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The SBlog Project
Last updated at 6:11 pm UTC on 11 July 2018
Note: This and child pages are historical pages from 2003

Project SmallBlog - the Squeak Weblog Server (2003)


There are a couple of reasons that I am interested in this project.


Point of departure. Do a limited number of tasks in a limited time

First, I've become a follower of a show called Monster Garage. The draw of the show is primal; men with tattoos cut metal with fire. The format of the show is simple. Someone comes up with an idea, such as 'build a hot dog cart that can go 130 mph'. The parameters are simple, a stock vehicle is provided to the build team. After the machine is built, the vehicle must look stock. The build team has $3000 USD to spend on parts to transform the vehicle. The team has 6 days to build the vehicle, on day 7 they race:

Day 1 - Design the Monster Machine
Day 2-6 - Build the Monster
Day 7 - You race the Monster

There are two groups involved, the design team which only works on day one, and the build team which actually builds the machine. The teams usually consist of 5 people. Each of the winners get $3400 of tools, the losers get nothing and are forced to watch their failed creation meet a terrible fate at the hands of the host.


Transfer to Squeak programming


I thought that this might be an interesting approach to build software as a group. Spend a little time designing the program, then build the program, but do it in a time constrained manner so that it doesn't drag on. To me, one of the problems with software is that not very many people know when to 'ship it'.

After trying to install one of the traditional web log servers, (see Manly Web Development), I was impressed about how happy Squeak is in a server environment. You install Squeak and throw the image down, you're ready to roll. I can only guess what happens in some of those other environments.

Over the last few years, Squeak has been changing. There's been a lot of projects going on, but it seems to me that it's been awhile since we've seen an interesting 'community built' application come about. So I thought it would be interesting for a few folks to get together and build something using some of the more recently introduced tools. I'm interested in building an 'exemplar' Squeak server app that people can take a look at to grok some of the different parts of the less visible parts of the system in a way that may be useful to "outsiders" coming from other parts of the network space.



SBlog Challenge



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