To clarify for some respondants to Voted Off the Planet: As far as I know, the decision to remove my blog from Planet Lisp was not made collectively by readers but solely by the site’s maintainer. As is apparent from comments on the announcement, some people approved of the decision and some did not, but those comments came after it had already been done. The emailed responses I’ve gotten have been uniformly positive — thank you to those people, and to anyone who is still reading.
I was never actually notified either when my blog was added or when it was dropped. I think that’s revealing: I was not being invited into the community, I was being tested. According to one person’s standards, I failed. That in itself does not surprise me. I was not ready for such a large and demanding audience. I only started this blog a few months ago, and I am definitely still feeling my way towards a writing style.
What did surprise me was the viciousness of the criticism, some of it from people who were clearly only skimming my posts anyway. E.g., I was “hassling” Planet Lisp by announcing “UFFI bindings to a C library.” Well, 1) It was CFFI, not UFFI; 2) only half of it is bindings, the rest re-implements bits of the Perl API in Lisp and translates data between the two; and 3) I said it was just for fun.
Or was the idea of embedding Perl code in Common Lisp just too heretical? ;)
But the lesson I can take from all this is that I still have a long way to go. So bear with me, gentle readers, as this page (hopefully) evolves into an interesting and enjoyable discussion.
I think the blog just has a mix of Lisp and non-Lisp posts. Then again, when that other blog on there posts stuff about Mr. Wiseman’s trips to LA., it makes me wonder…
And what really riles me about this is that Planet Lisp, most of the time, is never updated in days. Surely it’s better to have MORE Lisp blogs on it, not less.
I only check Planet Lisp once every couple of weeks now, otherwise it’s just a waste of bandwidth reloading it all.