Should Coding4Fun be available through a blog only?
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 https://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/ as its back-end blog engine and the MSDN presence at https:///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 https://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 https://blogs.msdn.com instead of https://msdn.microsoft.com
Let me know what you think!