The Virtues of Chitchat - A modest proposal for using blogs to keep IT teams and management up-to-date on implementation.
We did this three years back, running Squish on Zope. But The Powers That Be made me take it down - we were collecting lots of useful data on software they didn't trust, and they were afraid it might all got lost. So, instead, we just used email for everything. And it all got lost.
I've never got Zope Zen, but installing Zope and wacking Squish, ZWiki, Plone and the like on it are a piece of piss.
Via Slashdot.
Posted to Blogs by Simon Brunning at May 18, 2004 01:06 PMYeah, it would have worked, if it wern't for those pesky kids (read directors, etc).
It was usefull and simple and easily searchable and was working- great stuff.
Like simon says, they shoulda let us keep it.
Would you elaborate on the problems you had with the Zope products?
Posted by: DeanG on May 18, 2004 04:21 PMWe had absolutely no problems *whatsoever*. But our senour management hadn't heard of Zope and couldn't get their heads around this commie-pinko open source stuff - "Who'll support us if it goes wrong?" So they made us take it down.
We are curing them of the latter - we can demonstrate thet we get better 'support' (in the form of mailing lists etc.) than we do for our commercial purchases.
Posted by: Simon Brunning on May 18, 2004 04:34 PMA Wiki seems more appropriate to me -- there's some transient information that would be more appropriate in blog form, but most information that comes out of IT should be a bit more permanent (though also dated in case it becomes stale). With an RSS feed, and the use of quality log messages, it should have most of the same advantages. (Hmm... the RSS should really include the body of new pages as well, which most Wiki implementations don't do)
Posted by: Ian Bicking on May 18, 2004 05:07 PMActually, we had both a blog and a wiki up, but people seemed to prefer the blog. Squish has threaded comments, which are good for discussions.
This was early in the project. I suspect that once the discussions started to resolve themselves the wiki would have been a good place to keep the results, but Zope didn't survive that far into the project. :-(
Posted by: Simon Brunning on May 18, 2004 05:16 PMThanks. I didn't know which way to interpret the slang.
The latest Zwiki has an improved comment mode, although not indented as Squish folks might like.
The RSS feeds don't include the text, but could easily (along with first few lines "summary").. see http://zwiki.org/Rss2