Some thoughts on comments
When I was planning the current incarnation of this blog, one of my goals was to have it require as little maintenance as possible. I decided that the best way to achieve this was to make the site fully static. This means that there's no server-side software to patch or maintain, so I don't need to worry about keeping track of WordPress bugs or anything. Just a bunch of static documents on a web server — doesn't get much simpler than that.
One limitation of a static blog is that it doesn't support comments on posts. To get around this, I thought about using a service that provides off-site comment hosting. Via TechCrunch, I learned about a bunch of these: CoComment, Disqus, Intense Debate, SezWho. My favorite was JS-Kit, mainly because it's incredibly easy to set up. However, after a brief trial period, I decided that I wasn't comfortable giving a (possibly short-lived) startup the power to add arbitrary content to my site, so I abandoned this approach.
I'm not sure what to do. I don't want to give up the simplicity of my current setup, nor do I want to deal with comment spam or anonymous assholes. At the same time, I would like to give people some convenient way of providing feedback on my posts. But after re-reading Joel Spolsky's thoughts on this issue (as well as the post by Dave Winer that inspired him), I'm not sure that allowing comment posting on my site is the right way to do that.
Any suggestions? E-mail them to me, I guess.
Tags: meta
Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:46 UTC
Giving up on application/xhtml+xml
Until today, I had been following the recommendation of the W3C Validator and serving the XHTML pages of this blog as application/xhtml+xml (to all clients except Internet Explorer). Unfortunately, it appears that Google just doesn't like to index application/xhtml+xml, as the bizarrely incomplete search results for this site seem to confirm.
Since having my site properly indexed is more important to me than strict MIME-type adherence, I've changed my server configuration to send a content type of application/xhtml+xml only to the validator. All other user agents get Apache's default (text/html).
Apparently, I really enjoy seeing clean markup-validation results, since there doesn't seem to be any other benefit to worrying about W3C-recommended content types.
Update: Since the Google search results for this site are now sensible, it seems like my assessment of the situation was correct.
Tags: meta
Wed, 17 Oct 2007 22:56 UTC
About This Blog
This is the personal blog of Christopher Stawarz, a software developer who lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The design of this site is a slightly-modified version of Typography Paramount, an open-source web design template created by Six Shooter Media and available at Open Designs. The pages are statically rendered by a custom Python script, which uses docutils to convert reStructuredText input files to XHTML, Pygments to add syntax highlighting to code examples, and Cheetah templates to generate the output files.