So I've been migrating my life over to the Mac that I bought late last year and briefly mentioned in my summary post of 2008. Mostly I'm there but one aspect keeps tripping me up: Which blogging tool to use for posting to the couple of blogs I maintain?

On Windows I'm very happy with Windows Live Writer and I figured that with all the creative writing people of the Mac it wouldn't be an issue at all to find a nice comparable tool on the other side.

Boy was I ever wrong in assuming that. For some reason there isn't really a very good tool which has feature parity with Live Writer on the Mac. The most prevalent tool out there is MarsEdit, which to me doesn't fit the bill. It does everything right in the technical department but lacks in one key area: The editor.

Over the years I've grown accustomed to having a couple of features which really help out in the process of writing a new post:

• The tool must be desktop based. Web interfaces are handy but too cumbersome to work with
  
• WYSIWYG editor
  
• Auto creation of image thumbnails with links to the original
  
• Image formatting tools like alignment and custom margins
• Support for BlogEngine.NET and DasBlog (categories, upload images via MetaWeblog API)
  
• Ideally rich image formatting features like drop shadow

MarsEdit 2
I don't know about you but I expect to be able to edit my posts in the WYSIWYG interface, which might occasionally require me to drop into HTML view to do some of the more tricky stuff (read: I've done this maybe four time in the five years I've kept a blog). MarsEdit, however, is built on the notion that the writer should have complete control of the HTML and thus provides nothing but raw HTML editing, even billing it as a feature, not a bug. I'm sorry but in 2009 I expect so much more from a tool like that. A tool which even requires me to spend $29,95.

I read a review which describes MarsEdit as being very windowy. I think you'll agree when you take a look at the screenshot below. Basically you've got a window for displaying previous posts, a windows for the raw HTML editor, and a preview window to display what your HTML looks like. Nastylicous!

Qumana
Qumana was my second attempt at reaching a blogging solution on par with what I have on Windows. It was even free so I was off to a great start. Qumana looks like Live Writer enough that I thought I was home free and stopped looking any further. Qumana is a pretty good tool which gets the job done. However, it lacks polish which turned me away from it in the end. No support for picture thumbnails was a huge point for me.

As far as windoyness it's far better than MarsEdit and it does provide a WYSIWYG editor, which was sorely lacking from MarsEdit 2. To sum up Qumana comes close but lacks thumbnail support.

Blogo
Now Blogo is a relatively new tool on the Mac as I understand it. I came across Blogo while listening to Leo Laporte's excellent Macbreak Weekly podcast in which he's got a segment where the panel picks their favorite tool. Blogo was in there and I decided to check it out.

My first encounter with Blogo was a nice one to a certain point when it failed one of my requirements miserably. Read on to find out how.

Hopes were not exactly high when I started using the tool the first time around but that quickly changed as I set out to create my first blog post. Sure image preview was sort of a strange feature in the sense that you get a little standard placeholder which shows you that an image is there. As for actual image preview you're out of luck.

Unfortunately Blogo doesn't support BlogEngine.NET 1.4.5 fully. It seems like it's almost there but posting doesn't happen when categories are in the mix. Editing a post after it's posted to BlogEngine.NET also presents some problems. Blogo "sees" the post but when it's pulled down no content is present inside it. Too bad it's really the only piece of puzzle missing for me to start using Blogo on the Mac instead of Live Writer inside my Fusion virtualized Windows 7 install.

A particularly nice feature of Blogo is its fullscreen editing, which basically allows Blogo to take over the entire screen to focus your attention on the blog post and nothing else. Love it!

All in all I'm not quite there yet. I'm hoping for support for BlogEngine.NET in a future release of Blogo, although I'm not holding my breath in that one. I already contacted the good folks at Drink Brain Juice (yeah I know :)) but nothing has happened as of yet. Crossing fingers and toes as it would see and end to that particular dilemma of my migration.

In case you’re wondering why you’re not receiving any updates from my blog in your favorite feed reader, wonder no more. First a little background.

Google last year acquired FeedBurner without much fanfare and everything has pretty much been quiet since then with the minor exception that some paid feature became free.

This all changed recently when the great FeedBurner migration onto the Google platform started, which screwed people up in a number of interesting ways.

My first attempts at migration were unsuccessful due to the fact that one of my feeds did get migrated in the first go, not completely, mind you, just a little bit, leaving me with my feed both at the old FeedBurner site and at the new Google FeedBurner site.

Of course it’s gets quite tricky to determine automatically what to do when someone tries to migrate a feed onto a new platform where another feed with the same name exists. Luckily I figured out what was going on, and being in control of both ends of the equation I removed the duplicate feed and tried again…

Now for the reason why you’re not receiving anything from this blog in your feed reader. The second time around the migration was successful, only Google for some reason can’t access my original feed URL at my ISP, which means that the FeedBurner URL gets a nice HTTP 502 error whenever you, dear reader, tries to access it.

Until this gets resolved between my ISP and Google (like in a million years) I’ve turned FeedBurner off for the site. Once it’s fixed you will automatically received the new feed. The down side is that you’ll have to update your reader to use the old feed URL in the meantime: http://www.publicvoid.dk/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss

I think this illustrates nicely why you should be weary of the cloud computing trend. Indeed it’s a fine proposition; supposing that everything works as it should. It’s quite another matter when the cloud turns out to be filled with hot air and starts failing. All you can really do is sit back and wait for someone, somewhere to do something.

This is going to be the last post in which I mention Twitter… seriously. In fact I’m going to start right now by not talking about Twitter but instead I’m going to focus on a side effect of Twitter: Corporate Tweeting. (You would in fact be correct if you assume that I just made that term up :))

The Vertical Niche

Like Google Twitter has got the market for short public messages pretty much sewn up. Does that mean that there isn’t a market for short public messages anymore? As Google so clearly has shown sewing up the market does mean that others can’t compete in that same market. It’s all about the vertical niche, baby!

Yammer is the New Black

What IMDB is for Google. Yammer is for Twitter. Before I dive into what Yammer is let me start out with a challenge we have at Vertica: As we spread to different geographical locations how do we keep the company spirit going strong? How do we make the departments one coherent company with the same values and a sense of collectiveness?

We spent a couple of meetings debating that very issue and of course the good old ones like doing company outings, shared social events, wax eachother’s backs all came up but for me the most interesting one, aside from waxing eachother’s backs, was to try and use Twitter and also allow for the usual private chit chat which goes on inside a company. Some jokes are best kept inside the company… like you know that waxing one. You get my point right?

Yammer

Yammer has set up shop with a Twitter clone which is ideally suited for running private Twitter-like networks. Bascailly all you need are e-mail addresses on the same domain and you’re golden. Sign up is stupid easy: Enter your e-mail and you’re good to go.

From there is smooth sailed with a nice Adobe AIR client (surprise Adobe AIR is not just for Twitter clients!) which gives you the ease of posting new messages that you’re familiar with from that other netwokr which I won’t mention from here on in.

At Vertica Yammer is quickly turning into a questions and answer service which translates directly into increased productivity because A) You don’t have to know who knows what, you just ask the question and someone will chime in, and B) You don’t interrupt people who don’t want to be interrupted because if they’re not looking they won’t answer.

Now whether or not it will actually serve its original purpose remains to be seen. The new offices in Zealand is still under a month old and quite small so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. What’s interesting though is that people at the first office were very quickly to adopt Yammer.

In a previous post I wrote about Twitter and what it means to the Danish developer community. The real value of Twitter however does not come by visiting the site from time to time. You have to participate actively to keep the conversation going and that’s where the Twitter clients come into the picure.

I’ve been through a bunch of them and ultimately decided which one I liked the best. I’ll try and spare you from doing the same all over.

Digsby

Digsby gets honorable mention becayse it was my first Twitter client and because this program how I got started with Twitter and in no small way the reason why I still use it.

Digsby is labelled a social network client which gives you access not only to Twitter, in fact that’s the least of it, but also to Messenger, LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo Chat, Google Talk, the list goes on and on but you get the point. Digsby speaks with most social networks out there.

That was my reason for trying it out as I really didn’t feel that I needed a dedicated program to try out Twitter. I spent quite some time with Digsby and felt for a long time that it was the way to go. In fact the reason I dropped it was not so much Twitter related as it was Messenger related. It simply didn’t work as advertised, sending file for one was spotty.

As a Twitter client it performed admirably and for me at least it was a low cost to pay for trying out Twitter as I used it primarily as a Messenger client with the added benefit of being able to send out my tweets as well.

Twitterrific

Twitterrific is an interesting one as it didn’t start out on the desktop for me. It actually started out on my iPhone and went I got a Mac late last year it was the natural choice for the desktop as well as the iPhone experience with this thing is flawless as far as I’m concerned.

Now the application is pretty much the same on the Mac. Interestingly it turns out that the functionality doesn’t quite cut it on the desktop. Due to the nature of tweets messages need to be as compact as they can be.

Imagine that you’re posting a link which can easily be 50 - 60 characters; at that point you really want to be able to shorten a link easily and post the short version insteand. Unfortunately Twitterrific doesn’t support this which is fine on the iPhone where cut and paste is not to be found so you tend not to post links. On the desktop though links are thrown left and right so not having the feature is a real pain point – at least for me.

Thus Twitterric was evicted from the Mac desktop but remain on the iPhone as one of the first apps I ever installed on that thing.

twhirl

Before I delve into twhirl a word on Adobe AIR. Not so much because I find the platform interesting but because I find it interesting that as a platform a lot of the ecosystem is made up of … wait for it … Twitter clients. It’s interesting to me that a service like Twitter can drive a platform like AIR and not the other way around.

twhirl is pretty much like Twitterrific only the name is quite a bit easier to spell and it supports the link shortening feature I mentioned above. It being an Adobe AIR app also means that it’s cross platform for those us running cross ethnic platforms out there.

twhirl is like the girlfriend you can’t quite figure out if you want to spend your life with or leave for someone else. I left but ultimately came back so I guess it’s forever between us :)

And finally remember to follow me on Twitter once you get your favorite client up and running :)

Back in May 2008 I wrote a short note about me trying out Twitter. At the time I just wanted to know more about what Twitter actually was as I heard about time and again on podcasts, blogs, everywhere really.

Interestingly whenever people talked about Twitter it was due to the service being down but still I felt compelled to take it out for a spin.

Twitter of course is the service which enables you to post little notices about what you’re currently doing which doesn’t sound all that useful until you actually sit down and think about it. In reality it turns out that there are numerous applications for a service like that. The notices are limited to only 140 characters which means that you have to be really short and sweet in the stuff you send to the service.

Fast forward to January 2009 with the experiment done and my conclusion is in: Twitter is indeed a service worth paying attention to. Read on to find out why.

Now what prompted this post is a question I got from Brian Rasmussen when I suggested that he take a look at it. Basically he asked why he should use Twitter, a question I didn’t quite know how the answer with anything but, “it’s cool”. Since that time I’ve been wondering what makes Twitter worth my while and yours as well, dear reader.

Twitter is a lot of things to a lot of people. The value to me and our little community in particular lies in tying together everybody in a more coherent way than what is possible today. To me at least Twitter is a place where I get to keep in touch with a number of the Danish .NET developers in a far more personal way than what is possible at DotNetForum, ActiveDeveloper, etc. because the service is geared for throwing stuff out there without thinking too much about it.

Why do I call it the back channel of our community? Due to the nature of the messages you stick on Twitter it quickly becomes just little notices about what’s going on right now. For example Mads used it to get an idea of which IoC framework to go with, I recently got a Mac and had no clue where to start so I elicited suggestions for apps to use, Niels uses it for communicating with the Umbraco team from time to time, recently Jesper wanted to know what to include in his ASP.NET MVC presentation coming up in ONUG in January, and Rasmus had a memory leak which he needed some input for fixing.

Basically what you get is an inside look in the process leading up to a blog post, presentation, the solution to a giving issue, or whatever; something you don’t really get from reading the final product and often times much more interesting.

I would encourage you to go create an account with Twitter and follow a bunch a people from the Danish .NET community. Morten from DotNetForum was even kind enough to create a wiki with the Twitter names of a bunch of the Danish .NET guys which you can use as a starting point. You can follow me using my Twitter name  publicvoid_dk.

Of course there are a number of people which I’d like to see get Twitter accounts like Brian Rasmussen, Søren Skovsbøll, Mark Seemann, Kasper Bo Larsen, and Martin Bakkegaard Olesen,

I had grand goals for 2008 when we started out the new year last time around, only stuff happened and my activity level on this blog has not been up to the goals I initially set out to reach. In spite of that I'm very happy with my accomplishments for 2008. They just happen to have occurred in a slightly different way than I originally thought.

The Blog

Surprisingly the most visited and commented post on the blog during 2008 wasn't even written during 2008. It caters to the more mainstream internet users, was written in 2006, and is about an annoyance I had with Windows and the My Music folder which disappeared from time to time.

But we are looking back at 2008 here so it's fitting to mention the posts which I'm most proud of which were actually written during 2008.  First up is my Developing with Commerce Server 2007 series in which I dove into the the development experience of Commerce Server. Also on the topic of Commerce Server 2007 I wrote a post on a generic mapping piece I did for a project early in the year which turns CS objects into nice POCO object for nice testability.

Work

Of course there was real work to done and 2008 brought some really interesting challenges with me participating in one of the largest e-commerce projects I've ever had my hands on. Huge customer, international team of devs, traveling across the Atlantic to do some of the work. All in all a great learning experience and as a result I'm now able to provide even better service to our customers. Oh and it was kinda fun too :)

I got to attend a couple of conferences as well. First Daniel from Microsoft was nice enough to invite me to JAOO; a conference I enjoy a great deal and later in the year I had a unique chance to fly out to Los Angeles to participate in PDC 2008. I have to say that if you ever get a chance to participate in a conference like the PDC you really should jump at it. It's spectacular show to be sure. I did a couple of podcast episodes about it too; in Danish mind you.

Finally I'm happy to report that we managed to add a number of very talented people to both to my own team at Vertica and to the integration team as well. I'm proud to have such great colleagues and to be able say that every day I learn something new as a result.

Aarhus .NET User Group

Now as I started the post out by saying that I haven't spent as much time on the blog as I would have liked and there's a really good reason for that: Aarhus .NET User Group which has sucked up a significant part of my time.

During 2008 the core group and I organized thirteen meetings, indeed we didn't miss a beat the entire year and even managed to do a bonus meeting in December with my good colleague Daniel about unit testing. Additionally we pulled off a code camp in the beginning of the year, the ANUG 1 year old birthday dinner, and a Christmas Dinner. Not too shabby if I do say so myself.

Support for the user group during 2008 was tremendous and I couldn't be happier about where we're at after just one and half year of operation.

More importantly we've shown other .NET developers in the Danish community that a user group in Denmark is viable and as a result new groups have sprung up during 2008. As I write this groups are up and running in Odense (ONUG), Aalborg (AANUG), and Copenhagen (CNUG).

ANUGCast (www.anug.dk/podcast)

Ever since we started the user group we've had requests for putting the meeting content online somehow, be it video, audio, or something else entirely. What we did from the start was write meeting summaries which weren't really the ideal way to bring the content online. It's adequate and we'll continue to do so but it's been clear from the start that it was far from sufficient.

Late in 2008 it struck me that the podcast format might be the ideal way of addressing the requests. With that in mind I set out to create a podcast based on the topics of the meetings. With that ANUGCast was born with the initial goal: to bring out an episode once a month. This quickly escalated to one per week and so far it's gone really well. In fact episode thirteen was posted today and I've got a bunch of episodes already in the can just waiting to get released.

The podcast is my little baby and I guess most of the time which would otherwise have been spent on the blog got diverted there. I enjoy hosting the podcast a great deal, so much so in fact that I'd do it full time if I could :)

Since starting out the podcast I've gotten it registered with more than 50 aggregation sites, we're on iTunes, and we've have more than 4000 5000 downloads since the pilot episode in September 2008, a number I'm particularly proud of. We seen a steady climb of downloads since the pilot episode and the past couple of months saw more than a thousand downloads each.

I guess I should do a couple of posts on how ANUGCast is made and some of the tricks I picked up wearing the hats of producer, sound engineer, basically every damn hat needed to make it happen :)

2009

The coming year will bring a similar activity level on the blog as 2008. It is my every intention to keep up my work with the user group and the podcast and even step it up a bit. 2009 will bring more real marketing of the user group to reach new audience which I'll write more about after we hold the first meeting of 2009. There's something to look forward to for sure. 2009 will also bring our first IT pro related meeting and will cover Hyper-V. It's intended as a pilot to kinda try the waters for something like that.

Oh and I went and got myself a Mac so I guess I'm sort of a Mac switcher as of December 22nd... 2009 is going to be interesting for sure.

In my first post I covered the Why? of community and ended up with this mission statement, "The Danish .NET community is an open platform through which developers meet as equals to share experiences and inspire each other through enthusiasm".

With the Why? in place I followed up with What? and came up with my personal idea for the Danish .NET community, "The Danish .NET community is about face to face meetings where people participate on equal terms and secondarily about online activities to make up for the intervening periods.".

How?

And now for my favorite part of the series: The practical aspect. The how!

How do we go about creating an open platform through which developers meet to share experiences? In many way I already feel we've made good inroads on that one. Naturally I'm a little bit colored here due to my involvement in ANUG but I honestly feel that the the user groups out there are the very best vehicle for getting developers together. Especially with user groups popping up in major cities across Denmark and the possibility of cooperation between them.

That's why I'm taking the initiative to bring the core groups of the Danish .NET User Groups together on a regular basis to knit the enclaves of .NET community better together.

The NUGs will create a nice platform from which to create the informal gatherings which are the geek dinners. I like the idea of geek dinners and I feel that the informal nature of such gatherings help people let their guard down a bit and talk more freely about whatever challenges they're facing day to day.

Microsoft of course is playing their part in this with the TechTalks which I feel are much better than the Meet Microsoft events of yesteryear due to their clearer focus. Although I feel that Jutland is left out in the cold a bit.

Microsoft is very keen to help out and I've wracked my brain to come up with ideas for places where they can help out because basically the .NET community seen with my eyes is better than ever.

One way to help out the NUGs is by helping us put together large scale shared events, maybe full day events with specific themes and who knows, maybe in the long term we can go even bigger and create a yearly .NET conference? Microsoft has experience with this kind of stuff with the Meet Microsoft events and I feel it could work even better with the special sauce that the NUGs bring to the table.

Also I'd like to see large scale events based on the open space principle. Simply bring together a bunch of enthusiastic and opinionated people and have them go at it. We've discussed doing this within ANUG but we feel that the scale is too small to do it without any sort of structure. But imagine gathering people from across the country for a day of open space discussion; I see some magic happening there.

We need to take a long hard look at what's already out there and not try and create new initiatives. Basically what will happen is that we'll water down the community until relevant information is scattered across the ruins of the community useless to all. In that vain I propose that we start using some of the prominent .NET sites out there to share information like DotNetForum.dk. More specifically I'd like Microsoft to not try and invent the wheel by creating their own platform for sharing content. Use what's out there, use DotNetForum.dk, ActiveDeveloper.dk, or whatever else. Please don't try and do something completely new. Just get the content out there and back the existing efforts by doing so.

I was surprised to find that people place an enormous value on web casts and specifically on web casts created here in Denmark. I partially agree that they are a good vehicle for information but only for some information. I've given Daniel a though time in the past but he has proven that web casts are the way to go for personal interviews with people in the community. His unique position with Microsoft along with his outgoing personality makes him perfect to go out there and do just that.

These are some of my opinions and ideas on how we can make the .NET community even better. In short we need to create more opportunities for us to meet face to face and use the existing platforms to promote new content.

I'd like Morten Jokumsen's opinion on where he sees DotNetForum.dk, I'd like to hear from Daniel Mellgaard Frost and Bo Drejer whether we can establish a strategy based on some of this stuff, I'd like to hear from the powers that be at ONUG Jesper Blad Jensen, Joachim Lykke Nielsen, and Kasper Bo Larsen what their opinions on this are, and the same thing goes the KNUG guys Jakob T. Andersen and Mads Kristensen.

This is my second post in the series Do! Community! Why? What? How?. In this post I'll try to address the What based on the mission statement from the previous post, "the Danish .NET community is an open platform through which developers meet as equals to share experiences and inspire each other through enthusiasm".

What?

What makes a community? I guess that's it different for each individual. For me it's all about meeting people and doing so continually. I first started feeling part of a community with my involvement in Århus .NET User Group and Danish Forum for .NET Architects.

Meeting the same people again and again, getting a sense of what they're about, and why they care about the things that they do, that's what community is for me.

Blogs, web casts, online articles, never really did it for me. To me it's very impersonal although once I've met a person I usually follow their blog religiously.

Everything should have the chance to participate in this on the level he or she desires be it as an attendee at a meeting, as a speaker, posting to a blog, whatever, and everybody should have even opportunity to do so.

The Danish .NET community is about face to face meetings where people participate on equal terms and secondarily about online activities to make up for the intervening periods.

Read part 3 Do! Community! How?

In my last post I was pretty harsh in my statements about Microsoft and Daniel in particular but I felt it necessary to get out there in order to spark a debate or at least get the right people thinking about what's going on.

Now that said I also feel that whenever someone puts forth criticism it's vital to back it up with something substantial to address the situation. That's what I intend to do with my next couple of posts.

First I'd like to address why we should care about the community at all. The why of it. Second what can we do about it. The what. And finally I'll talk about ways to get where I'd like to see the community go. The how.

Background

I never felt as part of any community in my years working with Microsoft technology, not when I spent a lot of time answering questions on news groups, not when I spent time on Eksperten.dk, and not even when I attended the Meet Microsoft events regularly when they were still running.

During the last year though that started to change. Along with the other members of the core group I've busied myself with getting Aarhus .NET  User Group off the group. Right around the launch of ANUG I was invited to be part of the Danish Forum for Danish .NET Architects. Both initiatives have brought change to the way I think about the Danish community. With that in mind I'll try to explain why we should care or at least why I care.

Why?

To me community is inspiration, participation, enthusiasm. At the core of each of these words are people. Interaction with people, knowing people, sharing experiences with others.

I care about the community because I care about people. I care about creating something which benefits others, not just myself. That's why I blog, that's why I spend my spare time helping out with ANUG, that's why I take the time to answer every comment and e-mail I receive.

Simply put you should care about the community because it provides developers a great way of inspiring each other, of sharing the enthusiasm that most of us feel every day when we go to work, and finally because community knits together competency centers across the country which otherwise wouldn't benefit from each other.

In short I feel that we should care about the community because the Danish .NET community is an open platform through which developers meet as equals to share experiences and inspire each other through enthusiasm.

Read part 2 Do! Community! What?

I seldom take the time to respond to a blog post directly but in this case though I feel that I must.

Before I get to the actual commentary a little background on what's going on in the Danish Microsoft developer community: Microsoft Denmark is very eager to reboot their community effort. In that vain they're trying to engage the people who are active in the community. Central to this initiative is Daniel Mellgaard Frost, the new developer evangelist with Microsoft. Since he came on board two months ago he's been very visible and has shown lots of energy and enthusiasm for which I have nothing but praise to sing. All is well and good up to this point.

As part of this effort a number of people was named Microsoft Designated Information Providers of which I am one. This Wednesday all the MDIPs where pulled together for the first time in a community event set up by Daniel Mellgaard Frost.

I honestly didn't know what to expect and so I was rather shocked when Daniel stood up first thing and started rattling of all sorts of demands for content delivered by the MDIPs. Now don't get me wrong I'm happy to help out but I do so on my own time and because I enjoy the work I do with ANUG a great deal. Not because I seek to please Microsoft thank you very much. I'm sure that Daniel meant it well when he stood up and tried to take control of the meeting but he came off very matter of fact and became defensive when challenged on his point.

Bad start aside we did get a good discussion going and it seems that Microsoft is very keen to help us out. Now my only problem is that when we get right down to it all we got from the meeting was a whole bunch of fluff. I understand that we're in the early phase of this thing but honestly if the MS evangelists are so eager to make stuff happen in the community it would have been so much better come to the meeting with concrete initiatives instead of a lot of "we'd like to do this...", "we could do that...", "We don't want to step on anybody's toes...". In short I'm missing purpose and direction on this one. I simply didn't take away any sense of an overall strategy for the initiative which is a crying shame given all the energy put into it.

Case in point we wanted to create a place where the MDIPs could communicate about ideas which everybody felt would be a good thing. Now the MS guys seemed at a loss as how to make this happen. While the we were discussing various avenues of making this happen Morten Jokumsen simply whipped out his iPhone and created a new group on DotNetForum. See here's an example of "Do! Community!". Don't talk about it. Do it!

Another example is the community event scheduled for the next day open to anybody and everybody. A meeting set up by Daniel although he apparently didn't deem it necessary to come prepared or even well rested. He spent five minutes there before leaving the scene to the attendees. What happened after he left? Odense .NET User Group was formed by the attendees, web sites went up, and a core group of people committed themselves to getting the group off the ground. That's "Do! Community!". Don't set up a meeting like that, sit back, and wait to see if something might happen. Set something up and make it happen!

There is a lot, a lot! of good intentions within Microsoft to do good in the community but I feel that they're paralyzed from taking action. Everything seems to be a committee and they don't want to cause a stir by favoring one initiative other another. That's not doing. That's not even trying.

And finally we come to my point with all this. I'm not trying to bash Microsoft, the evangelists, or Daniel specifically. What I am trying to get across is the fact that before you can start acting up in the community you need to prove yourself. Prove that you want to make a difference. Even more importantly make an actual difference.

I know that Daniel is very active with ActiveDeveloper.dk, both now and prior to his job with MS as evangelist and he is trying to do good, not doubt about it. His latest post though seems to indicate that he feels that he personally is the driving force behind the Danish .NET community. I'm flabbergasted when I see comments like these , "you just have to kick people over the knee to make things happen", "the new Odense .NET User Group that I helped kick-start", and my personal favorite, "it's incredible how much I've accomplished over the last two months".

Now Daniel, I personally don't feel that you've accomplished anything as of yet. Yes, you've put heavens and seas in motion but that's a simple matter. Before putting comments like those online I'd like to see some follow through on the initiatives. Essentially it's all for naught until something is proved viable in the long term and we have yet to see that.

Do! Community!

As an experiment I'm trying out Twitter a service for spewing your thoughts at the internet with little or no filtering. Kind of a public chat room.

http://twitter.com/publicvoid_dk

My good colleague Daniel has joined the blogging fray. He's been at it for a while too before telling anyone about it so he's got a nice bunch of posts up already and keeping up the pace. He's been working on a Commerce Server/SharePoint project for the past couple of months and of course the regular C# stuff so expect to see more posts about those subjects.

Subscribed!

I was recently asked which podcasts I listen to and I've actually been planning to write about for a while. Commuting to and from work takes about 1½ hours of my time each day, my way of making an opportunity out of this time is to listen to a lot of podcasts. I learn something from the work related podcasts and I get to relax with the ones just for fun when my brain is fried after a day at the office :)

To mix it up I dabble with audio books from Audible.com but I've not yet gotten that routine down so I'm going to hold off with my commentary on that for now. Just know that if you're looking for richer content you can go there a get real books to listen to.

Work Related

Dot Net Rocks! w. Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell - Everything .NET. The first and definitely the best. You get a nice high level insight into many different products from Microsoft.

Hanselminutes w. Scott Hanselman - Lots and lots of information about .NET and its extended family. If you listen to only a few podcasts be sure to make this one of them.

ARCast.TV w. Ron Jacobs - Architecture on the Microsoft platform, higher abstraction level than .NET rocks.

Polymorphic Podcast w. Craig Shoemaker - the content is there but Craig doesn't keep a regular schedule which I dislike so I ditched it again. Still well worth a listen if the missing regularity isn't an issue for you.

ASP.NET Podcast w. Wally and Paul - geared towards the Microsoft .NET Framework and ASP.NET.

RunAs Radio w. Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes - a podcast for IT professionals working with Microsoft products. I listen to this to become better at understanding the issues which people of the development cycle has to deal with. Also I'm a hardware nut which is something they tend to talk about as well. Finally they offer up some nice tools and techniques for debugging problems which is something we as developers have to deal with due to increasing complexities and number of moving parts in the systems we build.

For Fun

Windows Weekly w. Paul Thurrot - news show that deals with stuff related to the Windows user, nice commentary on various news stories and they even talk about Apple from time to time.

Diggnation.com w. Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht - Kevin and Alex chat about the new stories on Digg.com but mostly they are just fun to listen to. Caution! This one will make you laugh out load. I usually start my Monday morning drive to work with this one just to ensure that I get started on a good note. It's a video podcast but the audio version works very well.

Games for Windows - Talk about the newest games for Windows. Very funny. I actually don't get to play a lot of games due to lack of time so when I do I damn well make sure that they are the best. This is the place I go for that information.

1UP Yours - Talk about games for the console. I own a Nintendo DS and have a heck of a time to find good games for it. This is a great way to find them.

It turns out that I was lying when I proclaimed my upgrade to DasBlog 2.0 a success as I had a small bug. Apparently you need to change a config value in web.config which pertains to how ASP.NET 2.0 handles cookies otherwise you cannot use the Remember Me functionality when you login to view config, referral stats, etc.. It even says so in a friendly comment in web.config but of course you need to look for it :)

Uncomment <httpCookies httpOnlyCookies="false"/> in web.config and you're good to go. Remember this only applies if you're running it under ASP.NET 2.0 which is always the case with DasBlog 2.0 but not so with 1.x.

dasBlog-2-Download-Now" src="http://www.publicvoid.dk/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/UpgradedtoDasBlog2.1_9EC4/dasBlog-2-Download-Now_3.png" width="500" align="right" border="0"> dasBlog 2.0 was released little over a month ago and I've been wanting to update to it for a while; yesterday I finally got around to doing it. If you're in the same situation and need to update an existing dasBlog install here are the steps to do for a 1.9 to 2.x update:

• Copy bin directory
• Copy root directory files, aspx, ascx, everything found in the root directory of dasBlog
• Copy web.config
• Copy DatePicker and ftb (this is just in case)

When you're done updating the code remember to reconfigure your IIS AppPool to run ASP.NET 2.0 as dasBlog 2.x is now a framework 2.0 application. Please note that if you have other framework 1.1 apps running in the same AppPool you'll need a separate AppPool for 2.0 as a single AppPool will, not surprisingly, run one framework version only.

With the updated version a couple of new feature are available on this blog: Paging on the main page, i.e. you can now move backwards through posts. Scroll to the bottom of the main page if you want to see how it works.

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Paging in the categories, instead of just displaying everything only five posts are displayed when you looking at a particular category.

dasBlog-2-Category-Paging" src="http://www.publicvoid.dk/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/UpgradedtoDasBlog2.1_9EC4/dasBlog-2-Category-Paging_3.gif" width="377" border="0">

If you're running your own blog on dasBlog a nice little addition is found in the admin module. It's now very easy to switch back and forth between dates when you're viewing you referral stats. Very handy.

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FeedDemon introduced an interesting new feature with version 2.5: Link blogs. Basically you can make a News Bin in FeedDemon public by providing a RSS feed for that particular in. Check out Nick Bradbury's post about it.

I'm trying this feature out so if you're interested in knowing what catches my attention you can subscribe to my attention stream.

When I mentioned that I needed to do a post on Brian's new blog my other colleague Sune indignantly told me that I didn't do the same for him when he launched his blog. So here we go: Honorable mentions go to Sune Hansen's HansenOnThird.com. Sune writes about BizTalk and the software development business in general and he's already got a couple of insightful posts up on his blog.

There, I hope everybody is happy now. :)

On a side note I really love the idea of blogging spreading in Vertica as it helps give us give the company a human face, not only to other devs but also to our potential customers our there. I'm convinced that real words coming from real people are a much better selling point than any fancy PDF document can ever be. It seems like yesterday that I tried getting the folks here hooked on consuming RSS feeds and look at us now, we're actually joining the conversation.

I've been reading the Chief Happiness Officer blog for a while now and love the insights Alexander Kjerulf provides. Today I stumbled across a podcast he did a while back on motivation and why many companies fail motivating their employees. A very interesting listen with some good tips on stuff you can do today to improve your own workplace.

Podcast about motivation

My colleague Brian has started blogging in anticipation of attending TechEd Barcelona 2007 at which time he'll provide you with on site reports of the various sessions he'll be attending. He works with me on e-commerce solutions and general .NET development so you can probably expect to see posts on those topics. In his spare time he runs a small hosting operation called YourHost.dk where he does some interesting stuff with custom e-commerce web applications.

I just finished reading Eric Sink on the Business of Software yesterday and I was actually annoyed when I ran out of pages: I wanted to know even more! :) The premise for the book is Eric Sinc's work with SourceGear a company he founded. SourceGear which develops the source control system called Vault, an alternative to Visual Source Safe.The content of the book is made up from blog posts and MSDN articles he did on running a MicroISV.

In his own words SourceGear is, "a boring but profitable small ISV selling developer tool", and that is basically what you get from the book: Not boring content but solid practical guidance on how to go about areas developers normally don't think about (or even care that much about). He covers areas such as Marketing, Accounting, Hiring, Strategy, Pricing, and Sales.

Initially I was skeptical to the notion of turning blog posts into a book, much like Joel Spolsky did with his books. Let me just tell you right off that bat that the model actually works and it works well. Basically you get everything presented in a coherent manner which makes the thoughts and point so much more accessible than what you find in a blog. Reading blogs often gives you a disjointed look into the person due to the fact that most of us usually reads lots of blogs on a daily basis which makes it hard to separate the content. Not so with the book. Also there's still something to be said about sitting back on the couch and enjoying an hour with some good old fashioned paper :)

By no means is this a comprehensive work to allow you to run a business. What it does give you is an insight into some of the hard learned lessons that Eric Sink has been taught over the years by running SourceGear. It's accessible and has a humorous tone which often lacks in books for our kind of audience.

Eric's style of writing is engaging and interesting and I even got the feeling that he learned a thing or two along the way making it even more compelling to know what happens on the next page.

It's not a huge read so I would suggest that you read if you find yourself at all interested in other aspects of development than just writing the code, doing solution architecture, or even infrastructure architecture. For me it provided a nice additional insight into the workings of my surroundings here at the office and a fresh perspective on why some things work the way they do.

For you guys here at Vertica reading this: The book is on the book shelf if you want more ;)

I got turned on to Google Co-op when reading a post on some blog I can't remember the name of off the top of my head but I didn't really get until later when I got around to listening to the Dan Appleman episode on .NET Rocks.

The problem with my first introduction to Google Co-op was that it only searched a single site. Now what Dan has done is basically to add multiple sites to his custom search and thereby he has create SearchDotNet an engine searching only quality .NET sites for content with Dan Appleman as a kind of editor-in-chief. Check out his post SearchDotNet.com – Google custom search for .NET developers.

This really opened my eyes to the possibilities of Google Co-op. I've been toying with the idea of creating a couple of sites with the main purpose of aggregating great content but I never got around to it due to time constraints. Now thanks to Google I can create the sites easily and I can do with very little HTML.

First thing everybody should do is to integration Google search into their blogs if they haven't already done so and then go ahead and start creating searches for their favorite sites. I know I have a couple I visit when I'm trying to solve some kind of problem.

To create awareness of Mozilla Develop Center, Mozilla Corporation has created a very cute desktop background for us. Check it out. I just had to add it as my own desktop image :)

Get larger versions of the background image.

Blogging is about writing. Many claim that content is king. If content is king, then the army that protects and defends the king is the written word.

Here are some things to think about next time to put your army to work on your blog.

[Blogging Is About Writing]

One of the issues I encountered in my transition to team leader at Vertica is that the number of tasks grew to a number which I was unable to keep organized in memory. Previously keeping everything in memory was an option because it was simply a matter of one task after the other. Now I am faced with many parallel tasks making my old approach impractical. I thought I would share how I go about handling the numerous concurrent tasks using Outlook 2003 and 2007. The main difference between 2003 and 2007 is that colored flags are not available in 2007 so I have switched to using categories instead. Here's how is goes:

The most obvious way of organizing the tasks in Outlook is using the task list which I did but it turned out to be impractical when you receive every task in the form of an e-mail. Also switching to the task list just did not do it for me, I want to have everything available at a glance and the 2003 implementation of the task list did not provide that.

What I ended up with is using my inbox for organizing tasks (each task corresponding to an e-mail). Using categories (or flags for 2003) I distinguish what I need to get done and what others need to get done: High Priority (mine), Work Items (mine), Awaiting Internal (a colleague), Awaiting External (a customer), and Deferred (basically I never get around to these but it is nice to know what I keep pushing in front of me). Each has its own color to make them easily distinguishable at a glance in the inbox.

This way I know not only what I need to do myself but also what members of my team is doing and what I need from our customers. I created the Awaiting External/Internal because I want to keep the ball in my court so to speak. I want to be able to follow-up on a request I have made of a customer and not leave it entirely up to customer to get back to me. The same thing goes for internal stuff. Basically the goal is to avoid a single point of failure. With only a single person keeping track of a task it only takes same person to forget about it and it is gone. My way a number of people need to forget about it for it to disappear; in essence it is distributed task management :)

Additionally I have created a search folder for each of the categories in order to have a nice count of what I have going on. It is a nice reminder of the stuff needing to get done but it also allows me to get my folder organizing on and have tasks residing in other folders without them buried. Right now I do not really need it but it allows me to scale up easily.

Finally I want to mention the To-Do Bar of Outlook 2007 which makes the whole thing make even more sense as e-mails. I simply flag the e-mails I want to deal with at a specific time and it is added to my task list which is available at all times to the right of my screen. Also the e-mails and Outlook tasks are nicely integrated this way.

TIP: Setting up Outlook to do this is pretty easy but I did run into one thing which is not obvious, at least not to me. I wanted the search folders to display total items not just unread items. To do this you need to right-click the search folder and change the radio button from "Show number of unread items" to "Show total number of items". Obvious once you know how.

I would love to hear how you go about managing your daily tasks.

Title says it all. Order now! :)

The "Works on My Machine" Certification Program

Want to do some good while sending those IMs all day long? Check out this link im.live.com. Simply add a letter code to your Live Messenger name and you're good to go.

i’m is a new initiative from Windows Live™ Messenger. Every time you start a conversation using i’m, Microsoft shares a portion of the program's advertising revenue with some of the world's most effective organizations dedicated to social causes. We've set no cap on the amount we'll donate to each organization. The sky's the limit.

Ah time flies when you're having fun. My former colleague Simon sent me a link to the web archive of Bolia from back in 2001. This version actually predates me by about a year as I didn't join the development team of the site until mid 2002. It still looked pretty much like the 2001 version at that time.

We did a major overhaul of the overall site design in 2003 and later in 2004 we went ahead and redid the checkout pages with the help of usability experts. The result of the usability work is something I'm still proud of today because it truly does make a difference. Finally 2005 introduced revamped catalog browsing with more elaborate presentation of the categories. Three new category presentations were introduced in various levels to allow for better presentation of their stuff. Top level with completely free HTML presentation or banner control from Commerce Server depending on what they choose to go with. Second level with a nice image and text presentation of the categories beneath. And finally third level with more text and an image along with the various materials for the products found in the category.

That's how it stands today. Most active development at this point happens in the backend with a strong focus on moving to the new platform.

Check out Bolia.com 2001. For reference this is our current design. I wonder when we'll move to Web 2.0 black :)

A couple of months ago our network setup changed here at the shop and I now have to check the "Use Default Gateway" on my VPN connection to get to any of our remote servers. This is really annoying as I can't get to anything on our other remote network which hosts stuff like source control while I'm connected adding to the overall time I spend on deploying stuff because I have to use my local machine as temporary waystation before getting to the actual live server.

I'm delighted to report that Steven Harman has what you need in his post VPN Connections and Default Gateways. The basic idea is to set up static routes to the remote network which negates the requirement of having to check the Use Default Gateway box. Great stuff.

I was just checking out a Windows Vista story on LifeHacker and wanted to leave a comment on User Account Protection which seems to everybody's favorite dead horse to beat these days. It turns out I can't. You need to log in to get commenting but you can't unless you're invited to site. WTF?! How snobby is that? I get that Google can get away with something like that but LifeHacker? No way. How is this at all useful?

"Anyone who has been invited, either by us or by a friend. The invite system works like Gmail's invite system. We've invited a bunch of our favorite productivity freaks, bloggers, and frequent tipsters to comment, then given them invitations to share with their friends and colleagues. That way, the burden of inclusion, and exclusion, is shared."

All sillyness aside Gina states in the article that she wished she knew how to turn off User Account Protection to which I would have responded, if I could: How Not to Sell User Account Protection

... Shoots Itself in Foot in Process. I find the story about Krak demanding a fee for a link to one of their maps on their site highly amusing. Surely they must know how the Internet works and have sent the letter as some kind of premature April fools joke?!

Even if they do have the law on their side they must know that this kind of action is highly damaging to their reputation. With the online map business being what it is I wouldn't stomp around pissing my customers off. There are better and free alternatives out there like Google Maps, Live Maps, and Yahoo Maps.

Here's the story in Danish from the guy who received the letter and here's the story in English from his friend along with the Digg article which I would like you to go digg.

It's been a long time since I got my C++ on. I never actually got much further than playing around with it but I do enjoy a good quote which nails the essence of something completely:

"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."

Bjarne Stoustrup

Check out the article The Problem with C++ for more. Thanks to Simon who sent this along.

I've been listening to the Windows Weekly podcast featuring Paul Thurrott of WinSuperSite fame. I enjoy the format very much and it reminds me of DotNetRocks in that it provides the same insight into Microsoft but in other areas which DotNetRocks doesn't cover. I highly recommend it for weekly Vista news.

Also check out the comprehensive review Paul Thurrott did of Windows Vista.

Once in a while I come across blogs which are truly different and inspiring. One such example is the Chief Happiness Officer blog by Alexander Kjeruff. It's very different from what I usually read and that makes it even better in that it gives me a different perspective that I wouldn't usually get.

Check out his latest post which highlights some of the best posts from 2006. I only recently started reading the blog but if the list is representative of overall content I think it's safe to say that I'm hooked. I thoroughly enjoyed each and every post on that list. I think you will too :) This post stood out to me the most How Not to Lead Geeks.

What better way to spend new year day than to create a logo for the blog? I've noticed that logos are popping up on more and more sites but I've never found them particularly useful. That is until I started reading feeds in FeedDemon. FeedDemon supports favorite icons and will display them next to the feed name. This makes navigating my subscriptions much easier as the feed itself now provides me with a visual cue by which I can remember particular blogs. Naturally I wanted one for myself :)

I like the Technorati logo very much so I took cue from that in creating my own logo. The simplicity appeals to me a great deal. Usually I try to stay away as much as possible from PhotoShop, for my own sake as much as others: Pushing pixels just isn't my thing. Give me some angel brackets and semi colons any day of the week instead :) In spite of my limited pixel skills I'm pretty happy with how the thing turned out. I wanted to create a fav icon only but when I first got going I figured I might as well do a larger version for an actual site logo.

In case you were wondering I created the logo using PhotoShop and used a service from Chami.com to generate the favicon.ico file. You need to clear caches in Firefox and Internet Explorer in order to get the file to display. IE had me do this in spite of the fact that no icon was actually showing.

Finally got around to upgrading dasBlog to version 1.8 and modifying the source to accept image uploads using the MetaWeblog API. One of these days I'll have to look into getting my code added to the codebase so I don't have to run through the steps each and every time a new version is released.

Let me know if something broke will ya? :)

Looks like my blog has just been through a field test of comment spam using the Comment API. Thanks to the recent attention to the Comment API on various blogs it looks like the spammers have gotten wind of the technique.

I’ve turned off the Comment API for now, I’m guessing that it won’t come back until we see some form a user authentication on DasBlog.

publicvoid has found a new home on more powerful servers and wider connections. The DNS update should be complete by now. If you are reading this post it means that your DNS server has already updated.

A big thanks to my employers at Vertica for providing me with free hosting on our Windows 2003 boxes

The hosting facility at the office is having a bit of a problem coping with the Danish summer … at temperatures of high twenties who can blame it? The service of the site may fluctuate a bit until we get hosting sorted out.

More to follow.

Speaking of using your time more efficiently thus gaining more time for yourself, Keith Hammonds has an article about the very subject. A pretty good read.

You know the drill. It's Monday morning. You arrive at work exhausted from a weekend spent entertaining the kids, paying bills, and running errands. You flick on your PC -- and 70 new emails greet you. Your phone's voice-mail light is already blinking, and before you can make it stop, another call comes in. With each ring, with each colleague who drops by your office uninvited, comes a new demand -- for attention, for a reaction, for a decision, for your time. By noon, when you take 10 minutes to gulp down a sandwich at your desk, you already feel overworked, overcommitted -- overwhelmed.

[You can do anything - but not everything]

Just found an e-mail in my inbox from Flickr where they state that my subscription time has been doubled from the two years I originally paid for to four years, and they are giving me two pro accounts to give away along with a 2 GB monthly upload limit; previously 1 GB. Now there’s a way to run a subscription service

Google is set to increase the storage available to Gmail users from 1 GB to 2 GB. As of now my account has been boosted to 1166 MB which is considerably lower than the 2 GB promised, but bear in mind that the increase is still 164 MB more than I get on my current Hotmail account which is still stuck at 2 MB. Frankly a 2MB e-mail account is just ridiculous; spam fills my inbox quicker than you can say, “diet pills casino poker on steroids”!

By the way I have 100 Gmail invites available should you want one for yourself.

Even more on the search engine optimization subject:

Google is the best search engine on the 'net right now. The Googlebot is Google's indexing software. The Googlebot visits billions of web sites over time and records their contents, which makes them available to search. The Googlebot is very smart and works really well. But, like everyone, it could use a little help from its friends.

Help the Googlebot Understand Your Website

Also I couldn’t agree more with this disclaimer. SEOs are indeed thieves:

** Disclaimer: I'm no Google expert or employee, and I'm no SEO. As a matter of fact, SEOs who charge exorbitant amounts of money for "proprietary, secret" methods of upping your site's placement in Google results are thieves. There aren't secrets or tricks to any of this; my sources of information for this list of recommendations are the freely available Google Webmaster Guidelines and my own piddly server logs.

I’m always on the lookup for something different to subscribe to. Today it comes in the form of Drawn a blog dedicated to drawing. As the name implies you’ll find lots and lots of cool drawings posted every day.

Go take a look yourself. Here’s some art for the movie Robots which I found while looking through some of the stuff.

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

More at How to Start a Startup

From the bright minds of Omar Shanine and Scott Hanselman comes an dasBlog1750162Released.aspx">update to DasBlog which addresses a security bug found, and more importantly adds a URL rewriting feature which generates better permalinks for posts, e.g. the permalink for this post is DasBlogUpdate.aspx. This will ensure better page ranks on Google and make the links easier to remember. Before you turn on the feature (Use Post Title for Permalink) please bear in mind that every post will be assigned a new GUID so your RSS feed will republish previous posts as new ones.

If you are using my updated MetaWeblog API DLL which enables posting of images, you need to redeploy the DLL after you complete the update. It doesn’t look like any changes were made to that particular namespace but I took the time to recompile it anyway, just in case.

My favorite podcatcher Doppler went out of beta yesterday. Version 2.0 offers the following new features:

• Multi-threaded, simultaneous downloads.
• Resuming downloads.
• Automatic retry if a download fails (for instance if the server goes down for a few seconds or something like that). Doppler will retry the download 10 times, waiting a bit longer between every retry.
• On the fly conversion of your mp3 to m4b/aac format if you are using iTunes
• Tag rewriting including 'smarttags' like %date%, %feedname%, %time%, %artist% etc. etc. etc.
• The ability to have Doppler check feeds at a specific time during the day.
• You can now apply your default feed settings to already existing feeds (it's in the "Tools" menu)
• A new space saver: clean up by rating! It allows you set a specific rating. If you set it to 1 star, the moment you set your podcast to a 1 star rating, Doppler will remove it from the playlist in the next retrieval run.
• Catch-up all feeds. You can tell Doppler to not add the last x podcasts to the history, so that you can still enjoy the latest podcast. But not have to download all those podcasts made during your vacation.
• You can Doppler now tell explicity how to handle feeds which contain the same mp3 file over and over. Skip them or add the date/time to the filename.
• A log file. Doppler 1.1.1 reported to the system event log. Doppler 2.0 maintains it's own log, which means now that Windows ME and 98 users now also can run Doppler!
• You can pick a category to sync from BlogLines
• Double click on a feed and it will open a lightweight RSS reader!
• You can automatically increment a track number counter on every download, making it easier to order your downloaded podcasts in a playlist.

I’m not talking about satan here but rather about the spammers of the world looking to make a buck on the gullible people out there. I’ve been hit by referral spam en masse, luckily my upgrade to dasBlog 1.7 put some measures in place for me to use in this event. It’s getting pretty bad on the spamming side when time is spent on referral spamming a site like mine with my rather low visitor count. Ah well.

Comment spam is pretty much solved in dasBlog 1.7 by use of the CAPTCHA system but referral spam is still a problem. I thought I’d point you to the MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse where I among other things found an updated Movable Type blacklist file for dasBlog.

I’ve been trying to branch out from the mostly technical blogs I read  because I really don’t want to be that kind of person who knows about only one thing, and also I want to stimulate my brain into using different patterns as I’m sure that the end result will that I’ll do better at what I do on a day to day basis.

One of the blogs I found through Robert Scoble’s link blog: Creating Passionate Users. I’ve been reading it regularly ever since the first post I stumbled across. Every post is simply a little nugget of gold, very well written, and very interesting. Each post is rather long and not really suited for skimming as the topic often requires you to reflect on the content which is a very good thing as most blog entries tend to be a little on the short side and often not very well thought out (kind of like every post found here actually :)). Take this last post “Most classroom learning sucks” detailing what can be done in order to further intellectual growth in schools, great post with a great story to back up the point of the post.

I do blog reading both at home and at work as I’m sure many other people do as well. Or that is what I would like to do but I have around 200 feeds which I like to follow and I just don’t want to spend the time at home checking up on feeds I already read at work. I’m adopting a world view where time is the only real currency, and I really don’t want to spend any more of it managing the information flow than I already am. Thus I thought that I would shop around for services providing read synchronisation for my feeds, with the advent of online aggregator services like Bloglines and NewsGator Online I figured that there would be no problem finding what I was looking for.

How wrong I was.

FeedDemon is an aggregator client where support for both Bloglines and Newsgator Online Services was recently announced so my guess was that this would be the best place to start. Sadly I found a comment from Nick Bradbury who said,

“Joost, the way it works is that FeedDemon only downloads items you haven't already read in Bloglines, and when an item is downloaded in FeedDemon, it's marked as read in Bloglines. We considered one-to-one item synching, so that an item isn't marked read in Bloglines until you've actually read it in FeedDemon, but the added bandwidth consumption and performance cost didn't make this worthwhile, IMO.”.

I simply don’t agree with that statement. In this day and age where personal time is getting increasingly hard to come by, synchronisation is exactly the kind of thing which saves time by enabling people to access their information when they need it without having to think about where they access it from, or what they accessed so they can keep their home or office information up to date as well. The scenario is easily handled by IT and yet Nick Bradbury claims that the is no point in enabling it; why oh why should the user spend valuable time synchronising data?! I just don’t get it.

Microsoft recently announced the Microsoft Office Outlook Live service which I think goes to show that I’m not the only one thinking about this out there. Microsoft believes that people want to access their data wherever they are and they want their data to be as up to date as possible. I personally believe that it is only a matter of time before we see initiatives like synchronising music, video, and other large data stores. If not the entire data store then usage statistics such as play count, last played, play lists, and so forth for starters.

I finally caved and bought BlogJet 1.5. Actually I was pretty happy with SauceReader which I have been plugging heavily in the past but the few annoyances it has finally made me pay for what seems to be a quality piece of software according to what I read on my various subscribed blogs.

The main reason why I chose to replace SauceReader with BlogJet is that I could never count on SauceReader to work. Frequently I would get weird errors with the final straw being a Javascript error. Also the speed of the application is something I’ve mentioned before, although it took a great step forward in that department with version 1.10 but it’s still not what I would call a super responsive app.

The only feature I know I will be missing from SauceReader is the ability to post images to my blog using the Movable Type API which SauceReader supports. Guess I’ll have to do some lobbying to get the BlogJet people to add that particular feature :)

This is a post about a the Danish banks collecting a small fee for each transaction made with the national credit card even though they years ago made a promise to the consumers that no such fee would ever need to be collected.

Skal bankerne have lov til drive gæk med den almindelige dansker, igen!?
Mens de spinder guld på et helt igennem uretfærdigt og ubegrundet gebyr.
 
Siger du også NEJ! har du nu chancen for at blive en del af en fuldt ud lovlig og fredelig landsdækkende protestaktion, der skal få bankerne på bedre tanker.
 
Dankortet sparer bankerne for millioner af kundebetjeninger årligt, det er åbenbart ikke hvad de ønsker. Derfor skal vi alle gå i banken og hæve 88,75 kr, så tit vi kan.
 
Hvorfor 88,75 kr? Fordi det er en 25 øre, 50 øre, 1 kr, 2 kr, 5 kr, 10 kr, 20 kr og en halvtredser. Den absolut vanskeligste udbetaling og et maksimalt pres på deres kontantbeholdningen.
 
Torsdag d. 27. januar er en mærkedag i aktionen, her opfordres alle til at møde op i banken og hæve de famøse 88 kr og 75 øre.
 
Vær med i en aktion der vil skabe historie!
 
For at deltage i den landsdækkende protestaktion skal du altså blot gøre følgende:
 
1.      Så ofte som muligt gå i banken og hæv 88,75 kr.
2.      Alle der har mulighed for det går i banken og hæver 88,75 kr, torsdag d. 27. januar 2005.
3.      Send denne mail til så mange folk som muligt på din kontaktliste.

If you are considering whether you need a stand-alone application for posting to your blog, I can tell you this: Get one, right now! Since I installed and started using Sauce Reader for posting blog items my blogging behavior has changed. I now get an idea and start my blog post, if I think it needs more work - most often it does but that never stops me from posting anyway :) - I just click save in Sauce and the post gets stored and ready for editing later on.

Basically the process from idea to blog post has shortened a great deal which makes me more likely to actually do some blogging.

You need it too :)

One of the things which have kept me from posting is the fact that writing a post isn't very easy ... or rather it's pretty easy but I have lost posts in the past due to the fact that I was writing them in the browser interface for dasBlog, a less than ideal solution for my post writing pattern which basically is multiple iterations over the same post until I think it is in shape for the blog.

As you may know I'm a freak for new tools to try out. Various FTP clients, web browsers, notepad replacements, and so forth have been put through the paces to find the piece of software which fits my usage behavior perfectly. Actually one of the reasons for me starting this blog was to share what I learned through these periods of trial of different pieces of software.

I went through a similar thing with blogging software never finding a piece of software which made it perfect for me to write posts off line. My demands for a posting tool include:

• Easy posting to the blog.
• Support for dasBlog and specifically dasBlog categories.
• Save drafts of posts.
• Add pictures to the post without the need for a FTP account in order to upload the picture to the server.
• Easy formatting of the text.
• Full control over the formatting of the text.
• HTML formatting of .NET code.
• Nice clean interface.
• Free. I'm cheap :)

I thought that was quite a modest list but as it turns out nothing is ever as easy as you might think. I went through all kinds of clients never finding the one fitting my needs. Some posts in this include BlogJet, W.Bloggar the Posting Tool - NOT, Post From NewsGator, and Test From Outlook. While BlogJet came close to being my number one choice for posting it had some quirks which caused it to crash in earlier versions, the formatting of text wasn't exactly easy, and it was unable to HTML format .NET code.

The dasBlog plugin for NewsGator made life easy but it was just cumbersome to use and it didn't support categories in a nice way; you had to know the categories and type them in a comma separated style in Outlook, a nice way to get all kinds of spellings of your categories I think :)

W.Bloggar just sucked. Not so much to say about that.

None of the tools made for easy posting of pictures, they all require some kinds of FTP account which isn't an option.

I finally gave up and figured that I would pay for BlogJet at some point and be done with it. I never got around to it and before long I had started a never trial on RSS Readers. While I am fond of NewsGator and particularly of the online features which allows you to sync subscriptions and read posts between machines I wanted to know whether someone out there was doing something new. During my trial I found something unexpected: The posting tool which I was searching for earlier and a nice looking RSS reader all in one, its name? Sauce Reader. While it's slow as a dog even in the latest version it features a great blog posting tool which basically supports all my mentioned requirements except for one: HTML formatting of code. That however is easily taken care of with the handy Copy as HTML extension for Visual Studio which I talked about in a previous post. Sauce Reader sports a nice Outlook 2003-like interface which I like. The only caveat with this program is that it's slow. Not that it really matters if you choose to use it just for posting like I do.

Oh yes Sauce Reader also supports editing and deleting from the server which I guess is kind of a given but still nice features to have.

A quick notice about a vulnerability which Clemens Vasters posts about. It is present in all version of dasBlog.

I seldom get around to listening to the MSDN webcasts simply because they are buried so damn deep on the MSDN website so here is a post which contains information which is sure to get me listening to a lot more webcasts which is good since they provide a lot a great information.

Here is a pretty unique blogpost about how it is to go and have dinner with Bill Gates. Well to my mind anyway, pretty amazing to read this kind of stuff.

I just have to point out this site I discovered this week: The Daily Cup of WTF. It's basically a place where all sort of weirds piece of coding related material get posted. The site is relatively new so there aren't all that many posts as of yet but you'll have a laugh or two from those that are there now that I gurantee :D

I especially like the last post here.

Some time ago Scott Hanselman reported a bug in dasBlog which involved the cache getting corrupted. A hotfix has been released which you should download right away. I have installed this update and as you can see the blog is still running without a hitch :)

Just saw this post at SecretGeek.net. If you for some reason find yourself doubting your skills or your decisions take a peek at the post. It's really up lifting :)

I have been trying various posting tools and also tried getting BlogJet to work. This is no easy task; for some reason it completely denies to start on my work computer and crashes with a friendly message which goes something along the lines, "exception occured error 9484747555", and then nothing.

I am writing this test post from my home computer where BlogJet works without a hitch, very weird but at least it works, right?

I've been searching for an easy to use tool for writing blog posts and I think I might have found it with BlogJet. Unfortunately it isn't free but hey I am all for paying for quality :)

Now all I need is an easy way to insert code snippets and get them highlighted :D

A new version of dasBlog has seen the light bringing us up to version 1.6.4121.0. You can grab the new version here. Being an update-addict this is of course great news for me as it gives me my regular fix (the Longhorn fix has just about worn off about now :) ).

As you have probably noticed by now this site is dasBlog powered and I am happy to report that I have already upgraded to the new version and everything is a-OK.

You can read all about the changes and new stuff if you want to get the low down on this release.

My adventure into the blogging world started with setting up dasBlog as my personal blog and learning how to use the templates.

Now I have reached the point where I am experimenting with blogging tools which allows me to write posts from a more userfriendly environment than the browser, although I must say that the use of the Office 2003 components as editor eases the process a lot. Being a developer I really want an easy way to format a piece of code. This is no easy task using the Office editor so I figured why not try one of these blogs editors.

Having played with W.Bloggar a bit I ruled it out. It doesn't support dasBlog properly, so categories and headline (?!) aren't sent correctly. It boggles my mind that the head lines aren't sent to the blog but hey it may just be me missing something :)

Off to search for some other tool. I am looking into using OneNote 2003 as a posting tool via e-mail posting to dasBlog. Stay tuned ...

So the server needed another boot, back at it again :)

Just read this post on Neopoleon.com about a book called Coding Slave which you can buy at CodingSlave.com. It actually sounds like a pretty good book which was discussed on a previous .NET Rocks! Show (you absolutely *have* to listen to this show) where some pretty interesting conversation came up, not about technology in particular, more like a philosofical discussion about the biz, the people, and where it's all heading.

Anyways, I wanted to buy the book but CodingSlave.com doesn't seem to ship internationaly and Amazon doesn't have it (!?). So I shot a mail off the Bob Reselman an e-mail which I got this reply to: