Help, my article is dying!
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I've just spent quite a bit of time putting together my first article. I tried to follow the Marc Clifton guidelines (which are excellent), as well the CP guidelines. I also read up on related articles and generally tried to do a great job. But after the first day, the rating is already down to 2.67!!! The really bothersome thing is: no posts, no feedback. Its one thing to give somebody a "1" rating, it's another to not even ask any questions or send any e-mails. If somebody found a bug or has a problem, I'd certainly like to make things right. Any ideas on why this is happening are welcome! X| samurai down... Tom Ollar the Coding Samurai
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I've just spent quite a bit of time putting together my first article. I tried to follow the Marc Clifton guidelines (which are excellent), as well the CP guidelines. I also read up on related articles and generally tried to do a great job. But after the first day, the rating is already down to 2.67!!! The really bothersome thing is: no posts, no feedback. Its one thing to give somebody a "1" rating, it's another to not even ask any questions or send any e-mails. If somebody found a bug or has a problem, I'd certainly like to make things right. Any ideas on why this is happening are welcome! X| samurai down... Tom Ollar the Coding Samurai
Someone probably took a dislike to your nick-name (perhaps the samurai portion of it). I've 5d you now, so your rating should have improved. Nish
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Someone probably took a dislike to your nick-name (perhaps the samurai portion of it). I've 5d you now, so your rating should have improved. Nish
Thanks Nish! The idea was to be "the Coding Samurai" in the same way Chris Farley was the "Hollywood Ninja." Obviously a stupid idea. :wtf: So I've ditched the "funny bio" and changed my alias back to my name. Ah well... Thanks again! Tom Ollar blix: more native than native
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I've just spent quite a bit of time putting together my first article. I tried to follow the Marc Clifton guidelines (which are excellent), as well the CP guidelines. I also read up on related articles and generally tried to do a great job. But after the first day, the rating is already down to 2.67!!! The really bothersome thing is: no posts, no feedback. Its one thing to give somebody a "1" rating, it's another to not even ask any questions or send any e-mails. If somebody found a bug or has a problem, I'd certainly like to make things right. Any ideas on why this is happening are welcome! X| samurai down... Tom Ollar the Coding Samurai
I think people are voting on the utility of the code rather then the content of the article. Many developers are not big fans of LOC measurement. I think that is one reason it is not as well received as you hoped. All I can say is don't get discouraged. The best way to get better is to keep writing. Start a blog, or answer questions in the forums. Get in the habit of writing about code and coding. It is only going to give you more ideas and let you develop your style. At least that is the advice I've gotten. I think it is a good first article. It's got a good flow and explains what the project does and how it is organized. I took the same approach with my first article, explain a simple programming concept and focus on the article text, since that is what I consider hard. It didn't do all that well. Next I chose some harder more interesting concepts, but I think the article itself suffered because my skills of the writer. I didn't do a good job explaining the concepts. That's where I am now, I have a few articles with the code written, but the articles are half finished. I've taken a little time off to polish my writing skills, so hopefully I can write more naturally, when I try some more articles.
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book, only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
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I've just spent quite a bit of time putting together my first article. I tried to follow the Marc Clifton guidelines (which are excellent), as well the CP guidelines. I also read up on related articles and generally tried to do a great job. But after the first day, the rating is already down to 2.67!!! The really bothersome thing is: no posts, no feedback. Its one thing to give somebody a "1" rating, it's another to not even ask any questions or send any e-mails. If somebody found a bug or has a problem, I'd certainly like to make things right. Any ideas on why this is happening are welcome! X| samurai down... Tom Ollar the Coding Samurai
> The really bothersome thing is: no posts, no feedback. Its one thing to give somebody a "1" rating, it's another to not even ask any questions or send any e-mails. I agree completely. It is extremely rude (and very unhelpful) to give a low rating when the author has no explanation of why. Anyway... I think your article has scored poorly because there are many similar tools out there which do an excellent job. Your big problem is in the motivation section: > However, I wanted something that was written in C# and did not install into Visual Studio. You need to explain why this is important to you, because it's the only thing you're doing that hasn't been done before (and done *much* better). You need to convince your readers that your code isn't something they could put together themselves in an hour, because I bet that's what they're thinking. -Don
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I think people are voting on the utility of the code rather then the content of the article. Many developers are not big fans of LOC measurement. I think that is one reason it is not as well received as you hoped. All I can say is don't get discouraged. The best way to get better is to keep writing. Start a blog, or answer questions in the forums. Get in the habit of writing about code and coding. It is only going to give you more ideas and let you develop your style. At least that is the advice I've gotten. I think it is a good first article. It's got a good flow and explains what the project does and how it is organized. I took the same approach with my first article, explain a simple programming concept and focus on the article text, since that is what I consider hard. It didn't do all that well. Next I chose some harder more interesting concepts, but I think the article itself suffered because my skills of the writer. I didn't do a good job explaining the concepts. That's where I am now, I have a few articles with the code written, but the articles are half finished. I've taken a little time off to polish my writing skills, so hopefully I can write more naturally, when I try some more articles.
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book, only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
andy brummer wrote: I think people are voting on the utility of the code rather then the content of the article I think, lots of article in CP is voted based on it`s demo or the utility or code not the article. At the bottom of an article, it is stated "rate this article for us". I don`t know whether the demo or utility or code should be included for the rating. Chris, maybe there should be two voting. One for the article ( the writing ), and one for the demo / source / code. After all good article, could have a poor demo.
Work hard and a bit of luck is the key to success.
You don`t need to be genius, to be rich.
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andy brummer wrote: I think people are voting on the utility of the code rather then the content of the article I think, lots of article in CP is voted based on it`s demo or the utility or code not the article. At the bottom of an article, it is stated "rate this article for us". I don`t know whether the demo or utility or code should be included for the rating. Chris, maybe there should be two voting. One for the article ( the writing ), and one for the demo / source / code. After all good article, could have a poor demo.
Work hard and a bit of luck is the key to success.
You don`t need to be genius, to be rich.
Yulianto AKA goodmast3r wrote: maybe there should be two voting. One for the article ( the writing ), and one for the demo / source / code That might work, but I don't think people will use it well. The people that care about downloading code will vote 5 for both if they can drop an object in their project. The people that care about well written articles will rate code higher for well written articles. One advantage of the current system has is that it is simple. Everybody understands a 1-5 ranking and I think people vote more because it is only one step. Each extra step tends to reduce the number of people that do vote, and confuse the meaning of the number that is generated.
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book, only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
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Yulianto AKA goodmast3r wrote: maybe there should be two voting. One for the article ( the writing ), and one for the demo / source / code That might work, but I don't think people will use it well. The people that care about downloading code will vote 5 for both if they can drop an object in their project. The people that care about well written articles will rate code higher for well written articles. One advantage of the current system has is that it is simple. Everybody understands a 1-5 ranking and I think people vote more because it is only one step. Each extra step tends to reduce the number of people that do vote, and confuse the meaning of the number that is generated.
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book, only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
andy brummer wrote: One advantage of the current system has is that it is simple Two voting is still simple, just like this. Vote the article 0 1 2 3 4 5 Vote the source /demo 0 1 2 3 4 5 0 means user didn`t vote for a certain criteria. In order to submit their vote,user must vote for at least one criteria.
Work hard and a bit of luck is the key to success.
You don`t need to be genius, to be rich.
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I've just spent quite a bit of time putting together my first article. I tried to follow the Marc Clifton guidelines (which are excellent), as well the CP guidelines. I also read up on related articles and generally tried to do a great job. But after the first day, the rating is already down to 2.67!!! The really bothersome thing is: no posts, no feedback. Its one thing to give somebody a "1" rating, it's another to not even ask any questions or send any e-mails. If somebody found a bug or has a problem, I'd certainly like to make things right. Any ideas on why this is happening are welcome! X| samurai down... Tom Ollar the Coding Samurai
Just a thought--you know what this needs to spiff it up, make it stand out from the pack? The ability to cut and paste the list into something like Excel. Just allow the user to copy it into the clipboard as a comma-delimited file. Why, IMO? For example, I have a client that wants to see how much work I've done between yesterday and today (I am NOT kidding), and what better way than by comparing LOC's in all the different modules. Right now he loves to do an update on CVS and complains when there aren't enough files that have been updated (yeah, it's easy to spoof that one!). Or otherwise, it's just fun to graph daily/weekly changes! :-D A couple other things-- Source code download should be just that--source code and the csproj and/or sln. It should not be 400KB zipped!!! (It seems CP is throttling downloads--this took forever!) On further digging: What is blix? This is the reason your download is so large, and frankly, a simply LOC counter does not need this baggage. Furthermore, and a reason I would vote this article a 1 if I did vote for it (but I'm not, as I'm just giving you a slap on the hand here), you are distributing an evaluation license of blix, that specifically states: For a period of 30 days following your initial download or other acquisition of blix, you have the right to design, develop and test blix-based applications. You may run these applications on a single development computer and make backup copies of these applications as you deem necessary. You may not distribute these applications or the backup copies, nor run these applications on additional computers. Even if you are the author of blix, you are saddling the end user with an evaluation license or are in violation of that license. Not good. I'd suggest rewriting the article without using blix. And, IMO, shame on those people that have blindly voted you a 5 because you were complaining about your low rating, without doing some digging. Marc MyXaml Advanced Unit Testing YAPO
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Someone probably took a dislike to your nick-name (perhaps the samurai portion of it). I've 5d you now, so your rating should have improved. Nish
Nishant S wrote: I've 5d you now Maybe you shouldn't be so trigger happy next time. :-D http://www.codeproject.com/lounge.asp?forumid=1159&mpp=50&select=1023497&df=100#xx1023497xx[^] I wouldn't vote 5 for an article that violates the terms of an evaluation license. Marc MyXaml Advanced Unit Testing YAPO
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I think people are voting on the utility of the code rather then the content of the article. Many developers are not big fans of LOC measurement. I think that is one reason it is not as well received as you hoped. All I can say is don't get discouraged. The best way to get better is to keep writing. Start a blog, or answer questions in the forums. Get in the habit of writing about code and coding. It is only going to give you more ideas and let you develop your style. At least that is the advice I've gotten. I think it is a good first article. It's got a good flow and explains what the project does and how it is organized. I took the same approach with my first article, explain a simple programming concept and focus on the article text, since that is what I consider hard. It didn't do all that well. Next I chose some harder more interesting concepts, but I think the article itself suffered because my skills of the writer. I didn't do a good job explaining the concepts. That's where I am now, I have a few articles with the code written, but the articles are half finished. I've taken a little time off to polish my writing skills, so hopefully I can write more naturally, when I try some more articles.
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book, only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
Thanks Andy, I think you're articles are great - especially the protocol one, I'll definitely have to try that out the next time I'm in aspxland (which will probably be soon.) I was also very surprised to see that you went to UT-Austin. So did I. Spent a couple of years consulting for then Coopers & Lybrand (now PriceWaterhouseCoopers), moved on to independent consulting, built a "shrinkwrap product" business and have now moved on to what is hopefully a "shrinkwrap" product for C# (though I doubt plastic will ever touch it, nor will it ever see the inside of a box.) Anyway, you're lucky to live in Austin! I'm currently in Evergreen, Colorado, which is also pretty awesome. The view from my little coding hut is nice! Again, thanks for the encouragement, at this point I really need it!!! Tom Ollar blix: more native than native
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Just a thought--you know what this needs to spiff it up, make it stand out from the pack? The ability to cut and paste the list into something like Excel. Just allow the user to copy it into the clipboard as a comma-delimited file. Why, IMO? For example, I have a client that wants to see how much work I've done between yesterday and today (I am NOT kidding), and what better way than by comparing LOC's in all the different modules. Right now he loves to do an update on CVS and complains when there aren't enough files that have been updated (yeah, it's easy to spoof that one!). Or otherwise, it's just fun to graph daily/weekly changes! :-D A couple other things-- Source code download should be just that--source code and the csproj and/or sln. It should not be 400KB zipped!!! (It seems CP is throttling downloads--this took forever!) On further digging: What is blix? This is the reason your download is so large, and frankly, a simply LOC counter does not need this baggage. Furthermore, and a reason I would vote this article a 1 if I did vote for it (but I'm not, as I'm just giving you a slap on the hand here), you are distributing an evaluation license of blix, that specifically states: For a period of 30 days following your initial download or other acquisition of blix, you have the right to design, develop and test blix-based applications. You may run these applications on a single development computer and make backup copies of these applications as you deem necessary. You may not distribute these applications or the backup copies, nor run these applications on additional computers. Even if you are the author of blix, you are saddling the end user with an evaluation license or are in violation of that license. Not good. I'd suggest rewriting the article without using blix. And, IMO, shame on those people that have blindly voted you a 5 because you were complaining about your low rating, without doing some digging. Marc MyXaml Advanced Unit Testing YAPO
Hi Marc, Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it. Yes, I am one of the authors of blix and this confusion is totally my fault. I will change the download to contain a special license that allows the use of blix with the line counter utility in perpetuity. That way no developer will ever be saddled with anything. I'll reduce the size of the source download by not including the blix.dll, but instead indicating where the blix.dll can be downloaded. The clipboard feature is a great idea, I'd be glad to add it. Thanks again for your suggestions, they've been really helpful!!! Tom Ollar blix: more native than native