Or, A Blog's Story
A couple weeks ago, I "finished" my first release of Vying Games. So, I sat down with my to-do list and began prioritizing. What to do next? Develop more games? Work on the AI for the existing games? Work on the website itself? Ultimately, I decided I needed a blog more than anything else.
There are plenty of good reasons to have a blog -- which is probably why there are about 28 trillion of them. That said, there are only a couple reasons that really matter to me. First, I think it's important to keep visitors to Vying Games informed. Sometimes changes to a website can be subtle but important. When we visit a website often enough, common features tend to disappear. How likely are we to notice a new link in the menu? Or footer? A blog is a great tool to keep people informed about website changes.
It's not only website changes that I want to keep people informed about, though. A blog is also a great way to communicate an organization's values. If you read a blog like Signal vs Noise, it doesn't take long to figure out that 37signals values simple, elegant design and an unmatched user experience. I hope that someday, this blog will similarly embody what Vying Games is all about.
While I hope to someday grow Vying Games into a company, right now it's a single person venture. Up until 4 months ago I had been working in a small, tight knit, IT department for 5 years. So working from home is an alien experience for me. Probably the most difficult adjustment has been working alone instead of as part of a team. I miss the camaraderie. It's difficult not having someone to share that cool hack with, or to vent about a frustrating bug. It's easy to become unmotivated. Which is, again, where this blog comes in. This may be a one-sided discussion (I have -- to the best of my knowledge -- only one regular reader), but hopefully it will serve as a good outlet.
Choosing Blog Software
So, I started looking for blog software. Ultimately, I wanted a blog that would:
- Match the look-and-feel of the rest of Vying Games
- Allow placement of arbitrary articles on the root page at http://vying.org
- Eventually, integrate user logins from Vying Games
To be truthful, I didn't look very long before I decided to build my own. The structure of a blog is fairly well defined, and there are, as I mentioned earlier, about 28 trillion examples out there on the web. By integrating blog software right into the Vying Games webapp, all the above features would be easy to implement.
But Isn't that Reinventing the Wheel?
Yes, which is why I had some qualms about it. Wouldn't it take too long? Wouldn't it be too much of a distraction from developing games? However, in software development, writing something for oneself, is at least an order of magnitude less time consuming than writing something for others. So before I got started I decided to drop any aspirations of developing a Wordpress or Typepad competitor. There aren't any fancy text editor components (just simple Markdown via BlueCloth). There aren't skins, or blog rolls, or trackbacks. I didn't bother with captchas or spam filtering for comments. I stuck with features that were absolutely necessary or important to me.
In the end, keeping it simple (stupid?) saved a lot of time -- I was able to implement this blog in 3 days of light programming. I'll have to add some of those cut features, eventually. In the case of spam filtering, hopefully before the blog gets spammed.
But overall, I'm happy with the experience. It was definitely more gratifying than the alternative would have been. And, now that I've seen how easy RSS is, I could definitely see using it for other things.
Which is not to say I'd reinvent the wheel every time. There is a balancing point at which it becomes impractical. I just hope I'll be smart enough to recognize that point in the future.
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Dan says,