A funny thing happened on the way to the blog

One of the applications mentioned in Okay, now what? is a blog. But just what is a blog? A blog (or Web log) is a simple but powerful publishing tool which enables you to easily share thoughts and opinions by providing commentary or news on a particular subject that no one else but you can change. Blogs tend to be temporal in nature -- similar to articles in a newspaper. A typical blog combines text, images, and sometimes links related to its topic. Be Communities blog articles can cover a wide range of topics, including:

Things that relate to infrastructure and Bentley business.
“Life in the projects” — successes, challenges, achievements, and day-to-day experiences in your project execution and infrastructure sustainment activities.
Satisfaction with your tools and technologies — also your frustrations, how you are tackling them, and how it is working out.
Anything else that you think your peers and colleagues will find relevant, inspiring, entertaining, or enlightening.

The ability for members to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of the Be Communities blogs. One fairly common question that has been asked by a number of Be Communities members is "Where should I post my blog article?" In Be Communities, there are three primary blog article contexts:

technical (i.e. product-related, subsystems, functionality, etc.)
personal (i.e. relating to an event, situation, etc.)
a mix of both (i.e. how someone feels or thinks about specific technology)

For #1, that has the "best fit" in a Product or Solutions community blog. For the second, that should go in a personal or Bentley or User Community or Bentley Program community blog. The third context is the tricky one... it could go in any blog, although it probably makes more sense in the personal blog. The good thing about this is that you can see the most recent blog posts either in a widget that summarizes current blog activity or through a simple search (which can be brought straight to you through RSS).

Before you begin blogging, use the site's search function to determine if the subject/topic that you want to create a blog post for has been previously posted -- see How do I find stuff? for some helpful hints regarding that. If the topic you want to post about has not been covered, locate the most appropriate and relevant area on the website to blog at -- whether it be your own "personal" blog or one for a specific product line or one of the Bentley Solutions, etc. If you find an existing blog about the same topic, you should consider posting a comment to that entry. If it has not, click the big, blue, "New Post" pushbutton. Note that you can configure how your blog post and comments to it will be handled.

Should you have any question about where you should post your blog article, or if you encounter any problems posting it, feel free to ask in the Be Communities Help community forum.

Happy blogging!