devnulled: A stream for software developers and engineers

I’ve been heads down coding for what seems like 8 years now when in reality it’s just a few months, so I’ve been a little out of touch with what else is going on in the Boulder start-up scene. This also explains my spotty blog posting, but hopefully I’ll get a chance to post a bit more frequently soon. Josh from MadKast recently contacted me about installing their product, so I decided to give it a whirl. (On a side note, I have no affiliation with them at all, I just like to support fellow start-up companies.)

What is MadKast? I guess I would describe it as the FeedBurner of social bookmarking & discovery– it gives your blog readers a way to share your posts, and also supposedly gives you a way to see other sites that your readers are viewing, analytics behind what your readers are sharing with other people, etc. I haven’t yet received any sort of confirmation e-mail about a way to login and view this information, but maybe that happens automagically once they have some data to work with. Until then I don’t have a good idea about the latter parts, but the concept seems cool at least.

Just thinking about how functionality similar to this usually works, I fully expected to have to go download a Wordpress plug-in, unzip it and SCP to my server, then enable it in Wordpress and have to edit my post templates, etc. I never really looked into it because I just assumed I’d have to go through all of that work and I honestly just don’t have the time or interest currently for that. I’m just spending an hour today to try and get caught-up on personal e-mail and decided to give it a whirl. When I saw that I just needed to include a link to their script, I was still a bit skeptical thinking I would still need to edit my post template to get it to work. Not so– it literally took just a few seconds to get up and running on my blog, so color me impressed.

I’m interested to see what sort of information I can gleam from the analytics portion of MadKast, and hopefully I can start blogging somewhat more frequently soon to make that sort of thing more valuable to me. I do feel like my site is starting to get a bit widget heavy, but it still seems to load quickly for now.

Have you tried MadKast? What do you think about it? Have you seen the analytics portion of it?

Although this is a topic which has gotten much coverage, to the point of beating a dead horse, I felt obligated to comment on it as someone who served on the Editorial Board of the ColdFusion Developer’s Journal until is was recently shuttered.

When I was originally asked to join the board, I had some strong reservations about it for many reasons, but decided to give it a try for the purpose of helping out the community in a constructive way. For instance, I’d heard about a previous editorial board for LinuxWorld who all resigned at the same time, I think not compensating people who contribute to the magazine is completely unethical, and their website reminds me of a “warez” site where popups, videos, and all kinds of other annoying crap invade your computer. Despite all of that, I assumed that being part of an editorial board would help voice developers concerns like “Your site makes the baby Jesus cry, make it stop!”, “What kind of monkeys are editing the articles?”, and “Why do you keep stealing people’s content and publishing it as your own?”.

I thought perhaps as a board member, I’d have a chance to read articles which were still in draft and help with the code and articles, offer suggestions, and maybe even catch some of those typos which seem to plague the CFDJ. Having worked in ColdFusion for (at the time) 8 years, writing somewhat useful blog entries for quite some time, as well as doing tech editing for a ColdFusion book, and having a Computer Science background (kind of a rarity among CF Developers?) this seemed like a pretty good fit.

Instead, I think it just entailed having some community names added to the board to show that they were involved but in reality none of the people listed had any say in anything, nor even had any idea what things were being put in each issue. We never saw any articles, or even previews of what a printed issue would look like. I would have even appreciated a free subscription for writing and editing articles, but I never got that either– it certainly wasn’t worth paying for. I saw the final version of magazines the same way everyone else does, by going to the PDF download site. As others have noted, we had no idea it was being shut down until the entry was posted at the CFDJ itself.

I really never went out of my way to promote the CFDJ or even write new articles for them because it didn’t seem like anything had changed. It fact, it only got worse as time went on– it was hard to even get any sort of e-mail response from anyone on SysCon on the editors mailing list as time went on.

That said, the board really put a lot of time and effort into trying to breathe life back into the publication, but it was for little to no gain. It is with a little sorrow however– I can remember when I was first getting started with CF how valuable the publication was. I’d say most of us were all ready to resign out of frustration, though it wouldn’t have really mattered since communicating with SysCon has been like talking to a black hole for quite some time.

I think the only way I can sum this up is– I for one welcome the Fusion Authority overlords.

I can’t say I’m an avid reader of Dilbert by any means, but today’s comic features a mention of Java:

Don’t bother. I already coded a Java app to do everything you do.

Good stuff.