Topic: Weblogs

Mash Note: WordPress

Brian Dillard, Thursday, May 15, 2008 @ 4:41 pm

I'm only one day into building out our new WordPress templates and I'm already in love with the venerable blogging platform. Why? Two reasons so far:

1. Templates can be managed as files: No more dealing with a clumsy web interface for the maintenance of PHP and CSS templates. Now, I can edit files in my environment of choice - a.k.a. TextMate - and FTP them up when I'm done.
2. Posts can be edited as raw HTML: Sure, in Typepad, you can switch back and forth between WYSIWYG mode and raw HTML mode. But each time you do, mysterious additional HTML - usually a bunch of cruft that totally ruins your formatting - appears. With WordPress, you can disable WYSIWYG mode altogether for your account. Sure, the resulting editing window still tries to do your thinking for you, but in a far less obtrusive way than most such "tools." You can write raw HTML and expect your markup to survive the publishing process more or less intact.

The interface doesn't seem to like Firefox 3 much. I'm sure I'll tear my hair out a few times as I complete our templates. But based on one day's work, I'm happy to be moving to a platform that's geared toward developers rather than business users.

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Software Development

Joining the fray without a firewall

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, May 13, 2008 @ 1:06 pm

The 37signals folks know a thing or two about building a brand through open public discourse. Today they blogged about their "public communications policy." I like what they had to say:

When you trust people to make a reasonable decision, they’ll usually make one. When you require everything someone writes to go through an approval process they’ll probably write less and be less interesting. We don’t want people to be afraid to write or afraid to think.

That's certainly the policy here at Pathfinder, where everyone is encouraged to post about their projects, interests and specialties. For some of us, it's part of our job description; for others, it's an officially sanctioned extracurricular. In fact, my colleague Dietrich Kappe and I are presenting a brown bag about effective blogging tomorrow to most of the company. We're that interested in hearing from everyone.

For development shops, corporate blogs offer the chance to show off techniques, processes, philosophies and opinions to potential customers, job-seekers and fellow travelers. We target most posts to the developer community rather than future clients. But even the most nitty-gritty technical how-to serves an important marketing function. By virtue of existing, these posts show clients our company's values and methodology. As for the technical details, well, let's hope they make us look smart every once in a while.

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Software Development

2007 in review: Five humble suggestions for better programming and writing

Brian Dillard, Monday, December 31, 2007 @ 1:33 pm

I began 2007 as a front-end tech lead on a multi-million-dollar software project for a global travel company with a massively distributed waterfall development model. I ended it working in small, agile teams on R&D projects at a small outsourced software shop. I got involved in open source, became (yet another) tech blogger, and set in motion lots of other writing and speaking projects for 2008. It's been quite a year.

I'm sure everybody is sick of year-end lists at this point, so let me present a slightly more personal and highly subjective list of the five most important things I learned this year about software development and technology writing:

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Software Development