Project blogs

In my Blogs and Wikis entry, I briefly mentioned that we're using blogs on my current project. Using Pebble, initially I created a single blog that we (the project team) could use to share useful information. Stuff like configuring the development environment, links to useful documents and explanations of designs. In single-user mode, Pebble will host a single blog that can be configured with one or more blog contributors, allowing anybody in the team to contribute content. Until I introduced CruiseControl, this was working well.

One of the problems with blogging your build is that the number of build reports will eventually outnumber the number of blog entries that have been contributed by team members. I originally had the build reports from CruiseControl being published by the MetaWeblog API (thanks to Lasse's WeblogPublisher) into a specific category, but the build reports were starting to take over the blog, cluttering up the homepage.

To solve this problem, we're now running Pebble in multi-user mode with two blogs.

  • Project blog : This is the original blog that the team can contribute useful information to.
  • Project build blog : This is an additional blog, dedicated to the build reports from CruiseControl. Nobody on the team can contribute to it except for the CruiseControl publisher via XML-RPC.
I like this idea better than having a single blog because it's easier for people to choose whether they want to see the build reports or not. This is particularly appropriate for members of the extended team (people that are involved in the project, but not on a day-to-day basis) because they are probably not interested in seeing which files we checked-in recently and how many times the build has been broken.

For those of us that do want to see all content across both blogs, Pebble makes this easy. In mutli-user (multi-blog) mode, Pebble will aggregate content from each blog and summarise it on the front page, making it appear as a single top-level blog. Starting with version 1.6, you can easily navigate through this top-level blog and, with the today summary, it's easy to see everything that has been added today. All I need to do now is hook up a nice way to promote content to a wiki and we have a really powerful tool for capturing and sharing information on a project. I've maintained a project blog before and looking at the content after the project finished showed that we were capturing all that information that typically gets scribbled down in a notebook and forgotten about. It will be interesting to see if the same happens at the end of this project.

Update : Pebble attachments (and hence RSS enclosures) are a nice way to distribute documents.

Is anybody else using blogs in a similar way?

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Posted by Simon Brown on 17 December 2004 09:04:44 GMT #



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