Anyone’s welcome to request publishing rights here – just email webmaster@ with your site username (what you use to log in with) and give us a few days to set you up. If you don’t hear back, email admin@ and we’ll get you sorted within a couple of days. Sometimes, we just get bogged down in our real jobs and can’t pay attention to the PowerShell.org emails as much as we’d like.
Can I Repost Stuff I’ve Blogged Elsewhere?
Your content is your content. It’s not for us to say what you do with it. It’s a bit of a PITA for us to take stuff down, so we just ask that you’re sure about whatever you do post. Know that Google can sometimes get SEO-penalizing when it finds “commodity content,” meaning stuff that shows up in a lot of places, but that’s something you can decide if you care about or not.
I Don’t Have Anything Useful to Blog About!
Respectfully, bullshit. You’re saying that because maybe you don’t have any topics that you would go looking for online, or that you would find deeply intriguing. Helping other people, though, is about them, not you. Look around – scan the Forums for topic ideas. What are other people struggling with? You’ve absolutely conquered something, at some time, that will help someone else, whether you believe it or not. Take Don Jones – everyone knows him in the PowerShellVerse, right? He doesn’t write about “hard stuff.” He writes about entry-level stuff. “Easy” stuff. He says it’s what he likes, and there’s always someone new in the world, so there’s always an audience. He’s not trying to impress anyone. He’s not creating brand-new information or amazing, “hardcore” new techniques. He’s just explaining what already exists. So change your attitude about what’s “useful.”
I’m not Worthy!
Again, bullshit. Sure, other people know more than you do. Fine. But you’re (presumably) an adult human being, and you also know more than some other people. Look around you to see what other people need, and focus on them. And here’s another idea: it’s a big world, full of many different languages and customs. Maybe you’ve struggled to digest what others have written in, say, English. You’ve translated it in your head into something that makes sense to you and your culture. Why not rewrite it for others who share your language and culture? We’re not saying make direct translations of other people’s stuff (it’s fine if you do, and if you have their permission). Instead, rewrite it. Take whatever it was you read, digest it in your own mind, and produce something that achieves the same end goals for your culture. And yes, you’re welcome to blog on PowerShell.org in whatever language you like. English readers can either use Google Translate like you’ve probably had to do, or they can learn your language like you’ve learned theirs, or they can just read something else.
Everyone’s Already Blogged About Everything!
The world is not that small. And honestly, blogs aren’t the easiest thing to find and consume, so it’s absolutely fine to write about something that’s been written about before. Heck, look at news websites and you’ll see plenty of people writing about the same thing. Why? Because each site has a different perspective. A different way of explaining something. What’s been done before might not be helpful to every single human being, and so different angles, different analogies, and different examples are always useful. And sometimes, it’s just a matter of the content existing where the audience is looking for it, which is why PowerShell.org can be so powerful (we get ~85k visitors a month, these days). And has everything really been written? Sure, books like Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches go into stuff like comparison operators, but do they really go into them? No. Sometimes, existing material presents a specific take on a subject for a specific audience; what’s the rest of the story? And trust us: there’s no such thing as a topic that’s been “beaten to death.” You might think you’ve read it a thousand times, but someone else is still looking for it, we guarantee.
It Takes So Long to Make it Perfect!
Stop trying. The world isn’t a perfect place and you’re not writing for Encyclopedia Brittanica. Start with a problem you set out to solve. And then just document the ugly process you went through. What did you try? What didn’t work? Why? What did you try next? You see, teaching isn’t about preventing a learner from seeing the mistakes. It’s about showing them the mistakes, so they don’t have to experience them on their own. The process is usually far more important that the outcome. So just write about solving, and not about solutions.
I Don’t Have the Time to Blog Regularly
Whatever. We don’t have the time to vacation regularly, but we still do it now and then. You’re not signing up to be a correspondent for the AP. Sure, maybe your heroes online blog every week or every day, but that shouldn’t stop you from helping out where you can. And don’t think about a blog post as a 5,000-word opus; write something short. 500 words (that’s less than a full page in Word) can not only be helpful, they’re easier for someone else to read and consume than an entire book. Blogs help “in the moment” learning needs, so the more concise and to the point they are, the better, actually.
I Have Terrible Grammar/Spelling
Meh. If you can get the point across, that’s all language is really supposed to do. You’ll find that the more you write, the better you get at it.
I Have Too Many Ideas! I Don’t Know Where to Start!
Good grief, what a terrible problem to have :). Pick one. And maybe start a list of ideas somewhere public that other people can use for inspiration, since you’re so full of ideas!
