Lonely Lion

I’ve been adding code here and there to the fabulously non-featured tastebud-project, and have been debating whether or not to include comments as a feature. This morning, the Freakonomics guy posted this bit about “who comments?” It reminded me that I need to make a decision about comments.

tastebud-project, bless its little heart, is not really a full featured blogging package, it’s just a Django app that I kept reusing and decided to formalize a bit and release. The two projects that led to it (Tastebud and Victim of Time) don’t allow comments, simply because the people running both sites (Camri and I for Tastebud and Brett and Todd for VoT) don’t want to manage a bunch of comments. My previous side-project as message board maker for Chicago improvisers made me really dislike managing communities. A recent post by the CherryPy guy sums it up nicely, “You’re writing a community tool with a moderator mode. Do you really want to be a bouncer for the rest of your life?”

I allow comments on this blog, which is clearly a huge deal, as I get hundreds and hundreds of comments (I don’t, I’m being sarcastic). I had them turned off for a very long time, and never really felt bad about it. Comments, in general, are a nice way to build a community, but really…the side projects I like to work on aren’t typically “community” projects, they’re more like publishing projects. I want to write something, for you. I’m not necessarily trying to start a dialogue. Does that sound dickish? It’s not meant to be. I know it sounds very Web 1.0-ish, but…hey…it’s the truth. You can’t argue with the truth! Right? Uh…right?

So, in short, as of right this minute, I’m not going to include comments on the awesome tastebud-project. This decision is subject to change at a moments notice. The good thing is, if you actually use tastebud-project (why the hell would you do that?), it’s easy enough to add comments, as Django bakes them right in. So…comment away suckers.

I’m working on two sites for two unrelated projects, both in Django, both essentially blogs with Podcasts.

To that end, I started pulling models and general code from Tastebud and decided that it was an alright bare-bones blogging tool. So, I slapped a license on it and uploaded it to Google Code. It’s unusable currently, but if you’re interested, keep an eye on it. It’ll be a good exercise in trying to keep software general enough that it can be used by other people, while not so general that it takes hours to get running.

This is a crowded space, no one really needs more blogging software. I’m not trying to serve a market, I’m really just serving myself. Django is easy enough to use that blog software is almost easier to hand-roll than it is to use someone else’s project. That said, I liked ubernostrum’s recent release of Django Snippets source on Google Code so I figured I’d follow suit.