Get Your Company To Blog More With A Game

Josh Carver - 19 Dec 2011

At Bizo we try to blog fairly often. But writing blog posts with any degree of frequency at a startup is tough - there are often ten other important tasks that needed to be done yesterday. Finding the time to sit down and write a post when you have features to build, code to review and the occasional meeting is difficult to say the least.

We needed something that would encourage us to blog more frequently, and there's no better way to motivate a bunch of engineers than a game. So during our last Open Source Day we built a Blog Scoreboard that ranks authors based on the number of posts and comments they have. It's setup on our office big screen tv serving as constant reminder that Larry is by a landslide, the king of blogging. For a live demo of the scoreboard and to see just how much Larry is dominating us, checkout the live example here.

Currently we just optimize towards the volume of posts so the points are currently assigned as: 10 points per blog post and 1 point per comment. The weighting scheme is intentionally naive due since this had to be built in a few hours and will undoubtably change as time goes on

The best part about our scoreboard is that it is an open source sinatra (ruby) app, and it works with any Blogger blog! All you have to do is edit a few lines of YAML and you'll have your very own big screen blog scoreboard. You can grab the source code and install instructions on github: https://github.com/jcarver989/blog-scoreboard Happy blogging!

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