Managing Product Development

Due to incredible volume of spam comments, I’m moving to a new commenting system. The new one is installed. I’m working on importing the old comments to this system. In the meantime, it’s ok to leave comments here.

I use enetation as my comment service. The comment spammers have found a way to access enetation’s database to spam this blog and my hiring blog. After receiving over 100 spam comments this weekend, I can’t take much more and am looking for an alternative commenting service. In the meantime, ignore the spam comments you see, as I slowly remove them.

Do any of you know how to import comments? I know how to export comments from enetation, but I don’t know of any comment services that allow you to import comments. Please send me email if you know how to import comments. Thank you.

I’ve turned comments back on. The spammers were still getting through even though no one else was. If anyone has converted comments from one system to another commenting system, please send me email. I’m considering it.

I have — I hope temporarily — turned off commenting. I’m getting spammed by irrelevant and inappropriate comments. I’ve deleted close to 100 today already, and I’m not ready to delete more. Send me email if you want to talk or know of an alternative.

I’ve been trying to boot my computer for the last 3 hours. It’s not clear when I’ll fix the hard drive. No posts and no emails until I do…

I’ve been at this now for a year, and here’s my mini-retrospective on my blogging:

• What did I do well that I don’t want to forget? I learned that even a small entry that helps me to think more is useful. I don’t have to wait until I have completely well-formed thoughts. Pointing you to other authors is useful too.
• What did I learn? Some of my entries are useful for turning into longer articles. Your feedback helps me learn where I should write more (because I’m too vague or because I have a lot of energy around the topic). I also learned that Frank Patrick and Hal Macomber are great reviewers. I already knew that Dale, Esther, Keith, and Laurent were great reviewers.
• What should I do differently the next time? Make fewer mistakes For example, I completely failed to understand the impact of spam and phishing on email and productivity. Consider taking off more on other authors.
• What still puzzles me? I suspect I could use the blog even more for trying out things in my writing, and I’m not sure how to do that yet.
• What do I need to discuss in greater detail? Should I convert from an RSS to ATOM feed? The conversion is easy; I can’t tell if it benefits you, my readers.

In case you’re wondering where these questions came from, they’re from Norm Kerth’s book on retrospectives. When I facilitate project retrospectives, I use these questions to focus the conversation. I’m becoming the princess of focused conversations (Esther is the Queen), so when I debrief simulations or activities in workshops, I use the focused conversation technique. To me, a year of blogging felt more like a project than a small, focused, well-contained activity.

Ron, Laurent, Dale, Willem, Esther and I are all together at AYE - we’re having a blogging BOF.

We discussed things that stood out for us at the AYE conference: facilitating a panel, the presentation workshop, working with Jean McLendon, how difficult electronic room keys are to keep track of…

Laurent: thanks to Johanna for providing a laptop and dial-up connection ! I’ve attended two sessions so far - one on “Conscious choices for change”, one led by Jean McLendon on Satir system coaching… but what has been nagging at me in the background is how annoying these electronic card keys are. It takes a few seconds to open a door with a regular key - with the electronic equivalent it takes three tries and five minutes, because you have to fit the card into the slot just so and I haven’t gotten good at that yet. Why adopt a new system that’s worse than the one we had before ? That’s another topic that was covered at AYE - “What does it take to really improve things around here ?”

Esther Derby here, really much to tired to blog.

[ronpih] What stood out for me today was the afternoon session I attended on doing presentations. The presenters were Johanna and Naomi Karten. I myself wimped out and didn’t deliver the presentation that I prepared but I learned a lot about doing presentations from the folks that did deliver their presentations.

I’m also a little bummed that I didn’t set up the computer I brought to be able to write to my own blog but I’ll be taking notes and posting once I get home

I’m at the AYE conference this week, and a bunch of fellow bloggers are here: Laurent Bossavit, Esther Derby, Steve Smith, Ron Pihlgren, Willem van den Ende, Dale Emery. I hope I haven’t forgotten anyone.

Laurent suggested a blogging BOF (Birds of a Feather), so if we’re not too exhausted, we’ll sit around one of our laptops and blog. Maybe even pair-blog. Ooh, that would be fun!

Since it’s another conference week, don’t expect much output even if we blog together…

Hal’s been after me for a long time to switch to specific paragraph tags instead of relying on Blogger’s formatting. Ok. I did it here, and will in my Hiring Technical People blog later.

Comments seem to be fixed — at least partially. If you don’t see your comment, make sure you refresh the page, or wait for a few minutes.

I still can’t automagically generate my archives, so I had messed around with the archive locations, but I’m back to the original archives. I still can’t make automagic archive generation happen, so archives may take a few days to show up every month. If any of you blogger folks know how to do this, I’m all ears.

I’ve noticed these problems with my blog, and am investigating:

1. The comment number doesn’t seem to change with comments posted. Grrr. The last few posts *do* have comments.
2. Bloglet is easily confused with my blog and doesn’t send email that I have new posts. Grrrrr. I suspect that if I stay logged into Bloglet, the chances are better that you will see that I’ve posted something new. Of course, that may be irrelevant to the problem and coincidence.

If you find something else strange or buggy, please let me know.