22 November 2006

Hi everyone. Now, don't get mad, I know that you're saying "What are they doing, not another !@^&*$ blog!" but hold on, let me explain...

Over the past couple of years, the GRIDPP-STORAGE mailing list has grown such that we now have a fairly respectable number of subscribers (about 50 at last count). However, I have found from speaking to people that while most (if not all) of the postings are useful on a technical level, some subscribers feel that they cannot read through everything due to the volume of other email traffic that they have to parse. As a result, emails get filtered to a 'not often read' folder in your mail client. Of course, this means that important announcements like meeting agendas, new software releases and workshop dates can be missed, resulting in sites not knowing what software is available as well as when/how they should be upgrading.

The idea behind this blog is to rectify the situation. The blog will **NOT** become a forum for discussion of storage related issues; that will remain the purpose of the GRIDPP-STORAGE list/weekly meetings. What the blog **WILL** be used for is for making important announcements that (I believe) every site should be made aware of, thereby shielding them from the day-to-day technical discussions while still providing access to important information.

From this point of view, the real benefit of using blogger.com is that you can subscribe to the RSS or ATOM feed of the blog, meaning that you don't even have to check if a new posting has been made. As an example, I'm using the Sage plugin for Firefox, but there are loads of others available. A click of a button forces the RSS reader to check the blog feed and if something new has been posted the reader should let you know; otherwise nothing will change and you can go about your business as normal. Hopefully some people will find the news feed useful if used like this.

Of course, if you think this is all just a gimmick and will quickly become lost among your other RSS/ATOM feeds then you can ignore it completely and continue to read/filter the mailing list traffic. The decision is yours.

Thanks,
Greig

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