Engaging the Community

Say hello to some new voices

Novaleaf has been around for 5 years, and during that time I've personally written perhaps 20 or so substantial blog posts.  (Some lost to now-dead Posterous, but a lot of the game stuff can be found on AltDevBlogADay.  So while I can't say I've been a proflific writer, I think I've done my part.

However, you don't see much from the others at Novaleaf.   So today I hope to change that.

Show and Tell

As part of our new "Show and Tell" initiative, every month you'll be hearing from other people at Novaleaf in a variety of topics.    Most of these will be technically focused, but sometimes would fit a general (if perhaps, Thai) audience.

Here's the general guidelines given to everyone at Novaleaf, so you get an idea what will be popping up in the future:

• A feature you implemented in the last 3 months that is useful for other people like you to know about.
• A review / explanation of a piece (or pieces) of code that you wrote, and what was tricky about it or what's interesting about it.
• A problem that you think should be solved, and your ideas on how to solve it.

The medium (or, why blogspot.com?)

I spent a few hours today investigating the state of blog platforms.  Honestly I'm not too impressed with Blogger, but I'm also not so impressed with the other options out there.    Blogger was choosen because it has good integration with Google Apps Accounts (which we use at Novaleaf) and also can automatically republish to our Novaleaf Google+ page.       

My biggest complaints with Blogger is it's lack of custom domain option, and inability to tweet the posts.  I am planning on modifying our News page to list our tweets instead of the current system, so this will be a bit manual I suppose.

Edit:  Turns out you can use custom domains with blogger, and the free service twitterfeed.com allows tweeting, so I suppose blogger is pretty reasonable now :)