We had a big turnout for the weblog meetup at Crossroads last night but I probably made sure that one new member won’t be coming back.

There were two new people there last night: the prolific man behind ~C4Chaos (he’s got three different blogs and posts four or five times a day) and Jules Maas, who had the bad luck to sit next to me.

Danny (I think that is his name — I’ve seen him once or twice before at the meetings but I don’t have a URL) wanted us to actually talk about something related to blogging, so he asked everyone about our blog hosting. Do we use a service like Typepad, Wordpress, or Windows Live Spaces, or one of the communities like LiveJournal, or do we use a hosted account, or do we have a dedicated server somewhere, whether at a co-location facility or at home serving pages over DSL or cable? He was taking notes so once I find his post I’ll point to it.

It was a good meetup and, even though we didn’t always talk about blogging (though we mostly did), we didn’t mention science fiction once.

I got a beef-and-rice bowl from Bulgogi and they gave me a lot of food. I had eaten what I could and, as I stood up to get rid of my tray, Jack said, “You didn’t eat much of that.”

“You should have seen how much I started with,” I said. “There was this much.” As I made a motion with my hand over the bowl, I hit the glass of Sprite — the half-full glass of Sprite still cold enough to have unmelted ice — and spilled it all over Jules who was seated to my left.

She was remarkably gracious about the whole mess and even refused my offer to pay for dry cleaning.

Welcome to the Eastside Weblog Meetup, Jules. If you will come back again, I promise I won’t sit next to you.

Almost everyone else has posted a note about the meetup last night (Anita, Jack, Dennis, and Ram – but not Alex), so I’m a bit behind. We somehow manage to spend little of our time talking about blogging at these meetups but we still enjoy ourselves immensely. I’m disappointed that Anita (and Jack, I presume, though I didn’t get a chance to ask him) hasn’t been following Battlestar Galactica this season. The other folks I usually talk to about the show are still catching up from the first half of the season. I would love to know what they think about the Baltar-Six developments in the past few episodes.

Dennis — a.k.a. Orcmid — dropped by and left a comment this morning. He asked whether I had tried compiled JavaScript in .NET or not.

In the case of my strong typing epiphany, I wasn’t writing a script from scratch. Instead, I was modifying an existing script. Basically, I was changing it from doing a set of things once to doing that set of things multiple times, but with slight variations in the options. There was a bit of new logic in the program, but it was mostly refactoring. And it was the refactoring that got tough without strong typing as I converted repeating blocks of inline code into functions and corrected assumptions the original author had made (but that no longer were true). I had to change the scope of variables, create parameters, and document each new function. There were a lot of opportunities for typos.

One of the cardinal rules of modern programming is never to copy and paste. If you have two or more blocks of code that are identical, or even nearly identical, a subroutine should be made and then that subroutine called in place of the inline blocks of code. The reasoning is this: if the logic is duplicated in the code, if that logic is ever changed, it may not get picked up in all the places.

For example, pretend this pseudocode is a meaningful program:

if something equals "a" then
    doFunctionOne(using "a")
    doFunctionTwo(using "a")
    doFunctionThree(using "a")
if something equals "b" then
    doFunctionOne(using "b")
    doFunctionTwo(using "b")
    doFunctionThree(using "b")

There’s an example of copy-and-pasted code. It could easily be turned into a subroutine:

subroutine doFunctions(parameter)
    doFunctionOne(parameter)
    doFunctionTwo(parameter)
    doFunctionThree(parameter)

And then the main part of the program would look like:

if something equals "a" then
    doFunctions("a")
if something equals "b" then
    doFunctions("b")

Or even simpler, in this trivial example:

doFunctions("a")
doFunctions("b")

Imagine this kind of change, but across several hundred lines of script code.

Getting back to Dennis’s question: I have done some things with JScript.NET, but it wouldn’t have helped here because I was modifying existing code rather than starting from scratch and I needed to work within the already-established parameters.

If I have to touch this bit of code again, for anything more than the most-trivial change, I’ll most likely invest the time to convert it to managed code. It will save me — or whoever comes along after me to maintain it — more time than I’ll spend doing the conversion.

Now, another question that the devil’s advocate in me has been asking: when is copy-and-paste better than factoring code into subroutines? Let’s forget about one-off, throw-away code. For stuff that’s meant to last and be maintained, are there any situations where copy-and-paste is preferable? Perhaps I will address that in the future or, even better, maybe some of you will provide answers in the comments.

Update: I’ve got to do something to remind myself to insert the tags on the posts before posting. I need to figure out how to hook Blogjet to remind me.

Tags: meetup, programming, refactoring
del.icio.us tags: meetup, programming, refactoring

Thanks to Feedburner, my main RSS feed URL didn’t change when I moved my blog. But, for some reason, Bloglines won’t load my feed. I’ve checked, and it’s valid. I’ve also checked, and the content is there.

Except in Bloglines. And I had a lot of subscribers through Bloglines.

Anyone know anything about this?

Update (2006-02-23 13:10): Looks like something has been fixed in Bloglines. I’m seeing my posts again.

Tags: Bloglines, problems, RSS
del.icio.us tags: Bloglines, problems, RSS

Dave Winer pointed out Jeff Jarvis’s post about blogs being “prisoners of their format.” Jeff says that blogs need to have richer templates and more features: not just a set of posts. He would like to see posts with pages, and maybe news tickers — anything to make a blog Web site richer.

While I would like to see some more variety in templates, blogs are presented on more than just their site. In my experience, most blogs are read far more inside an RSS aggregator than on the site itself. I have no idea what the actual sites look like for many of the blogs I read because I never visit the site — I just read the content off the blog’s RSS feed.

And it’s RSS that has made room for so many blogs. If I had to visit every site in my Web browser because they publish their content in a way that doesn’t support syndication, then I wouldn’t read even a tenth of the sites that I do.

So let’s see some richer templates on blogs. But don’t forget about RSS — anything you don’t push out through RSS will only be read by a fraction of your audience.