Sometimes, when I’m not particularly feeling writey (Like right now when I’m freaking exhausted from not sleeping properly), I go back and look at some of the draft entries we (John and I) have started, but never finished. Some of them are total crap, some are just notes to ourselves (IE “I should write about Topic X”), some are fairly completely written (but didn’t get finished), basically we have something for everywhere in between. Most of our drafts we start eventually see the light of day, but sometimes you start with an idea, but eventually don’t care enough to finish… those just die. Sometimes, it is a matter of timing… and we miss it for one reason or another. Let me give you a little perspective on some of the articles languishing in our store room:
- Compiling Asterisk 1.6.1.4 on Ubuntu 9.04 x64 — By me — Last “dated” August 2009. Obviously Ubuntu 9.04 is a few versions out of date now… To be fair, it would have been a great guide, as it had every single step needed to get Asterisk up and running. Alas, it will probably be purged.
- Review: Le Whif — By John — Last “dated” August 2009. Well there is no time constraint preventing John from finishing and publishing the review on the Le Whifs… I think the items themselves have long since been consumed/spent and probably isn’t worth ordering more.
John’s note: I originally was waiting for more to arrive, since I had gotten a few emails indicating more (different flavor, new design, that sort of thing) were on the way, for free — I presume because I was one of the early birds who preordered. However, nothing ever showed up. You don’t need to give me free things, but if you say you are sending me stuff and then don’t… I will become less thrilled about you/your product.
* Fixing Echo in Asterisk — By me — Last “dated” August 2009. Well the entry is a total of 3 command line entries… not exactly an exciting start. Plus it isn’t something I’ve futzed with recently, so I probably wont remember the process well enough.
* How much is your account worth? — By John — Last “dated” November 2009. It was a follow up piece to a news story titled “Amazon’s EC2 brings new might to password cracking“. The original piece is quite interesting and John had some good math to support his commentary on it. Though it is kinda “old news” now, will anyone care about a response to a 6 month old article?
* Fight in the Clouds: AWS vs Rackspace — By me — Last “dated” December 2009. Just before the holiday season I had been playing with Rackspace cloud (and had long since been a user of AWS Cloud). I had meant to write a review/compare/contrast. Right now the entry is 4 words, and last I checked Rackspace cloud still sucked. It really wouldn’t be much of a compare/contrast piece, more of a “Hey look at all this cool stuff Amazon can do; Rackspace can’t do any of it”. So probably not gonna happen either.
It’s not that we’re lazy, we just find better things to do. In my case, for basically every blog post, I sit down and write out the entire entry tits to ass in one night. I rarely need nor want several days worth of entries (Editor’s note: Except for when one or both of us are going on vacation.). So when I start a draft, it is to have a placeholder for an idea, one that would be later filled — which is why most of my back drafts (not backdraft nor Kurt Russell) are almost non-existent content. John, on the other hand, tends to write large pieces, but generally doesn’t have the time to complete them in one sitting. Really, he’s a slacker with a bunch of back content that needs finishing. Maybe we should have an all John week?