It’s been great to see the interest and participation of the monthly PGSQL Phriday blogging event grow over the last 15 months. And like any new venture, it takes time to see and understand the best way to organize it and what the best parameters are to encourage more participation from month to month.
With some recent feedback from members of the #PostgreSQL community, and partially due to reduced availability of my extracurricular time, I’ve decided to make the following two changes to the monthly event. My hope is that this lowers the burden for folks to host and participate as we move forward.
First Friday of the month –> Second Friday of the month
The first change is that I’m going to shift the schedule and plan for the second Friday of each month to be the community posting day, rather than the first Friday. There are two main reasons for this.
- The first Friday of the month often falls close to a holiday (both in the U.S. or UK/EU). Even when it doesn’t, end of month/quarter duties for many folks makes it difficult for them to find extra time to participate.
- We ask the hosts to announce their topic by the previous Friday at the latest. This often means that people have to post the invitation during the previous month which can be difficult to remember for hosts, and confusing for participants.
I don’t think it’s a big deal to change the Friday of the month it falls on, but hopefully this will provide a little more opportunity for people to participate as well.
Host Rule Changes and Recommitments
As I have said numerous time before (and on the PGSQL Phriday rules page), the intent of the rules isn’t to add burden to hosting or participating. They’re mainly there to bring consistency and provide visibility to the articles that people contribute. If people make the effort to contribute and share, we want the wider community to know about it.
- Publicizing the invitation: There is no longer a requirement that hosts must be syndicated via the Planet Postgres blog aggregation feed. The real purpose of this rule was to make sure that the invitations can be seen by the greatest number of community members and I believe it’s still preferable for hosts to be syndicated. However, I’ve received feedback from some potential hosts that their blog or blogging platform doesn’t work well with the collector that gathers new articles to post.
Because I post every invitation to the PGSQL Phriday website, the invitation will be published through Planet Postgres from there at a minimum. If the host is also syndicated, great!
There is still an expectation that the host will help to promote their invitation in as many places as possible, but Planet Postgres isn’t a specific requirement. - Follow-up Summery Post: I haven’t pestered any hosts about the follow-up summery blog they are supposed to write after everyone has contributed to the event. Without it, however, there’s not a one-stop place to recognize everyone that took part and what they shared. Again, this isn’t meant to be a burden, but I am going to follow up if the host hasn’t posted a summary by the middle of the following week.
- Finding the next host: I don’t want anyone to feel the pressure of finding a host every month. However, it’s challenging for me to do it on my own. I will follow-up with each host to see if they can recommend future hosts or send people my way. It helps keep the engine moving.
Let’s get blogging!
So, to recap.
- PGSQL Phriday is now on the second Friday of each month. Hosts announce the topic by the first Friday of the month
- Hosts don’t have to be syndicated on Planet Postgres, but they do accept the responsibility of publicizing the topic when they host.
Ready. Set. BLOG! (and see you next Friday for the March topic. 😉)