Adapting slightly from a good article, in order to make it pertinent to the Madagascar blog:
“To really work, a blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company. Blogging as a medium seems so personal, and often it is. But when you’re using a blog to promote a project, that blog can’t be about you, Sierra said. It has to be about your readers, who will, it’s hoped, become involved in your project. It has to be about making them awesome. So, for example, if you’re selling a clever attachment to a camera that diffuses harsh flash light, don’t talk about the technical features or about your holiday sale (10 percent off!). Make a list of 10 tips for being a better photographer. If you’re opening a restaurant, don’t blog about your menu. Blog about great food. You’ll attract foodies who don’t care about your restaurant yet.”
Further elaboration on this can be found in Let’s Take This Offline, by Joel Spolsky (although the point of the article is not about how to make a good blog, but rather a summary made by one of the most read software bloggers, who is taking a break from blogging now)
I propose expanding the content of the blog to more topics of interest to the target developer and user base of Madagascar: computational sciences in general and geophysics in particular, HPC software architecture, coding tips, life in the industry and academia, and whatever is cool and interesting for the sort of people that we would want as developers and users.
Serendipitously, Sergey’s post on reproducibility is a good start 🙂 What does the community think?