Notes on Maintainability
Jens O. Meiert, April 14, 2009.
This entry is filed under Web Development.
To bridge Easter holidays and my upcoming trip to the W4A conference in Madrid, here are some small but mighty bits regarding maintenance and maintainability:
- Web development, like other things, is about probability. Improving maintainability means lowering the probability of changes.
- Change is inevitable, yet there is avoidable change. That is the secret of really improving maintainability.
- Change has a cost. That cost is the motivation to improve maintainability.
- In web development, HTML changes are most expensive. Consequentially, most maintenance potential lies in the markup.
- Laziness can be called efficiency once we’re really good in what we’re doing. Whatever.
Want more? Expect much more comprehensive documentation on maintainability to arrive this quarter, independent of what’s available on this site. German readers might even want to see me talk about web development and maintainability at the webinale 09 in Berlin.
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Comments
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On April 16, 2009, 6:15 CEST, Christian said:
Your feed only contain intros to your articles. That doesn’t really qualify as “syndicated content”. With 100+ feeds on my list, I most often skip the ones that lack content. I really enjoy your blog though, so I hope you’ll fix that problem
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On April 16, 2009, 17:15 CEST, Dave said:
I agree with Christian. Maybe you’ve explained this already and we missed it?
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On April 17, 2009, 15:41 CEST, Jens Meiert said:
Christian, well … I know people prefer the “full version” in their feeds, but I’m not entirely convinced yet that this means either a problem or some kind of obligation. I’ll take your comment as a vote though.
Dave, you mean if I yet explained why I feature articles teasers, not entire articles in my feeds? No, I didn’t explain that yet – maybe I should. Let me think about it.
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On April 23, 2009, 22:58 CEST, Christian said:
Jens, if you know that people prefer the full version, why do you only give them the intros? To attract page views?
If stats are important to you (which they probably should be), I’d recommend you to track your RSS feed with Feedburner and give people the whole deal. In the long run, you’ll loose out by skimping on the feed. My 2 cents.
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On April 24, 2009, 15:12 CEST, Jens Meiert said:
Christian, mainly because I don’t consider feeds as “full” content, and because I’m not convinced of the benefits of this kind of redundancy.
As for FeedBurner – but not stats, which also come with every basic server package –, there’s some advantage to hosting feeds on the same domain, and under full control.
