The Simple Common Courtesy

One of my pet peeves in this world is common courtesy. I have run into this situation far too often in my life, and today I run into it for the first time in the blogosphere. Instead of taking the opportunity to teach me something about blogging protocol via a short email or a brief phone call, I get called out in someone else’s blog for being a dope and not including the site feed on my blog. Heck, I have no problem making mistakes because this is one of the ways I learn. I just hate hearing about it through a third-party, or through a third-party source. I guess the more I think about it the public smack across the head is not uncommon these days, especially in blogs.

This huge oversight would have been corrected much sooner if I was informed with the email or phone call. It only took me a couple of minutes to add this to my Blogger template and republish the blog. Simple.

This is not the first time I have been called out on someone’s Web site. Years ago I wrote an article in FoxTalk on the new Top-Level form feature introduced in VFP 5. Several years after this article was published I was surfing the Web in my never ending quest to learn more about Visual FoxPro development. I hit a site by a well known VFP developer and speaker. Here is a quote from this posting:

All together now, let me hear you say it:
TopForms # SDI
... and don't you ever forget it.

All kinds of people who should know better make this mistake, from MS support people to gurus to helpful-types on the newsgroups. I'll quote from one example, from the lead paragraph of a lead article in FoxTalk engagingly titled "Using VFP 5.0 Top-Level Forms". (I single out this example because it perfectly illustrates the conceptual problem. However, its author, Richard A. Schummer, is no better and no worse than many other FoxPro experts who might have written these words. Don't blame him. Also, this particular article was written in 1997, so perhaps Mr. Schummer knows better by now!)

I never received a single correspondence from this person when the article was published or when they made the post. Instead I came across this posting years later and likely years after it was posted. I sent this person an email thanking them for the information and expressed my opinion about the topic I am blogging about this morning. I learned a lot that Sunday morning, both about Top-Level forms vs. SDI, and more importantly about the individual.

As far as a site feed, I guess I am truly spoiled by FeedDemon, created and sold by Bradbury Software. All I do is paste in the location of the blog in the New Channel Wizard and the majority of the time the channel is set up and I get the feed within seconds.

I want to take a second here and thank Rick Borup for answering my many questions about blogging and setting up a blog, and for his excellent recommendation to check out FeedDemon.

Well, as you can see this huge faux pas has been corrected. Craig, there are absolutely no hard feelings and thanks for setting me straight on the site feed. I hope this correction allows me to be added to your blogroll so others will get a chance to follow the link to my postings. And for those keeping score, I sent him an email before I posted this entry.