Have you read The Little Coder’s Predicament?  Similar articles have been published, and rambling on the positive and negative side has occurred here, but I must say that I side with _why on this issue : hacking is just not accessible to children and non-geeks like it used to be.

The solution?  Many have been proposed, including one that was named after _why’s article (LittleCoder).  Now, _why and friends are pushing forward a whyware project to end the issue forever : Hackey Hack.  The program (Windows-only for now, but that will change) gives simple kid-and-non-geek-friendly lessons on the Ruby programming language, while simultaneously allowing users to experiment (a.k.a. hack) to their heart’s content.

_why, whoever he may be, has also switched his blogging venue and topic.  He is now running hackety.org as a blog about hacking and code as art in general.

This is a really exciting project, and one I hope to make use of and see used in a big way!

Yet another experiment in following the community.  I have used the toolbar-creation tools from Conduit to create a social toolbar for the Blogger hacks community.

The toolbar has links to all the major Blogger hackers (if I forgot you, I’m sorry, tell me and I’ll add your link!), a drop-down to the main sections of the hacks wiki, a built-in search of the wiki (the co-op one isn’t allowed… but I linked to it), a feed-reader that alerts your when a hacker posts something new, and an announce section for community-wide alerts.  There is also a chatroom, email notification, weather, and pop-up blocking option.  All components are optional.

One of the really cool things is that there is a version for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.  If I update the toolbar components on their site, everyone’s toolbar gets updated, without a reinstall.

So, check it out at the toolbar homepage.

All geeks have their jargon, and the Blogger hacking community is no exception. One of the big words right now is ‘Bleet’ – the Blogger Elite. First coined by Avatar of Bloggeratto, this term is used to describe the best of the best of the Blogger hackers.

Wh!13 7h!5 m4y 83 r3m3n!53n7 0f 1337, 37c, the term seems to be gaining acceptance among non-hackers as well. Then the question becomes — how do we keep track of who’s ‘in’? 😉

Well, elite coders must write elite code. I’d hazard a guess that all Bleet members must be hacking the new Blogger by now, but what else? Who and what? What do you think?

I have created a survey with only three questions: the URL of a Bleet member (in your opinion), your favourite hack by this member, and one quality you think all Bleet should have. Note to the Bleet : do not vote for yourself!

Fill out the survey

Another note to the Bleet : Check out the Blogger Hacks Wrink and add yourself to it and it to your blog. You can use any of the modes (some people dislike webrings, some dislike extra blogrolls, we have options!) What’s the point? Well, right now that wrink is getting more than 500 traffic a week. This means that each week (unless my stats are broken) at least 500 people travel from one Bleet site to another using this widget. Great way for us to share our traffic with each other!