neither have the expertise in either nor do have the amount of time required so such posts wouldn't be useful. Even getting debdelta into apt/aptitude is still-born apparently because ftp masters don't like something in debdelta. The only contribution the last couple of weeks I have done is #859473 , #858599 and #858561 . Unfortunately, none of them went anywhere. I had filed few bugs about gtk+3.0 vis-a-vis mate , most of which are fixed by upstream in mate 1.18 so unless Mike backports any patches from 1.18 to 1.16 don't see anything happening therein. https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja/issues/687 https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/500 https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-screensaver/issues/95 There is this though #785739 and #767120 but both need upstream work. I'm not particularly worried whether my blog gets back into p.d.o. for I will not stop blogging in either case. I do however take the points of using <---more--> and seeing if there is a way in wordpress.com to cover photographs/secret similar to how cheat-codes or certain procedures in the game are kept secret in a forum and only if the user selects to view the content, the content is shown. Having said that, I know now its not alright to have anything even remotedly talk about sex at p.d.o. at all. Part of the reason of writing the blog-post is the way prostitutes are looked upon and treated in my society on the side-lines of untouchables, and prostitution like many places around the world, is termed illegal. I do know that there are some 'progressive' European nations where prostitution is not illegal but as somebody shared that my posts are excessively personal, I guess they will come on my blog but not on p.d.o. I do find it both fascinating and confusing that people have varied view-points. I know that is the reason why Debian remains strong. My $0.02 . -- Regards, Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com EB80 462B 08E1 A0DE A73A 2C2F 9F3D C7A4 E1C4 D2D8
