If you’re a Coding4Fun reader, please respond!
Earlier this week, I asked our Coding4Fun authors what they thought about moving Coding4Fun to being fully blog-based a la Engadget, Make, etc.
Many Coding4Fun readers don’t know this, but Coding4Fun actually uses http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/ as its back-end blog engine and the MSDN presence at http:///msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/ is really a “skin” if you will of that engine. Rather than having two sites, we’re considering on moving solely to http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun with our msdn site still existing but it would just redirect to the blog.
Why do this?
Advantages of moving to primarily a blog option * Built-in C4F only search so you can actually find articles * No formatting weirdness between sites where code looks good on the blog, but crappy on the MSDN site * No more disappearing articles where old articles can’t be found because they are no longer visible through the RSS feed * Deeper categorization/tags – we can provide a much more thorough list of tags than we do today * Built-in comments so you can share your thoughts on articles * Easier to find in search engines * Less work for authors to publish * Version resilience – MSDN is moving to an new infrastructure that would tie up our dev resources * We would still have article redirection in place for previously published articles that would point to the blog * Printer-friendly articles, assuming we stick to some high-level authoring guidelines
Disadvantages of moving to primarily a blog option * Less control over the UI Frame – It may not be as “sexy” a UI, although we’ll likely be able to get a custom blog skin * Article URLs would be on http://blogs.msdn.com instead of http://msdn.microsoft.com
Let me know what you think!