What's your opinion?

I've recently read the Jeff Atwood's post: A blog without comments is not a blog, and realised that, while I don't have comments turned off - I don't exactly go out of my way to encourage much commenting on this blog.

I'd just like to say that I really do want to hear your opinions on the stuff I say. I'm frequently quite opinionated, and more often wrong than I like.

I may not give this impression, but I like to hear what other people say about a topic to get other points-of-view or even just to figure out my own blind-spots (by having them pointed out to me by somebody else).

So I've decided I should do what I can to encourage more frequent commenting here.

I'm not entirely sure how to go about it... but I figured I should start with a small change. From now on, I'm going to try and end each post with a question - in the hopes of sparking a conversation about what I've been talking about. Maybe it's a dumb idea - but I figured I should begin somewhere.

Does that work for you? If not, what does? Do you have other examples of good ways of getting regular comments on a blog?

A blog to call my own

So, I've been thinking about shifting my blog over to my homepage recently. Why? well blogger's great, but I really need to move out and find a blog of my own. I want a tighter control over the content, I want to integrate it with my website's styling and layout and maintaining it in two places violates the DRY principle...

Ok, so I'm lazy and don't want to have to maintain stylesheets/layouts in two places :P

So anyway, in Rails, the major blog movers-and-shakers atm are Mephisto and Typo. They're both great. They provide heaps of functionality and have a thriving developer community. But they're a little on the top-heavy side. All the bells an whistles, Mephisto is almost a full CMS... you have to pretty much install either one as a new app (or hack it a lot ot fit with your existing one).

This is great if:

1. you're starting an entirely new website from scratch
2. you like using a CMS-approach to organise your site for you
3. you're ok with your blog being a completely independant rails app.

In my case:

1. I already have a pre-existing website. It might not be much, but I like what I've done and I don't want to have to re-hack it to fit around my blog software. Conversely, I don't want to spend hours hacking my blog software to fit in with my website - and risk destabilising the upgrade path (which kinda defeats the purpose).
2. I'm a rails freelancer - not a stay-at-home mum. I like to get my hands dirty in the innards of my site. I don't like having the structure of said site dictated to me by some upstart CMS (no matter how shiny). I like to call the shots on my own turf
3. We're seriously violating the DRY principle here. Why on earth would I want to maintain two separate sets of layout/styling? or two separate authentication systems? Single sign-on is a PITA. Yes, there are solutions, but why invite the problem into your home? and you couldn't integrate the layouts (eg put your latest post on the homepage) without contortions. No RESTful articles_path for you!

What I really want is to be able to do something like
script/plugin install blog
and have it all Just Work(tm). That doesn't seem available anywhere.

So, I've decided to write my own.

It won't be anything flash, just something bog-simple to allow me to post articles, tag them, let people comment and generate an RSS feed. It won't have whizz-bang flickr integration (well, probably not), but it's all that most people seem to need.

I'll post updates here as I progress.

No to death threats!

I am shocked and horrified. By this post outlining sexually explicit death threats levelled against Kathy Sierra. This behaviour is outrageous and should not be tolerated. Kathy is a wonderful person, an excellent speaker and a giving member of the tech community. She has my full support. My thoughts and best wishes go out to her as she copes with her current situation.

Let's not let it happen again. If you notice such unruly behaviour forming in your own blog/forum/community - head it off. Inform the person that this behaviour is not appropriate. If that doesn't work - then do something more drastic (ban them from the site and call the police).

[Update: Andy Carvin has posted (on "stop cyber bullying day") a social network he has set up to help people combat cyber-bullying here.]