Blog Entry Archetypes and Design Patterns
While away at Blogger Con, I had the opportunity to speak with several different individuals about my notion of Blog Entry Archetypes and how I thought they would play into the shaping of the future of blogging.
Somewhat to my surprise, I got a lot of push-back from several people as they reacted to the notion of "Better Tools For Better Blogging". Perhaps the one point that stuck with me most was the comment that this entry metadata that could potentially be generated was simply another cloudy taxonomy on top of an already wobbling classification system.
The other day, I had a comment from a reader that pondered if the entry archetypes weren't really all the same thing, Personal Entries.
This has me wondering, does seeing the patterns in things serve to destroy the thing itself?
I'm willing to concede that there is room for discussion in this arena. The other day I came across this amusing post about how to implement the "Hello World" application using OO PHP and Design Patterns. Harry Fuecks, the author, found that by using all patterns, he was able to use 160 lines to accomplish what could be done in 4. There are some rather insightful observations as well:
It would be interesting to try to squeeze all the Gang of Four patterns into it, and I'm sure I could bring it up to 1000 lines, but I have other things to do.
Some things I noticed as I was writing it:
- How impressive it seemed, considering its worthlessness.
- How satisfying it was to get the mechanics to work, futile though they may be.
- How, as the program's complexity grows, more opportunities present themselves for adding still more useless design patterns.
All of these observations are apalling when seen in a larger perspective. The example seems to support the notion that design patterns can cause problems which are easy to get into, hard to diagnose and hard to resolve.
If this code had been slightly more sophisticated and less obviously meaningless, it might be quite hard to refactor. It's like a labyrinth. The smell of decay from dead design patterns is not a very distinct one.
Despite this unique perspective on things, don't think that we can summarily dismiss the value and benefit of the Entry Archetypes as a whole. I don't believe it's Harry's point at all to dismiss programming design patterns, but rather to provide a line of caution in their usage.
Reflecting back on the conversation from Blogger Con, one of the main concerns was that the Entry Archetypes were a creation of my view of the blogging world and that once released in the wild, and subjected to interpretation, that the categorization would become bastardized. I definitely think this is a valid point. My main remark focused on the fact that these are more structural definitions than semantic ones. For example, I might choose to use one Archetype over the other, however, each provides me with a different mechanism for explaining the information. In othe words, the form simply wouldn't fit just any type, and therefore the user is eased into making the right selection.
On another front, I think it's important to remember that Entry Archetypes are only observations of things occuring in the "wild". The idea is that by understanding the different types of posts one makes, there are efficiencies gained when planning them as well as, in the future, when authoring them. They are not meant to restrict or otherwise constrain the author's creativity or ability to express themselves.
The moral of the story is that there's always the opportunity to have too much of a good thing and sometimes, even good things, can really be bad things.