Blogging
Yes, occasionally I blog about blogging. So sue me.
No, I’m not talking about my mental age. My son turned four this past week which means I’m four years into my world domination plan. One of the gifts we gave my son was a toolbox with plastic toys so we can train him on building the mega-lasers and fortresses needed to take over the world. Turns out that before you start dominating the world, you have to start taking baby steps. And then toddler steps. And then 4-year old running terror steps. In these past four years, I’ve learned a lot. For example, you can get a...
Dear Reader, I apologize for not blogging much lately. I know, total #fail, but I’ve been so f***ing busy lately. I thought I would start off this new year right with a top ten list FTW! Without further ado, I present my list of the top 10 blogging clichés of 2010. These are things yours truly would never ever do, right? The random photo: Starting off the list is a very common one that even gets the very best bloggers, including a random photo in the blog post completely irrelevant to the topic at hand...
I was thinking about alternative ways to block comment spam the other day and it occurred to me that there’s potentially a simpler solution than the Invisible Captcha approach I wrote about. The Invisible Captcha control plays upon the fact that most comment spam bots don’t evaluate javascript. However there’s another particular behavioral trait that bots have that can be exploited due to the bots inability to support another browser facility. You see, comment spam bots love form fields. When they encounter a form field, they go into a berserker frenzy (+2 to strength, +2 hp per level, etc...) trying to...
When summer arrives, many like to create a new look via a haircut or new threads. I prefer to change the look of my blog with a new design. This here design took all of four hours to complete. Well that’s not exactly true. It took all of four hours of my time to complete (give or take a few). You can probably see where I’m going with this if you’re one of the many to have read The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich recently. Wondering what all the buzz was about I...
Several pople have asked me recently about the nice code syntax highlighting in my blog. For example: public string Test()
{
//Look at the pretty colors
return "Yay!";
}
A long time ago, I wrote about using http://www.manoli.net/csharpformat/ for converting code to HTML.
But these days, I use Omar Shahine’s Insert Code for Windows Live Writer plugin for, you guessed it, Windows Live Writer. This plugin just happens to use the Manoli code to perform syntax highlighting.
I recommend downloading and referencing the CSS stylesheet from the Manoli site and making sure to uncheck the Embed StyleSheet option in the plugin.
The...
Technorati recently released their latest State of The Blogosphere report (renamed to something about the Live Web to avoid confusion with the Dead Web) chock full of statistics and pretty graphs.
This would be interesting, if I were interested in anything other than myself. No, I don’t care about how other blogs are doing. I only care about Me Me ME!
How is MY Blog doing?
To find out I could check on some external sources. For example, Alexa.com shows that my site has experienced steady growth in the past three years (click on the chart to see the actual report page).
But...
If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you know I tend to go on and on about the virtues of blogging and participating in Open Source projects. You might even start to suspect that I think we could end wars, poverty, and hunger and sit around singing Cumbaya together in harmony if only everyone would blog and participate in Open Source. Really now. I’m not that naïve. I’m sure we could pick a better song to sing around the campfire. All kidding aside, I really have put my money where my mouth is. In the past, I’ve talked about the...
Dave Burke makes the interesting claim that Community Server is an open source application. Whether this is true or not of course depends on your definition of the term Open Source. Here is Dave’s definition.
To talk about Community Server and Open Source we should start with a baseline definition of an Open Source application: All of the source code is available. For free.
But is that all there is to Open Source, access to the code? Is mere access to the code the fairy dust that has inspired such a passionate movement in the software community?
Certainly the term...
Recently I highlighted a site named DotNetKicks which is like Digg.com, but targetted to .NET technology. In particular I thought it was a smart move for them to share in their advertising revenue with those who submit stories.
Well to make it easier to kick stories from the convenience of your favorite RSS Aggregator, I wrote an IBlogExtension plugin so that you can submit/kick/unkick stories from RSS Bandit or any RSS Aggregator that supports the IBlogExtension plugin model (.NET 1.1 must also be on the machine).
Just download and unzip the extension to your plugins directory. The default location for RSS...
In the 1998 movie, The Big Hit, the protagonists kidnap the daughter of an extremely wealthy Japanese businessman. When they call to deliver the ransom notice, they turn to Gump who employs a brand name Trace Buster to prevent police from tracing the call.
Unbeknownst to Gump, the father has a Trace-Buster-Buster at his disposal. This in turn triggers Gump to use his Trace-Buster-Buster-Buster in an ever escalating battle to evade detection.
I just love that scene.
But I'm not here to talk about movies. I've recently noticed a post or two critical...
PubSub is no longer around, so those links will be broken. I’ve written a new post that provides fresh opportunities for being a vain blogger.
I'm not the first to say it and I probably won't be the last. But blogging is pure vanity, and new services out there just make it easier and easier to inflate one's head.
For starters, the vain blogger will subscribe to his own RSS feed (or ATOM feed) in his favorite RSS reader. The vain blogger will assure you that this is for quality assurance purposes, but the astute reader can see right through...
I’m going to buck tradition and start a new craze just because I mean to. Let’s call it, blogging while buzzed. Perhaps it will be the next meme, fad whatever, but this won’t be the happy byproduct or unintended consequence of an event, but the sole purpose of this blog posting.
Yes, I know, I can’t be so pretentious to think that I can start a craze by just saying I’m doing so. But hey! I’m buzzed, I can do what I want! I can try to do all sort of impossible things. Requiring success is not on my radar....