But what with the re-generation time of the blog and the fact that this wasn't meant to be a blog post to begin with (HN has an upper limit to the length of the text in an article header) I feel that leaving it in there is ok.
It would be a ton of work to get it excised for just that one posting and frankly I have more urgent things to do than to worry about being perceived as politically incorrect.
Those who know me do not care and those who don't are probably not going to be persuaded that this wasn't a ploy to get some more twitter followers or karma points.
So, now that we have that out of the way, and since you started it: I personally don't like it - even if I agree - when people are bitching all the time about formatting and things external to the body of the article that is posted.
It isn't rare at all to see a whole thread about an interesting or important text unravel into a discussion about fonts, style sheets in general, various plugs for readability or suggestions like yours. It's off-topic and detracts from the original message, which was a simple, genuine and heartfelt 'thank you', without any ulterior motive or other ploy. I'm not selling you anything, not trying to get people to click on advertising and I frankly couldn't care less about how this impacts what people think of me. I simply felt that we owed HN a sign of gratitude and found the easiest way to express that.
Of course it is much easier to nit-pick about style and format rather than to contribute positively (or even negatively) on the substance. And so you'll find lots of people vote such non-contributing stuff up, which often crowds out the real discussion.
I used to work in a bike repair shop where they had a large sign that said 'if you've got nothing to do, don't do it here'. Something similar applies to off topic gripes about the format instead of the message.
Hi Jacques - it's nice talking to you, you have some good stuff on your blog.
>external to the body of the article that is posted.
Well you see, that is EXACTLY the problem.
The way you formatted the blog, the "you should follow me on twitter" thing it is COMPLETELY indistinguishable from the body of the post. I can promise you that every single person that reads that blog post to the end also reads "you should follow me on twitter". It's even the same freaking spacing as another paragraph. I'm pretty sure this is intentional, hell, I'm doing much a similar thing on my own blog:
>It would be a ton of work to get it excised for just that one posting
Really? I feel now you're just talking from the rear.
Here. I took a look at your blog. jQuery is already included. It's even simpler than what I wrote above. Just put this inside your thank-you-hn.md file:
I tested that script by inserting it in your blog. Took me about 45 seconds and will probably take you even less. Certainly less time than it took you to write this big response, where you agree with me but lament that what I wrote above is just too much damn work.
Really, even if you won't do it for this blog post, just change the wording to "Follow me on Twitter". Really do you care about these few percentage points of followers that only would've followed you had you had that more aggressive wording in your footer? You put some great content on your blog - I feel you should do it justice by letting it shine on its own without the personal marketing tactics at the bottom.
For the record, when I say a ton of work I mean: figuring out where to make that change, re-generating the blog (which takes way too long), testing the whole thing and then deploying the change to the production server.
You don't get to decide how I allocate my time and half an hour or more is time I currently do not have to spend on something as un-important as this.
> Really? I feel now you're just talking from the rear.
I think we're done discussing this. Thank you for your contribution.
Please point to the location where I say I'm deciding how you allocate your time.
>I think we're done discussing this. Thank you for your contribution.
That language was probably more harsh than it needed to be. Still I've been hacking on my blog for the day and (granted it is much smaller than yours) I couldn't fathom how changing one line could ever be described as "a huge amount of work" when it currently looks like this to me:
<change line in editor. save the file>
$ fab deploy
That's all it takes. If what can be reduced to the above really takes half an hour for you then I think it would be a good time investment to try and speeden that deployment process up.
Sorry for the language above - really I just like your post and am saying how I find it could be improved.
> If what can be reduced to the above really takes half an hour for you then I think it would be a good time investment to try and speeden that deployment process up.
You are still telling me how to allocate my time.
For historical reasons my blog is a mix of badly interacting scripts called 'octopress'. I already spent a day and a bit just getting it to work properly and to migrate the content from Drupal.
Whenever I so much as touch it something breaks. This can be for random reasons, a misplaced character here or there does wonders. Drupal sucks (for different reasons) but at least it worked.
Octopress is nicer in theory but it simply does not scale beyond the trivial, there is a lot of content in those pages and clearly octopress has a problem with that. Just correcting a typo takes several minutes (if it works at all).
So let's make a deal here: you allocate your time and you run your blog and I won't tell you what to do or change, and I will do the same with mine.
And if and when that rainy Sunday with nothing to do rolls by (I wish...) then I'll spend the time required to re-write the software underpinning the blog to improve the turn-around time. Likely that will be several Sundays.
Until then I thank the guys that wrote Octopress for doing the job they did. Figuring how to make the template to change for just one file is beyond my current level of knowledge and I do not have the time right now to improve on that. It most definitely is not as easy as you make it out to be, this is a generated blog, not one built up from separate pages of pre-rendered content. So any change I make to the end product is automatically reverted on the next generation. The pages themselves are flat text (markdown), and do not have the ability to output javascript.
But what with the re-generation time of the blog and the fact that this wasn't meant to be a blog post to begin with (HN has an upper limit to the length of the text in an article header) I feel that leaving it in there is ok.
It would be a ton of work to get it excised for just that one posting and frankly I have more urgent things to do than to worry about being perceived as politically incorrect.
Those who know me do not care and those who don't are probably not going to be persuaded that this wasn't a ploy to get some more twitter followers or karma points.
So, now that we have that out of the way, and since you started it: I personally don't like it - even if I agree - when people are bitching all the time about formatting and things external to the body of the article that is posted.
It isn't rare at all to see a whole thread about an interesting or important text unravel into a discussion about fonts, style sheets in general, various plugs for readability or suggestions like yours. It's off-topic and detracts from the original message, which was a simple, genuine and heartfelt 'thank you', without any ulterior motive or other ploy. I'm not selling you anything, not trying to get people to click on advertising and I frankly couldn't care less about how this impacts what people think of me. I simply felt that we owed HN a sign of gratitude and found the easiest way to express that.
Of course it is much easier to nit-pick about style and format rather than to contribute positively (or even negatively) on the substance. And so you'll find lots of people vote such non-contributing stuff up, which often crowds out the real discussion.
I used to work in a bike repair shop where they had a large sign that said 'if you've got nothing to do, don't do it here'. Something similar applies to off topic gripes about the format instead of the message.