No, I’m not talking about using speech synthesis to abuse your users when they make a mistake – though the idea has merit … I’m instead referring to a blog entry written by Oren Eini back in August. Oren made the suggestion that your application should have a blog – a place where it can post informative messages about normal operation and abnormal conditions.

I think this is an idea with considerable merit – posts to a blog are necessarily intended for human consumption, giving system developers a strong incentive to make sure their messages make sense.

The other end of the scale is important as well – with RSS capabilities built in to many modern mail clients, including Outlook, Thunderbird and Live Mail, it becomes easy for the messages to be seen, raising awareness of the health (or not) of the system. One advantage of RSS over email is that email is only received by those subscribing at the time the message is sent - an RSS feed allows new subscribers to see old messages if they wish.

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus
Next Post
Nova's Fractals  11 Dec 2008
Prior Post
Finding Configuration Files  23 Nov 2008
Related Posts
Using Constructors  27 Feb 2023
An Inconvenient API  18 Feb 2023
Method Archetypes  11 Sep 2022
A bash puzzle, solved  02 Jul 2022
A bash puzzle  25 Jun 2022
Improve your troubleshooting by aggregating errors  11 Jun 2022
Improve your troubleshooting by wrapping errors  28 May 2022
Keep your promises  14 May 2022
When are you done?  18 Apr 2022
Fixing GitHub Authentication  28 Nov 2021
Archives
November 2008
2008