Pete On Rails

I’ve had it. I am moving from Typo to Wordpress. Why?

1. Typo is still buggy. I want to spend my blog time blogging, not reading logs/production.log to figure out WTF happened to my site.
2. After submitting many patches to Typo 5.0.3 and receiving not even a “Hey, got the patch, thanks…” I have deduced that Typo is not well maintained by anyone.
3. All the hosted blog solutions that I want (disqus, etc) have out-of-box integration with WordPress.

I still host at RailsPlayground. But now I don’t run my blog on Rails.

Sorry Typo.

I like to keep up with developer blogs, so I definitely read/watch Railscasts, The Intridea Blog, Hacker News, Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky and the like.

However, I get a lot of utility out of following the blogs of lesser known people I know or have worked with. If you haven’t checked them out already, please visit my peeps on their blogs:

• Fred Wilson: Ok. Not really one of my peeps, per se, but a smart guy who I respect and read daily.
• Sean Cook: If you know or have worked with me, it’s likely that you know or have worked with Sean. He’s starting to ramp up the content on his site with technical stuff, but the music stuff if worth a visit.
• Brendan Lim: A smart guy that used to work on my team. One of the two brains behind Yappd.com.
• Theo Nguyen-Cao: Theo is a versatile, quiet hacker who says more in print than in person, but is worth listening to in either situation.
• Brent Collier: The other of the two brains behind Yappd.com.
• Laurie Ruettimann: I haven’t met her in person, but her HR blog makes so much sense that nobody in the startup world can afford to not read it.

Enjoy.

This week was one of the toughest I’ve had to go through at work. Here’s a completely random set of things that have made me smile in the last 24 hours.

Fruity Cheerios. - It’s like eating Froot Loops, but they’re called Cheerios. All of the pleasure with none of the guilt.

Yo Gabba Gabba! - It’s a slightly ridiculous, but amusing kids show. Today, I curled up with my kids on the couch and ate fruity cheerios with them while watching the “Party In My Tummy” episdoe.

Punk Rock HR - Laurie Ruettimann used to work for Big HR, but after becoming unemployed a year ago, she started writing a blog about opting out of the corporate rat race. It contains such gems as “The Punk Rock Employee Handbook” and some refreshing quips like:

- Team building is for suckers.
- Office Speak is for Suckers.
- “You’re not cool and ironic. Trust me. You’re not.”

I think she likes to call people “suckers”. But in any case: read her stuff. Very amusing.

Fred WIlson makes a great point today about howblog comments can be as important as blog posts themselves. In this post, he says:

I want to be able to easily reblog onto my front page any and all great comments in a format that shows that they are comments and a link to the post the comment is from. I want to be able to easily reblog the comments I make on other blogs to my blog. I want services like techmeme and friendfeed to understand that comments are as important as blog posts (friendfeed is on its way with disqus and intensedebate integration). And I want commenters to have their own blogs that are simply aggregations of the comments they leave on the web. That’s happening too, here’s my disqus page.

Great stuff. I agree. I often paraphrase my comment back onto my blog as a new post. And, my disqus page is almost a blog on its own. However, I’d really like to have the option in either my blog software or on my disqus page to “Reblog this comment as a new post” on my main blog page.

The Disqus API should make this kinda trivial to support in most blog software. But how do we get the maintainers of Blogger, WordPress, Typo, and the dozen other blog providers to support it? I can tell you from experience that getting it into Typo as a patch will take more time than writing the code itself.

So how about a javascript badge that will do it? That shouldn’t be too hard. Who’s working on it?

I’ve released the typo theme you see right now via GitHub. I’m probably going to migrate to Mephisto in the next week or so, so this theme will go out of support, but I’ll maintain the repository and honor any pull-requests if you want to patch it.

I’m considering moving my comment system to disqus. I really like how their service helps keep online conversations easy to follow across multiple sites while making it easy not to lose track of the blog where the conversation began. It also lets users see more about a random commenter they come across on a blog.

Anyone else done this move on a Typo system?

Good grief. It’s amazing how fast you get buried in comment and trackback Spam. I had a tough week last week, so I hadn’t posted much or reviewed comments. This weekend, when I had some time to pay attention to my blog, I found that I had hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks.

I know. “Quit your complaining, Pete. That’s life. We all deal with that crap.”

Well, I hadn’t realized just how inundating it can be. So:

1. I turned on Akismet spam filtering.
2. I closed older posts to new comments.
3. I tuned some other settings, including requiring comments to be posted via AJAX. If you have Javascript turned off, you won’t be able to comment.

While I was at it, I enabled Gravatars. Woot!

Ben Hughes has created a simpler github badge for his typo blog that renders a little more smoothly in Typo than Dr. Nic’s badge.

I added support for YAGHB to githubsidebar today. If you like the look of YAGHB better, you can grab the latest sidebar from github. In the configuration pane, you should now see a set of radio buttons that let you choose which badge to render.

Personally, I like the original badge quite a bit, but Typo users who are having trouble getting it to look right with their theme may want to give YAGHB a try.

I liked Dr Nic’s github badge so much that I wrapped a sidebar plugin around it for Typo users. You can get it from github.

Or install it into typo like this:

# cd typo/vendor/plugins
# git clone git://github.com/peteonrails/githubsidebar.git github_sidebar

Dr. Nic has released a javascript based badge for GitHub. While I generally like to keep my sidebars clean because most readers just ignore the cruft in there, this badge is really useful for me. Plus, as the author points out, you get at least a 100% boost in coolness.

I like the badge, but it’s a little less than seamless looking in my sidebar. He’s made the source code available on github (of course), so I could download it and style it to my liking, but I’d much rather benefit from his future releases without having to re-download and merge.

Specifically, I’d like to be able to suppress the header the badge prints, so I can wrap it into a Typo plugin for a better look.

Working on a patch now to do just that.