Blog

On comments and social interaction

Ayende Rahien — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 10:00:00 GMT

I got a request in email to add something like Disqus to my blog, which would allow a richer platform for the commenting that goes on here. I think that the request and my reply are interesting enough to warrant this blog post.

My comment system is the default subtext one, but there are several advantages to the way it works. You can read the full explanation in Joel on Software post about the matter, but basically, threading encourages people to go off in tangents, single thread of conversation make it significantly easier to have only one conversation.

There is another reason, which is personally important to me, which is that I want to "own" the comments. Not own in terms of copyright, but own in terms of having control of the data itself. Having the comments (a hugely important part of the blog) being managed by a 3rd party which might shut down and take all the comments with it is not acceptable.

That is probably a false fear, but it is something that I take under consideration. The reasoning about the type of interaction going on in the comments is a lot more important. There is also something else to consider, if a post gets too hot (generating too many comments), I am either going to close comments on it, or open a new post with summary of what went on in the previous post comment thread anyway, so it does have some checks & balances that keep a comment thread from growing too large.

What happened to technorati?

Ayende Rahien — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:48:32 GMT

Recently all my technorati feeds started to give me stuff like this:

It looks like someone managed to crack the way that technorati is searching feeds, and I am getting what amounts to spammed search results. If this continues, it looks like I’ll just have to give up on it completely.

Any good alternatives?

Impleo – a CMS I can tolerate

Ayende Rahien — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:50:00 GMT

If you head out to http://hibernatingrhinos.com/, you will see that I finally had the time to setup the corporate site. This is still very early, but I have a lot of content to add there, but it is a start.

Impleo, the CMS running the site, doesn’t have any web based interface, instead, it is built explicitly to take advantage of Windows Live Writer and similar tools. The “interface” for editing the site is the MetaWeblog API. This means that in order to edit the site, there isn’t any Wiki syntax to learn, or XML files to edit, or anything of this sort.

You have a powerful editor in your fingertips, one that properly handle things like adding images and other content. This turn the whole experience around. I usually find documentation boring, but I am used to writing in WLW, it is fairly natural to do, and it removes all the pain from the equation.

One of the things that I am trying to do with it is to setup a proper documentation repository for all my open source projects. This isn’t something new, and it is something that most projects have a hard time doing. I strongly believe in making things simple, in reducing friction. What I hope to do is to be able to accept documentation contributions from the community for the OSS projects.

I think that having a full fledged rich text editor in your hands is a game changer, compared to the usual way OSS handle documentation. Take a look at what is needed to make this works, it should take three minutes to get started, no learning curve, no “how do they do this”.

So here is the deal, if you would like to contribute documentation (which can be anything that would help users with the projects), I just made things much easier for you. Please contact me directly and I’ll send you the credentials to be able to edit the site.

Thanks in advance for your support.

ayende.com move process completed

Ayende Rahien — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:21:22 GMT

The server is now hosted at GoGrid, it took longer than I anticipated because I also moved it to EC2 to test that (post about this is already in the queue, and will show up in about 2 weeks).

Commenting is now enabled, and it all should just work. Please let me know if something is broken.

ayende.com is moving servers – some interruption may result

Ayende Rahien — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:35:13 GMT

Well, the blog has grown a bit too large for my current host, and I decided that I need to move it elsewhere.

In order to make the move easier, I am disabling commenting site-wide. I’ll try to make this as fast as possible.

Automation, Mark 1

Ayende Rahien — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:32:00 GMT

I just got this email:

I seem to get automatic E-Mail notifications if you answer a comment from me on your blog. I asked our admin to enable this for our team blog, but he came up empty. Any hints?

My reply was a bit disappointing, I guess.

Yes,

It works like this.

You post a comment to my blog.

I get an email.

I answer the comment in gmail, send it to you.

I then copy the reply to the blog and post it.

Sorry, no magic here :-)

It would be a nice feature, but by this time this is part of my workflow of answering comment.

Is blogging dead?

Ayende Rahien — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 07:47:25 GMT

This is a reply to Chad Myers post about this question.

My answer: No.

How do you manage to blog so much?

Ayende Rahien — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 07:44:00 GMT

In a recent email thread, I was asked:

How come that you manage to post and comment that much? I bet you spend really loads of time on your blog.

The reason why I ask is because roughly a month ago I've decided to roll out my own programming blog. I've made three or four posts there
(in 5 days) and abandoned the idea because it was consuming waaaaay too much time (like 2-3 hours per post)

The only problem is time. If I'm gonna to post that much every day (and eventually also answer to comments), it seems that my effective working time would be cut by 3+ hours. Daily. So here comes my original question. How come that you manage to post and comment that much?

And here is my answer:

I see a lot of people in a similar situation. I have been blogging for 6 years now (Wow! how the the time flies), and I have started from a blog that has zero readers to one that has a respectable readership. There are only two things that I do that are in any way unique. First, my "does it fit to be blogged about?" level is pretty low. If it is interesting (to me), it will probably go to the blog.

Second, I don't mind pushing a blog post that requires fixing later. It usually takes me ten minutes to put out a blog post, so I can literally have a thought, post it up and move on, without really noticing it hurting my workflow. And the mere act of putting things in writing for others to read is a significant one, it allows me to look at things in writing in a way that is hard to do when they are just in my head.

It does take time, make no mistakes about that. The 10 minutes blog post is about 30% of my posts, in a lot of cases, it is something that I have to work on for half an hour. In some rare cases, it goes to an hour or two. There have been several dozens of posts that took days. But while it started out as a hobby, it has become part of my work now. The blog is my marketing effort, so to speak. And it is an effective one.

Right now, I have set it up so about once a week I am spending four or five hours crunching out blog posts and future posting them. Afterward, I can blog whenever I feel like, and that takes a lot of the pressure off. It helps that I am trying hard to schedule most of them day after day. So I get a lot of breathing room, but there is new content every day.

That doesn’t mean that I actually blog once a week, though. I push stuff to the blog all the time, but it is usually short notes, not posts that take a lot of time.

As for comments, take a look at my commenting style, I am generally commenting only when I actually have something to add to the conversation, and I very rarely have long comments (if I do, they turn into posts :-) ).

It also doesn’t take much time to reply to most of them, and it creates a feedback cycle that means that more people are participating and reading the blog. It is rare that I post a topic that really stir people up and that I feel obligated to respond to all/most of the comments. That does bother me, because it takes too much time. In those cases, I’ll generally close the comment threads with a note about that.

One final thought, the time I spend blogging is not wasted. It is well spent. Because it is an investment in reputation, respectability and familiarization.

Blog posts ideas, remapped

Ayende Rahien — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 21:15:15 GMT

Wow,

I got a lot of suggestions for new blog posts. I am not promising that I would do all of them, but I am going to try.

The experiment went well enough that I decided to create a dedicated forum for this, which would allow people to also vote for individual post topics, and give me better idea what people want to see.

I also moved all the previous suggestions to the new forum, and I think that I’ll make it a regular feature.

Extending SubText to report Future Posts

Ayende Rahien — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:49:38 GMT

Since I am making so much use of future posts recently, I decided that it would be interesting to have a sidebar that shows the future posts. The problem is that I really don’t want to mess around with SubText.

This is not a slight against SubText, it has served me well for a long time. It is simply that for what I wanted, the number of steps that I would have to go through is way too long:

Get the relevant source
Compile it on my machine
Figure out SubText’s architecture and where I should make my changes
Upload a new version of the blog engine

It is possible, but it just take too long. Moreover, it would most certainly break the next time that I would update SubText, because I would forget all about it.

But it is not the only way to get stuff done, however. Here is my solution:

Update: I actually had a bug here related to time zone handling, fixed now.

Update 2: I used the 3.5 TimeZone semantics for this, but my server is running 2.0, use an okay hack instead. And fixed potential issue with < & > in the titles.

<%@ Page Language="C#" %>
<%@ OutputCache Duration="60" VaryByParam="None" %>

<%@ Import Namespace="System.Data.SqlClient" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="System.Configuration" %>
<ul>
<%
string connectionString = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["subtextData"].ConnectionString;
using(SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString))
{
	connection.Open();
	
	using(SqlCommand cmd = connection.CreateCommand())
	{
		cmd.CommandText = @"
select top 15 Id, DateSyndicated, Title from subtext_Content
where DateSyndicated > @nowIsrael
order by DateSyndicated
";
		DateTime nowIsrael = DateTime.UtcNow.AddHours(3);
		
		cmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("nowIsrael",nowIsrael);
		
		using(SqlDataReader reader = cmd.ExecuteReader())
		{
			if(reader.HasRows == false)
			{
				%><li>Queue is empty</li><%
			}
			while(reader.Read())
			{
				DateTime dateSyndicated = (DateTime)reader["DateSyndicated"];
				string title = (string) reader["Title"];
				string formattedSyndication;
				TimeSpan timeLeft = dateSyndicated - DateTime.Now;
				
				if (timeLeft.Days > 7)
					formattedSyndication = timeLeft.Days / 7 + " weeks " + timeLeft.Days % 7 + " days";
				else if (timeLeft.Days > 0)
					formattedSyndication = timeLeft.Days + " days";
				else if (timeLeft.Hours > 0)
					formattedSyndication = timeLeft.Hours + " hours";
				else if (timeLeft.Minutes > 0)
					formattedSyndication = timeLeft.Minutes + " minutes";
				else
					formattedSyndication = "In a moment";
				
				%>
				<li><%= formattedSyndication %> <br /> <%= Server.HtmlEncode(title) %></li>
				<%
			}			
		}
	}
}
%>
</ul>

And then it was just a matter of changing the template to include the following JavaScript:

$('#futurePosts').load('http://ayende.com/Blog/FuturePosts.aspx');

And that is it. It works, it is safe, it can’t really break anything, and it will probably survive blog upgrades.