@PaulG: Sounds like you need a less sophisticated sense of humour like the rest of us then!
I do like the bizarre scheme of the comment, however the words “donkey” and “sponge” are used twice. This detracts from it somewhat.
It’s funny how many people blast the comment system as well as the number of comments on this blog … by leaving a yet another comment!
haha
No Comment.
I’m not sure that I like the idea of voting posts up and down, but I would put in a request for avatars. At the moment it feels like the “community” is too large for me to get a handle on. All that exists for myself is you, me and ‘a huge bunch of other people’. Some of those people are very smart and I’m sure there must be peoples comments I read again and again that I think are good, but it’s difficult to keep track of who they are with just a name. An avatar would, I think, help a little with that as it’s a lot easier to remember and associate something visual.
It doesn’t solve the problem of a lot of readers, and new readers, being swamped by the number of posts, but for someone like myself who almost always reads all the comments it could be a real help in building the sense of community.
Jeff, the feedburner counter is dropping!
The feedburner counter has some weird, repeatable cyclical properties every week.
The problem with metrics is that you start to care more about satisfying the metric than satisfying yourself.
This is why I never read the comments anymore.
Like Mattkins says, the comment is clearly from a mad lib. But all credit goes to “hello”, isn’t a mad lib a great way to define programming? For those unfamiliar with mad libs, they are a form of near-English in which defined parameters are entered to create a text. The result is a confusing script that almost could make sense but the origin of which is really only understood by the person writing it.
Yes, programming and better yet defining the software area and components end up you talking stuff that you don’t personal care about that much but is important to the business of the customer. So the words and phrases of the definitions might get wierd with strange business rules and programming issues, but still have some sense to somebody. The definer has to be careful not to let the rules dominate, because the rules come from the representatives of the customer who might not properly know the business - or at least not in harmony with all the other representatives. Or somebody just understood something wrong in some phase.
“Hello” has mad skills.
I’ve gotten a few like that on my blogs over the years. If only they were all so amusing…
I disagree wholeheartedly.
Blogs are worthless drivel from worthless people who have nothing better to do than self-congratulate their assholishness.
Comments are worse. Comments are proof positive that intelligence is lacking not only in America, but pretty much everywhere. Constructive debate does not happen in comments and if the “community” knows more than you about a topic, YOU should not be writing about it.
About the self-selecting nature of comments…
The selection of people responding to a post are likely to be in agreement with the blog author - few people keep reading a blogger they don’t agree with, and fewer contribute.
In light of that, surely there is a vast swath of counter-argument which will never be heard/read here, because the blog and its audience act as a positive feedback loop.
Not everyone agrees with all your posts, certainly, but it will self-select similarly-minded people. If there is an anti-usability, users-are-wrong, obfuscation-loaded truth out there, you’ll never see it. Every blog has its own religion.
What are the steps needed to familiarize oneself with a programming language?
- Type the language name into Google
- Click submit
- Select the next item
- Find out that the page does not explain how to get started
- Go to a sub page X to find out, it doesn’t either
- Go back to step 3) until you find something useful. Then go to step 7)
- Find out that the useful page doesn’t have all the necessary tools listed
- Type a tool definition into Google
- Click submit
- Select next item
- Find out that the page does not explain how to get started
- Curse the gods of software development
… - Buy an another book about the programming language
- Read the book
… - Find out that the tools produce mystical errors while you try to compile the example X
- Copy the error message
- Paste the error message into Google
…
I usually only read the first comment, because I love it when someone becomes famous by claiming the first post. lol
Riddle me this, if comments are so vital to a blog why are they almost never in the RSS feeds? When they are it’s usually as a separate feed altogether. If the comments, as you suggest, are great things that ought not to be missed then shouldn’t the cream of the crop show up to the subscribbers?
It’s about a half-and-half for me, between when I want to respond to the post, and when I want to respond to comments. This is a comments comment.
One of the interesting things I’ve noticed about this particular blog is the degree of segue that occurs in the comments, based off of one sentence, quote, or hyperlink that doesn’t by itself really indicate the subject of the post.
Case in point. You compare a blog without comments to Amazon without user reviews. Then, a barrage of comments appear arguing the usefulness of amazon user reviews. It’s kind of weird! Though, I guess it proves your initial point- As far as the comments are concerned, the initial post is just a starting point.
This reminds me of something I heard about raves. A rave without ecstasy is not a rave, it’s just a party. I agree that a blog without comments is not a blog as we have come to understand the term blog. Yeah, you can have a “rave” without the ecstasy, I guess, but most people would not call it a rave, they’d call it a party.
I find it odd that you’re partnering with Joel on your new community-driven site, when a recent stack overflow podcast he went off on blog commenters as useless second-guessers. Does he realized that the only way your new site will succeed is with that second-guessing community?
I’m not sure if I should be happy that it references my country but, what the hell.