This takes me back to my initial question, what can we do to: a) get more Smalltalkers to use a Smalltalk based blog system ...
Guys - this has been a very interesting thread. I'll put my hand up and say I feel guilty not using a Smalltalk based blog/website. I briefly considered it a few years ago when I was setting up a personal site but it was just so easy to pay $10/month and have a 1 click install of Joomla - which I played with for 1 hour, bought a nice template (another hour) and then published some content. Having said all this, for a Cms it's crazily hard to link to your own content (but it has an easy wysiwyg js editor that my partner can use to add content for me). But reading this, I would love to start again and would like a preconfigufed starting point to get my toes wet. Something setup with no obvious security flaws and a nice template (maybe 3) that can take a bit of load if needed. If there was this, it would be a no brainer (I have resolved to watch the mentioned screencast and give it a spin taking some notes). In this world I would then shame all my friends who know any smalltalk to take the "blogtalk" challenge! Of course in this world the further draw for me would be that it would be easy to then customise things with components that it's easy for me to write (particularly with our great environment). The icing on the cake would be an easy system to download/upload these components like you can in firefox (eg a gallery of them). For the latter point - I was quite taken by Avi's demos where they could do clever things with data using the power of smalltalk. To me, with a gemstone database backing things, plugins could do very powerful things like wrap all your hyperlinks in a tracker link etc. Or back out cleanly if you uninstall them. I notice it's quite nice on an iPhone that's it's easy (well could be better but...) to download things and try them and remove them if you don't like them. I think this would make the "blogtalk" challenge quite palletable. I think we are close to this world, as many pieces are there but we would need to get the same energy around it as with the core Pharo team. I've read lots of moans on this thread - and should we or shouldn't we, but I think it would be a lovely project even if it was just for us (but I bet it would attract others too). Tim