Second Round of Our Best Personal Linux or FOSS Blog Competition

We were hoping to have 20 to 25 blogs for you to choose from here in round two of our competition to see who wins the honors as FOSS Force Best Personal Linux or FOSS Blog–2013. We end up offering you a total of 19.

Voters in our qualifying poll that finished at noon today wrote-in plenty of web sites for us to consider. The trouble was, most of them didn’t meet the criteria we set-out in the article titled What’s Your Favorite FOSS or Linux Blog? which was published on July 29th when we began this competition.

To a degree, we expected that. We knew some voters would write-in names of great Linux sites that in no way qualify as personal blogs. That they did, placing votes for many of our favorite sites and for some we think downright silly. So we first cleared out votes for sites that obviously don’t qualify, such as Omg! Ubuntu!, phoronix and OStatic.

After taking care of that task we were left with a long list of sites. As most were unknown to us, we had to check each to see if it qualified as a personal Linux or FOSS blog under the rules of our contest.

Practically all the blogs on the list were great. We were particularly impressed with the different focuses of the different blogs–some being very technical, some being very personal, some being distro specific. Most of all, however, we were impressed with the quality of the writing.

However, most of the blogs didn’t qualify for inclusion in our poll because they fail one major test. To be considered a blog must be being actively published. According to our rules, this means the site must publish at least one post per week on average. In our enforcement of this rule, we gave a lot of leeway, but many really good blogs still couldn’t pass the test. When we saw blogs with only one posting a month, or that went a couple of months with no posts at all, we just couldn’t include them.

The good news is, we found plenty of great new blogs and we’ve now reached the second round in our vote. We’ve ended up with ten additional blogs to consider, in addition to the nine that were already on our list. That means voters now have a field of 19 blogs from which to choose. As with the first qualifying round, you can vote for one or two blogs. Because this is an elimination round and not a qualifying round, however, there is no longer any way to add a new blog for consideration. As Flip Wilson’s Geraldine used to say, “What you see is what you get.”

Next Monday, the 19th, we’ll tally the votes and reduce the field to ten great personal blogs for the third and final round. During that round, you will be able to vote for one blog and one blog only, to determine what blog will be honored by being named the FOSS Force Best Personal Linux or FOSS Blog–2013.

During round two and round three we will not display a running count of vote totals while the poll is open and active, as we don’t want the vote count to affect how people vote. As soon as each poll ends, the vote totals will be automatically displayed by our polling software.

We’d also like to remind you that each blog listing on the poll is also a link to that blog. We encourage you to visit all of the blogs that are unfamiliar to you before you vote, so that you can be a more informed voter. We’re also including below a list of the ten new blogs that were today added to the competition as a result of our first round of voting. Beside each blog name, we’ve included a brief description of that blog.

1. Alien Pastures: Blog of Eric Hameleers who maintain’s a Wiki and a website where he publishes “Slackware scripts and other goodies.”
2. Larry the CrunchBang Guy: A personal blog run by Larry Cafiero who also publishes the Larry the Free Software Guy blog that’s already on our list.
3. Jim’s 2011: Blog of James Eriksen, who bills himself as “The Tech Guy at Office Depot” in North Richland, Texas.
4. xmodulo: Dan Nanni’s Linux FAQ blog.
5. Techsource: Almost doesn’t qualify as personal blog but squeeked by since 95% or so of posts are by site owner, who’s name is in URL. Blog of Jun Auza.
6. Matthew Garrett: Onsite bio says, “Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Nebula.”
7. LinuxG: The G is for a blogger called Geekster who describes himself as a student of Computer Science in Romania.
8. Web UPD8: Ubuntu blog published by Alin Andrei using the moniker Andrew.
9. Everyday Linux User: Blog written by “a software developer/database developer living in the North East of Scotland.”
10. Benjamin Kerensa: Blog of an open source advocate who lives in Portland, Oregon.