Interesting and useful.

(I have seen so many posts discussing programming stuffs here without a single line of code and you are offering real suggestion and giving back to the opensource community, you've done a great job, thanks.)

Wow, the comments were incredibly useful as well.

For some reason the portrait on the left made me extremely uneasy, to the point I removed it from the DOM.

Nothing related to the article, but I really dislike all the circle portraits on blogs and services. Really looking forward to this fad passing

I had the same sensation. I think because it is off to the left, but he is staring to the center it gives the sense he's looking at you.

I ended up hovering the pointer over it. In its highlighted state, the sidebar was less irritating.

Ha. The Jekyll theme (changeable) or my face (less changeable)?

The "faded out" state actually manages to draw more attention to it, which isn't great when trying to focus on the article.

Also, the whole design is flat and minimalist, to the point the portrait just looked uncanny and baroque, with a lot of pop out.

Very good post. We started using VCR recently in our tests but somehow have avoided this issue. However as we clean up our old tests I'm sure we'll see this; but now I know to avoid it. Great discussion with the VCR dev too.

Great post, really interesting read.

(As a side note, you might want to provide syntax highlighting for all the code snippets on that page it makes it so much easier on the eyes).

Done. Thanks for the tip!

I'm new around here. Not acceptable? Seems like something I've seen before.

It is acceptable. Though the wording could be done differently to avoid comments like the one above.

Instead, include the following:

Discuss on Hacker News.

When we discuss something here, upvoting/downvoting plays an essential part is controlling where the conversation heads. So asking for people to upvote is not as positive as inviting them into the discussion.

By the way, welcome. Good post.

Thanks for taking time to explain some of the etiquette. I appreciate it.

I thought your title was fine, the content was dandy, its just that some one was having a bad day. Keep up the useful submissions. BTW - like your site layout, esp the faded sidebar, it makes the content stand out more.

It's absolutely fine. As it's the mechanism for attracting a wider audience to something that benefit is being derived from, reminding them to up-vote the article seems mutually beneficial. You are not forcing anyone to do it.