What Do You Want to Read About Seaside or Smalltalk?
By Ramon Leon - 12 October 2006 under Seaside, Smalltalk
Having had FeedBurner up for nearly a week now, and the blog for nearly three, I find it interesting seeing what people are actually reading, quite surprising as well. I assumed that most people would want to read about Seaside, or things I've done with Seaside. This is turning out not to be the case.
Out of the top 5, only one is the longer tutorial style post, the rest are mostly comments of mine on someone else's blog post, or the one short rant on enterprise development. I'm not going to change what I'm writing just yet, I'll wait a few weeks and keep an eye on what's being read, both on the feeds and on the site itself.
In the last three weeks, I've recieved the following traffic...
Over the last six days, I've seen the following results for the top 5 posts on the feeds...
| Article | Views | Full Article |
| Enterprise Development Suckage | 178 | 53 |
| Turtles All the Way Down | 87 | 41 |
| Seaside and Page Templates, Again | 85 | 34 |
| Seaside, Making the Impossible, Possible | 72 | 2 |
| Running Seaside, Apache, and IIS on One Machine | 39 | 14 |
I've been experimenting with titles a bit, to see the effect they have on traffic, and I wrote the Enterprise Development Suckage rant explicitly as a test to see if that title would get clicks because it seemed provocative, apparently, it did. The Seaside Apache article making the top 5 surprised me a little as well, I just wrote it last night, so maybe there are some things people still want to know about Seaside.
So it begs the question, what do people want to read? When you sit down and catch up on your daily blog posts, what kinds of posts are you hoping to find? I'm not quite sure which direction I'll take, but I'm interested in any suggestions from existing subscribers, via comments or private email, about what you'd like to see here.
Comments (automatically disabled after 1 year)
What would I like to read?
I would like to see someone do an exploration of how all the little peices of Seaside fit together ... the life cycle of objects from when the page is requested to the result is returned. In my learning of Seaside (and smalltalk) I have been trying to figure this out. I can create great pages easily with Seaside, but I am still a newbie and do fully understand what's happening under the hood. I am curious though... ther just doesn't seem to be a lot writen on it.
I'm new to Smallltalk and Seaside, and I would very much like to read more getting started in Seaside, especially using Dolphin D6. The tutorials on seaside.st are good, but still require a great deal of study to figure out all the main elements and concepts of Seaside. Can you illustrate these concepts piecemeal, in small bite-size chunks? Similar to those code snippets in Ruby Cookbook or Python Cookbook books, which offer small half-page samples of working code to explain to illustrate a feature.
This is one of hte few blogs that covers Dolphin and Seaside, so you can offer an invaluable service here.
I've never actually used Dolphin, I'm a Squeaker, but anything I write on Seaside should apply.
I think I've been doing pretty well on titles, it's something I definitely think about before writing. I've also gone back and changed a title here or there to make it more clear.
I appreciate the feedback, I'll definitely keep all this in mind for future posts. Maybe I'll shorten up the blog posts a bit, the shorter ones do seem to get more traffic, so I need to get to the point quickly.
Why do you want to write what others want to read ! Don't you write for yourself ! ?
Because I want to help the Smalltalk/Squeak/Seaside community grow, so I'd rather write something others find useful in pursuit of that goal, than simply spew stuff for my own satisfaction. I also enjoy teaching, so in writing for others, I am writing for myself, in a way.
What I'd like to see is some discussion of how to connect a Seaside app. to external resources, like a database, and an XML web service (is there a framework for this?). I know there are database drivers, but I have yet to find any documentation that talks about how to use them. You wrote a post on using ODBC with SQL Server, which was informative. What about MySQL and PostGreSQL?
Answering my own question Re: Is there a framework for web services? You answered it at: Seaside for the .Net Developer
And there's documentation on how to use it at the SoapClient link in your post.
Glad you found what you needed.
I like the exploratory posts - you finding out what worked for you with regards to seaside & squeak. I'm in the "programming after work" camp and appreciate the insight you provide into doing real-world things with seaside and squeak.
Given the seaside docs aren't the most expansive (i.e. what do I do after having followed the 'counter' tutorial?), how about a few more code examples, or even (time permitting) a small tutorial every now and then?
Yup, this is what I plan to do. Feel free to send me suggestions for tutorials, if there's something specific you're looking to learn. I just might write it up.
I enjoy your posts thoroughly, Can you talk about seaside and persistance to databases(Mysql, Postgres). Thank You.
Thanks, and yes, I've been a bit side tracked lately, busy with other things, but I do plan on writing more about databases soon.
Having a smalltalk blog myself, and being a reader of blogs, here is what I tend to like.
topic-related posts. If a blog is purporting to be a programming language blog, it should generally stick to programming languages. I'll remove it from my feed list if it starts doing politics, etc.
descriptive titles - I usually skip posts from feeds which are vaguely titled unless I follow the author closely.
terser/direct posts - If a post has a lot of good info, and gets long, that's ok. But I would prefer several posts on that topic. It's hard for me to grasp the point of blog posts which say something in the 4th paragraph like "...which brings me to my main point..."
my two cents