SitePoint! Woohoo!

I woke up this morning to a rather pleasant surprise.

Kay Smoljak has been working on some articles on the SitePoint blog about frameworks for ColdFusion in which she's interviewing various framework authors. For those of you who may not know Kay, she's a purple-haired web diva from down-under, part of the Adobe Ambassador program and a member of the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA).

Of course I was excited to get in her lineup as soon as I could. My big drive right now is to improve visibility of the framework and encourage more community involvement, so right now I'm all about being a media slut. :) You may have noticed that I recently added blog-style or "livedocs" style comments to the official website and that I created a new wiki that allows anonymous edits.

Anyway Kay's articles are going up on the SitePoint blog. I was already pretty happy about the idea of having content on SitePoint because they're pretty popular, get loads of traffic and that means good PR for our framework community. The surprise was an email from Kay letting me know that in addition to being published in the blog, the SitePoint editors felt the content was worthy enough to merit being a featured highlight on the SitePoint home page! Kay even took a screen-capture to send me just in case I didn't read the email right away, since she doesn't know how often those highlights change. I must say I'm really flattered, and I think this will be good for the community. :)

Kay was really helpful getting this content up, particularly given my propensity for long-windedness. :) She said that they try to keep the blogs relatively short because people tend to go elsewhere without reading if they notice the content of the blog is several pages. And as it was the other two articles from Geoff Bowers (FarCry) and John Farrar (COOP) were already getting long. Well as with most things I tend to go well beyond the mark and my responses to her questions were ... probably about twice as long as the others. It's funny because that's also mentioned in the question about documentation. I am a little concerned about that answer turning people off, particularly since I think the comment about having later added the quick start guide got edited out. But all the docs are on the site now including the quick start, so hopefully it won't deter too many people.

Kay suggested that I publish my full response elsewhere (with a link to the SitePoint blog) because she felt she had to cut a lot of good content. Though I think she did a really good job of editing it. I will probably republish some of the content from my responses, although I'm not sure it will be in one place.

And lastly as an aside, if you read the other two articles, you'll probably notice one thing in particular. All three of us, myself, John and Geoff have made claims of our frameworks being "more like ColdFusion" than others. The irony hasn't escaped me. :P Though in the end I suppose it does mean that it doesn't really mean much for one of us to say it. What really matters is whether you agree and whether you feel "more like ColdFusion" is a good thing.