It’s nothing fancy; I took the default Typepad stylesheet, tweaked it, and pushed the CS-ED.org site through it. A bit of copying and pasting to get the static content in, but it was quick, easy, and done.

I don’t know why I didn’t make CS-ED.org a weblog from the start. Converting the main site into a weblog makes it possible to set several goals:

• Calls for Papers
  I sometimes have a hard time finding publishing outlets for my work. I track a few different mailing lists where applicable calls appear from time-to-time. Unfortunately, by the time I remember I saw a call, it’s too late. This way, there is a place that makes sense to post the call.
• Guest bloggers
  Getting CS researchers, educators, and students involved in blogging their experiences is a challenge. Perhaps I’m not trying hard enough. Or, it’s possible the tools still don’t make it easy enough. More likely, there isn’t enough perceived value for the participant—of course, the value is emergent, and it comes from many people reading and writing about CS-ED. Either way, I think I can get people on board for one article, or writing once-a-day a week, or perhaps once-a-week for a month far more easily than selling them committing to maintaining a weblog over the long-term.
• Practice / Research highlights
  There have been a number of large CS-ED research endeavors in the last two, three years:
  1. Bootstrapping Research in Computer Science Education
  2. Scaffolding Research in Computer Science Education
  3. Building Research in Australasian Computing Education (BRACE)

  As a result of these projects, there are now … 60? small CS-ED research projects that have come into being; last year’s SIGCSE contained several papers that came directly out of the Bootstrapping project. The people in this rapidly growing community should have a rallying point for highlighting their work.

I hope I can provide/use CS-ED.org to achieve some of these goals.