Blog Review

Words are very unnecessary
They can only do harm

-- Depeche Mode, "Enjoy the Silence", Violator

My blog has been quiet the past couple of months, and that's not exactly something I'm happy about. Even here, at the forefront of corporate blogging software development, we sometimes fall into that "too busy to blog" rut.

Unlike the lyrics quoted above, words are very necessary when you're looking to acquire new customers. If you're not getting the word out about what your business has to offer, new customers won't be a callin'.

Fortunately, since everyone in our organization has a blogging account, the effort of keeping the message current and compelling is spread out across all departments. When they arrive at our website from a search, our prospective customers get to hear from a diverse array of voices... sales, marketing, client success, product support, and even the development team. That means our blogs continue to feature fresh content.

So what has been keeping me away from the post editor? Only one of the biggest development projects our department as undertaken since the new template editing and rendering environment we rolled out a little over a year ago.

Back in late March, the engineering team turned its attention to the user interface that administrators have for moderating blog posts and comments. There were two ways to moderate content. One interface presented content that was pending approval, while another provided a more comprehensive listing of all content on the network. We wound up replacing these with a sleek unified interface.

The change was a nontrivial undertaking. Over the past year, we have migrated to a service-oriented approach for our application, meaning that the operations one could perform with our application were accessible from URLs, callable by way of modern JavaScript interfaces or even other web services.

The moderation of posts and comments was one of the few remaining areas where we didn't have web service coverage. So we wound up having to write brand new service endpoints to do this, and we upgraded a number of our existing endpoints for listing and retrieving content so that they would be useful for a moderation interface.

On the front end, we took a different approach to designing a user interface. We created new JavaScript classes dedicated to interacting with web service endpoints, and we developed a set of loosely coupled components that communicated changes in state asynchronously.

How did this benefit the end user? Moderation moved to one central location instead of two. The interface took on a much more familiar appearance, bearing resemblance to popular web-based e-mail applications which have listing and preview panes. The interface was designed using state-of-the-art rich front end technologies.

Listings of content are now obtained more quickly, and there's no more waiting for the page to refresh itself as more information is retrieved. The act of previewing got a huge upgrade, with more detailed information about the post and a means of previewing content as it would appear on the live blog.

All in all, it was quite an achievement from a small, talented, and cohesive team. The Compendium Engineering team is committed to continuously improving the product in ways that make the experience of corporate blogging easy and enjoyable. You can be assured that we don't like resting on our laurels. :-)