Blog
On comments and social interaction
I got a request in email to add something like Disqus to my blog, which would allow a richer platform for the commenting that goes on here. I think that the request and my reply are interesting enough to warrant this blog post. My comment system is the default subtext one, but there are several advantages to the way it works. You can read the full explanation in Joel on Software post about the matter, but basically, threading encourages people to go off in tangents, single thread of conversation make it significantly easier to have only one conversation....
What happened to technorati?
Recently all my technorati feeds started to give me stuff like this: It looks like someone managed to crack the way that technorati is searching feeds, and I am getting what amounts to spammed search results. If this continues, it looks like I’ll just have to give up on it completely. Any good alternatives?
Impleo – a CMS I can tolerate
If you head out to http://hibernatingrhinos.com/, you will see that I finally had the time to setup the corporate site. This is still very early, but I have a lot of content to add there, but it is a start. Impleo, the CMS running the site, doesn’t have any web based interface, instead, it is built explicitly to take advantage of Windows Live Writer and similar tools. The “interface” for editing the site is the MetaWeblog API. This means that in order to edit the site, there isn’t any Wiki syntax to learn, or XML files to edit, or...
ayende.com move process completed
The server is now hosted at GoGrid, it took longer than I anticipated because I also moved it to EC2 to test that (post about this is already in the queue, and will show up in about 2 weeks). Commenting is now enabled, and it all should just work. Please let me know if something is broken.
ayende.com is moving servers – some interruption may result
Well, the blog has grown a bit too large for my current host, and I decided that I need to move it elsewhere. In order to make the move easier, I am disabling commenting site-wide. I’ll try to make this as fast as possible.
Automation, Mark 1
I just got this email: I seem to get automatic E-Mail notifications if you answer a comment from me on your blog. I asked our admin to enable this for our team blog, but he came up empty. Any hints? My reply was a bit disappointing, I guess. Yes, It works like this. You post a comment to my blog. I get an email. I...
Is blogging dead?
This is a reply to Chad Myers post about this question. My answer: No.
How do you manage to blog so much?
In a recent email thread, I was asked: How come that you manage to post and comment that much? I bet you spend really loads of time on your blog. The reason why I ask is because roughly a month ago I've decided to roll out my own programming blog. I've made three or four posts there (in 5 days) and abandoned the idea because it was consuming waaaaay too much time (like 2-3 hours per post) The only problem is time. If I'm gonna to...
Blog posts ideas, remapped
Wow, I got a lot of suggestions for new blog posts. I am not promising that I would do all of them, but I am going to try. The experiment went well enough that I decided to create a dedicated forum for this, which would allow people to also vote for individual post topics, and give me better idea what people want to see. I also moved all the previous suggestions to the new forum, and I think that I’ll make it a regular feature.
Extending SubText to report Future Posts
Since I am making so much use of future posts recently, I decided that it would be interesting to have a sidebar that shows the future posts. The problem is that I really don’t want to mess around with SubText. This is not a slight against SubText, it has served me well for a long time. It is simply that for what I wanted, the number of steps that I would have to go through is way too long: Get the relevant source Compile it on my machine Figure...
Blog posts ideas
Here is something a little different, I am going to open the suggestion box for blogging ideas. Just jot them down here, and I’ll try to get to them.
Blog Analytics
This is for the blog, for the last month: Some more interesting stats are when you go into the keywords: And if I try to break it up a bit, it gets even more interesting: NHibernate related searches are responsible for ~13% of the traffic on the site Rhino Mocks is responsible for just ~1.7% Generic Rhino Tools stuff,4.7% But looking at my traffic sources is even more interesting: I expected Google to be a major...
Post scheduling
This is a general announcement about a change in the way that I am posting to this blog. One of the more frequent feedback items about the blog was that people find it hard to catch up with my rate of posting. This is especially true since I tend to spend some days posting a large number of posts, and I feel that the sheer quantity reduce the amount of time people dedicate to each post (hence reducing its quality). I have started making use of future posting to a high degree (almost all...
Posts vs. Comments
Just some interesting correlation: Yesterday was the second most active day comments wise, eclipsed only by my single foray into politics. Another interesting statistics: # Posts / Day 1 ...
Saying goodbye to proprietary software
I have been doing Open Source stuff for five years plus now, you could say that it defines a lot of what I do. Increasingly, but for a long time, I have been feeling uncomfortable in my position as an Open Source developer that works on a proprietary operating system and proprietary platform. I have been spending more and more time investigating alternative technologies, as you probably noticed, and by now I think that I have accumulated enough knowledge to deal with the shift without causing too much pain for me. I am writing this post on my new machine,...
I wasn't the target audience for Windows Live Writer
How do I know? Well, I wanted to edit a post of mine from 2006, and I got this dialog: Just to give you an idea, I now have over 3,800 posts... 500 posts back only take me as far as June 2008
Newsflash to commentors: it is my blog
I can't believe that I actually have to spell this out. This is my blog. You can double check the URL, to make sure that it clearly states that. As such, I am going to write about whatever topic I feel like writing. And if I care enough about Chinese Procelaim Kittens, I am going to write about them. If you don't like a particular post, feel free to skip it.
The typealyzer
I run into this site, which perform an analysis on the text in the blog.
I run this on a couple of blogs of friends of mine, and it turned out... interesting results.
Here is what I got:
INTP - The Thinkers
The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine...
By popular demand...
There have been a couple of items that people kept pinging me about. Here they are: The Hibernating Rhinos webcasts are now offered as direct downloads, instead of torrent links. You can access them here. I uploaded the Advanced NHibernate Workshop and it can be found here. The code for them can be found here. The blog now has an integrated search
Cuyahoga
The Cuyahoga Project is a .Net CMS based on NHibernate. It used to be the best application to look for NHibernate patterns for beginners. Now I suggest people should look at this as a great sample app in general, not just for NHibernate patterns. Among other things, it has been the engine behind ayende.com for the last four years or so. Along the way, it gave me very little trouble, and allowed me to manage my site without much trouble. A CMS, by nature, is an extensible system. But it is a tribute to Cuyahoga (and to what I...
Asking for help
I run into an interesting problem today, I need something done, in particular, I need a redirect download module for Cuyahoga. Cuyahoga is a really nice CMS, which I have been using for the last three or four years, with very few issues. One thing that I want is to be able to create a download list that is hosted off site. In this way, I would be able to put stuff on S3 and still get tracking from Cuyahoga, not to mention that it will all blend into my site. Building a module with Cuyahoga is fairly simple, and...
What I am posting about
I got more than a few comments from people that were upset about my "attacks" on ASP.Net MVC. I wanted to clarify a few things. I don't think that they are attacks, they are simply documenting frictions points that I find myself running into. And as usual, I write them as I go along, so you get whatever impression I had at the time. So if I am frustrated or annoyed, the post would most certainly reflect that. I have been doing the exact same thing for over 4 years now. And I don't think that the ASP.Net MVC...
Meta blogging again
I had the feeling that I am doing a lot more blogging lately. But I finally bit the bullet and learned how to use pivot tables, so now I also have the graphs to prove it. KaizenConf gave me a huge boost of energy, but I the reason for the surge in the number of post is mostly the new project. I hate starting a new project, that is the most annoying part in the whole lifecycle. I am pushing my frustration as posts. It also helps that I think while writing, so I am hitting a problem,...
My Bio
Every now and again, I find myself having to cough up a bio. Usually for conferences, talks and the like. Since I tend to dislike talking about myself, I often neglect that. The last time I updated my bio was in 2006. Time for a fresh one.
Oren Eini is an independent consultant based in Israel. His main focus is on architecture and best practices that promote quality software and zero-friction development.
Oren is the author of Rhino Mocks, one of the most popular mocking frameworks on the .NET platform, and is also a leading figure in other...
Blog updated
I updated the site to Subtext 2.0. So far, it looks good. Reason for upgrade? I wanted to get the ability to future post. That should give me a way to throttle my blogging bandwidth. This post, for that matter, is posted with 4 minutes delay. Broken: I manage to forget that this blog also has a lot of links built from the old old blog, using dasBlog. It run for the last year and a half with no issues, so I just didn't notice that. Trying to fix it now, but it may be delayed for...
Does you application has a blog?
I was having dinner with Dru Sellers and Evan Hoff and Dru brought something up that really sparked my imagination. To put it in more concrete words, what Dru said started a train of thought that ended up with another mandatory requirement for any non trivial application. Your application should have a blog. Now, pay attention. I am not saying that the application team should have a blog, I am saying that the application should have one. What do I mean by that? As part of the deployment requirements for the application, we are going to setup a...
Writing begets writing
I am working on the versioning chapter for the DSL book, and it is going amazingly well. When I started it I had only the vaguest of idea how to go about writing it, but I wrote 10 pages today, and it is going very fast, and the flow seems to be good. What creeps me out is that I spent months thinking about this, without getting any concrete idea about how to express myself, and than it all flow at once. The problem, of course, is that it doesn't really flow into the book, here is my current...
[meta] Blog Data Sheet - Jul 2008 Version
I did this a year and a half ago, so it probably about time to do it again. I am using the same approach I outlined in this post. Active since: April 2004 ( I am doing this for 4 years! Wow! ) Number of Posts: 3,437 (was 2196) Number of Comments: 12,958 (was 3030) Avg. Comments Per Post: 6 (was 3) Avg. Posts per Month: 71 (was 60) Avg. Posts per Month Last Year: 51 (was 82) ...
Craig Neuwirt has a blog
Well, after a long time of bugging him about it, I finally decided to give Craig the first Hostile Blogging Award. So Craig has a blog now, which is wonderful. Who is Craig and why should you care to read what he is thinking about? A friend Committer to both Castle Project and Rhino Tools Main guy behind Binsor 2.0 Main guy behind Zero Config WCF All around interesting guy Subscribed, and very excited.
Post #3,000!
I have been doing it for quite a while, sometimes it seems like forever. Somehow, I am not quite sure how, I got to this post, the third thousand one. By sheer coincidence, this is also my birthday by the Hebrew calendar. I am not quite sure what I am supposed to do about it, since the big surprise is planned for a few months from now, so I decided to go with the traditional route and do a retrospective. I used these two posts to gather the information: Active since: April 2004 Number of Posts: 3000 Number...
Blog feedback, and a request for help
Luke Breuer has the following to say about this blog. Perhaps you do not care, but Subtext is getting on my nerves. I love reading your blog, love reading comments, and feel that I have learned a lot from you. Hopefully you have learned at least one useful thing from my comments. With that said: I cannot track comments unless I write something manual to do it. (To be fair, I have asked the commentful folks to add support for SubText, and gave them all the XPath/ID/Class information they need to do it.) Code looks horrible...
Creating readable content
Okay, let us see if I can get this post readable. If I am successful, you are supposed to see two images, one to the left and one to the right. Those images represent two blog posts, they are blurred on purpose, I don't want to talk about the content, I want to talk about the presentation here. The main difference between those two posts is the amount of text that goes into one paragraph. This has a direct correlation to the way that I read content. The post on the left is painful to read, it has...
Blog Posts vs. Articles
Jakob Nielsen says that experts should not blog, Larry O'Brien disagrees and bring some real world data about leads generated from blog posts and articles. I have a different approach for this, and it is about the time invested vs. the exposure earned. I have published several thousands of blog posts, and I rarely work on a blog post for over a few hours. The single article that I published took several weeks to write and re-write, peer reviewed and get published. The amount of contacts that I got from that vs. the ones that I get from this blog cannot...
Month Summary
A month ago, I was caught red handed, with no post in a span of eight hours or so. I decided to see just how much I can post if I really put my mind into it. This is my 150th post for this month, and obviously the last one. Here is a chart of my posts in the last month by day, the most prolific day was the second day of the month, which actually warranted 17 posts. It has been an interesting experience, but it turns out that it takes a lot of time, so...
Using Google to Fight Comment Spam
This seems like an obvious way, but it is worth mentioning. I was reviewing the search phrases people use to get to my site, and I found some... extremely explicit ones. Not what you would expect on this site. Repeating the search in google brought me a to a post that had several spam comments of the more nasty side. That gave me the idea of trying:site:ayende.com explicit-word-or-phrase I found a lot of those, sadly, and I was able to remove ~50 or so spam comments fairly easily. The main issue with spam...
Blog Data Sheet
Active since: April 2004 Number of Posts: 2196 Number of Comments: 3030 Avg. Comments Per Post: 3 Avg. Posts per Month: 60 Avg. Posts per Month...
Calculating most popular posts with SubText
How do you get the most popular posts? There are three criteria that you want to check: Aggregator Views Web Views Comments I decided to give each the following ranking: Each aggregator view counts as 10 points - a lot of people are subscribe to the feed and so...
Blog Stats: SQL
The best part about using a blog based on a database server is that you get to run all sorts of interesting queries against it. Posts #: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.subtext_Content Comments # ...
Rhino Mocks Wiki Status
I got a number of queries about it. My Wiki db was lost during the servers transafer in my old host, they also manage to lose all the backups. I managed to save a bit of the Rhino Mocks documentation from the Google Cache, and I'll try to update it shortly.
Blog temporarily down: dasBlog Limitations
Well, it looks like I have run into some limits with dasBlog. I have over 2,000 posts, and close to 1,200 files in my content directory. It gets to the points that just opening the directory has a noticable delay. Trying to run dasBlog currently takes roughly 100% of the CPU, and takes forever. This is on my machine, by the way, so it is single user only. Trying that on the server apperantly killed it. Profiling it shows that the fault is probably...
Temporarily switching to a new server
Hi, My hosting company has moved me to a new server, so it might take a while to setup correctly. I am still planning to a new host company, and am probably going to choose webhosting4life. The move to the new server is a stop gag measure, to bring performance to an acceptable level again. Take into account that this also means that I may not get emails for the next day or so (not a bad thing in itself).
Time to change a host
For the last three years I had my site hosted on Mirshetet, and I couldn't be happier. I had zero headaches from the site, and when I called, I got really good people, who understood what I was talking about. Recently, however, I had a number of serious problems that resulted in unacceptable slow downs and the site being down. (This is disregarding my mistake with no renewing the domain). Just to clarify, I am getting response times from dasBlog in the order of minutes. The final stroke was trying to go to...
WPF Impressions
Since it is expected that I will learn WCF and use it extensively, I decided to take a look at WPF and see what I can do with it. Considerring that I am thinking about taking some of my posts and turning them into a series of recipes, I thought that it would be a good idea to start by creating Ayende Viewer. Not, it is not even half way complete, but it it looking good, isn't it? Couple of notes about it: ...
Magic numbers...
Somehow it crept by me without notice, take a look at my blogging stats: Over a thousands posts just this year, damn!
Link love
This is kind of weird, take a look at this, I look at this and I hear in the background, "Oren, this is your life." And as long as I'm dealing with link love, check this as well. I'm going away to blush privately...
Posting habits
I can't figure out my own posting habits sometimes. I average on about 75 posts per month, but the actual post count vary pretty wildly. Last month I posted 54 posts through the month, the last two weeks I posted 55. This has to do with the amount of time that I spend at the office vs. the time that I spend at various client sites, I guess. I don't get a lot of posts from clients (at least not the kind that they would want me to air :-) ). On the...
Upgraded to dasBlog 1.9
The blog was down for about half an hour while I updated to dasBlog 1.9. You should be able to notice a major speedup. The nice feature that I really want is the tag cloud support, but I can't figure out how to make it work, I added it to the theme, but it isn't outputting anything. You should notice the nice category view, though.
Useful blogging
I wrote this comment last week over a piece of code: /// <summary> /// Yes, this is ugly. /// Yes, we need fix it. /// If you read it, take the time to do it yourself. ...
Adding Aggregation Services
My current readership seems to have stabilized on around 3,500 readers a day (after a peak of about 5,500 a day after I got linked from ScottGu's blog). After seeing the dramatic difference that such a link can cause, I decided to check how I can bring in more readers. The simplest thing is to get myself linked from the aggregations sites such as Digg, DotNetKicks, etc. Of course that the high goal there is to get slashdotted, but I'm leaving this tactic for the future :-) Now, putting my...
A New Methodology: Blog Driven Development 2.0
I
would like to introduce a new Methodology for development. I call it Blog
Driven Development and it is a modified version of XP.
Here
is the entire Methodology in its simplest form:
What
projects this Methodology is fit for?
Just
about any project you like, but I strongly recommend that you will use BDD for Web
2.0 projects, since it mesh well with empowering the developers and result in
better product that can be readily consumed by millions of eager users.
As
you can see, I'm practicing my own craft and use BDD daily for the last two
years or so. I've been very successful so far.
Please
note that this Methodology means...
Reading the logs
I spent a couple of minutes now going over the logs, it's quite amazing what you can find there. It looks like my posts about Brail started a bit of interest, since I suddenly started to see searches for information about it.
Another interesting things is that I started to get a lot more readers ~2,800 a day in the browser, and ~1,300 a day from RSS aggerators. I'm not using those numbers for their numeric values, since they don't really mean much by themselves, but it's interesting about 1,000 more readers via the browser, and ~700 more in RSS.
Changes
I look back at my posts for the last couple of weeks, and the are full of SQL stuff. One of the nicest things in having a blog is that you can go back and see what you did at various points in time. I knew that I blog about it, and indeed, I found out that I wrote my first trigger less than three months ago. That was a half day ordeal involving me and a couple of co-workers, checking out all sorts of crazy stuff (recursive triggers, for instance). But writing the last post took...
What I did on 2005
Seems that there is a tendency to summarize all sorts of things at the end of the year, and this is one place that a Blog really help. Here is my end of year summary: I found Boo (And the light, too) I published my first OSS project, NHibernate Query Analyzer Got scared shitless ...
And the magic number is: 800
Right now I've made 766 posts (I'm not really sure how it got so high, but what the heck). My goal is to post enough (real) content to the end of the year to push it beyond 800. BTW, in all of 2004, I posted 117 messages.
Monetizing a Blog
Wesner has a post about how to monetize your blog that strike me as interesting. I started to write this blog in April 2004, and I really cranked the volume of that shortly after that. I usually blog because I have something to say, and that is a good place to put it. Some time ago I put a Google ad on the page, hoping that at least it will generate some cash to pay the bills for the hosting. It didn't really work. So far I didn't even get a payment from Google. ...
Testing dasBlog Mail to Blog interface
If you’re seeing this, I manage to config everything
properly and I have succeeded in moving a message from Outlook to dasBlog
More on dasBlog Categories
It seems that some of my categories do not appear in the category listing, which is annoying. The problem is that I can't seem to find the reason why. Among the categories it refuse to display: Culture, Open Source, Operating Systems.... I smell a conspiracy... :-)
Blog Transformation Done!
I found out what the problem was, dasBlog uses the "Max. Days in Main RSS Feed" for the various API as well. I just changed that value to 1000, run the script again, and then watched how my entire category system reorganize itself. Total run time for the script was 40 minutes. Add to that some more time considering how to solve the problem, learning how to use Xml-Rpc.Net, checking dasBlog source to see why I can't get all the posts, etc and that is ~2 hours. If I would've tried...
dasBlog and hierarchal categories
Did you know that dasBlog has a hierarchal categories with a beautiful way to represent them? I didn't until I visited Oren Ellenbogen's blog and saw how his categories looked. My immediate response was "Me Too! Me Too!", so I set out to learn the secret.
Turns out that this isn't such a big secret after all: Oren* told me
that it's simply a matter of seperating the categories with '|'. There
is also some css magic that goes along with it, but looking at Oren's
site with the WebDeveloper Extention for Firefox quickly showed what I needed. (#1 tool...
Captcha for Comments Enabled
I've enabled Captcha for Comments, because of the recent comment smap floods. I also tightened quite a bit the ability to post bad stuff to the blog. Sorry for those measures, but the spam was getting to a point where I simply can't handle it on a regular basis.
Spam Attack
I'm under a comment spam attack from some loan sharks, I just got ~30 comments that I need to delete (that is quite a bit by my standards). All of them were from the same source, so it was really easy to just block the common URL. I hope they crash & burn on ReverseDOS. And for some reason I can't seem to delete those comments, I just get a 404 from the delete item page :-(. This is probably because I'm using the release candidate version of dasBlog 1.8, which means that...
Finished upgrading to DasBlog 1.8 RC1
Okay, I've finished upgrading to the new version of DasBlog. Unfortantely, I overwrote the site configuration and web.config files with the default ones, which broke the site for a short while. I've fixed it all and made some minor CSS adjusments that will make my life easier (change administrator menu location and style). I hope that this will help reduce the spam, and at the very list this gives me a way to remove it :-D
New Version Of DasBlog
DasBlog 1.8 RC1 is out, and the feature list is very impressive. The one thing I really want is the ability to remove trackbacks, which means that I will be able to remove the annoying spam from my old entries. Right now I can't do that since there is no interface for that and I would rather not edit the raw files. ...
Hierarchal Web.Config
I've a strange problem, I want to allow access to my blog using http://blog.ayende.com/ but the way that sub domains are implemented on my host gets in the way. The problem is that it's possible to access sub domains by doing: http://www.ayende.com/blog/, so in essense I've two physical paths to the same place. Usually it means that I would've to take care for paths in the html, but here I've another problem. The root site, http://www.ayende.com/ runs Cuyahoga and this require that the blog application (dasBlog) to remove several httpModules in its own web.config....
Upgraded to Cuyahoga 0.8.1
The upgrade went quite smoothly. Copy files, run script on database, enjoy... I also reduced the font sizes again, it's amazing how unprofessional a site can look when the fonts look too big. What do you think about the color scheme of the site, anyway? I find it hard to recall a site with a similar color scheme. Is it working?
Project Aardvark annoy me
Why have a blog if you don't allow comments?
The 100th post record
I just notice that last month I posted exactly 100 posts. This translate to about 3 a day, but on general I find that there are just days when I can post 5 items, 8 items, 7 items, 8 items, 8 items, 5 items, 6 items, 5 items, 5 items so in 9 days I posted 57 posts. Now I'll have to top that somehow... "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes." -- Jackson "Automobile" -- A mechanical device that runs up hills...
Blog downtime
I just noticed that my blog was down, I'm pretty sure that was because of adding the popular lists, I removed it, and everything was back online again. Sorry for the down-time.
To Block Spam: ReverseDOS
AngryPets' ReverseDOS I read about it quite a bit, and after tha last round of trackback spams, which dasBlog still doesn't handle, I decided to give it a try. The webseite is very clear, and the installation is a piece of cake. Drop the file in the bin folder, add some lines in Web.Config, and you're done. The nice thing about it is that it should stop a wide range spams (comments, CommentAPI, refferers, trackbacks) using a single tool and without modifying the application at all. It's like Ascpecting the application....
Popular list & Google Ads
I just added a popular list for the blog, the results are not very suprising :-) One thing I noticed is that on IE I can't see the google ads, is it just me? [Update: It seems to be just this computer, on my laptop I can see them. Strange]
Blog Reading: It never ends
I'm trying to catch up on my blogs reading list (which I managed to squeeze to less than 200), the problem that I neglected that for the last couple of days, and new content keep appearing, I just finished one category and move to the next, and then there are more posts there. Good content, though.[Listening to: Demonbane - The Last Herald-Mage: Vanyel - Shadow Stalker: Songs of Vanye(05:52)]
if (dasBlog.Posts.Count > 400) DisplayNotification();
I just noticed that sometimes yesterday I passed the 400th post mark, wow!
It's better to learn from other's mistakes...
I just found about The User Interface Hall Of Shame blog, there was a very funny set pages several years ago at IArchitect (which seem to be gone). Reading the posts is partly learning experiance and partly the helpless humor of the stupidity involved.
Blogging activity
Here is a survey of my posting habits... I got this domain name on the start of 2004, and did nothing much with it for about 4 months beyond using it for email. Then I started blogging, the graph actually surprises me more than a little bit. What did I do in febuary, and this is only 5th for this month, and already I've just about half the usual quata. [Listening to: Track 8 - - Time Tunnel(03:53)]
Michael's Child
I just saw this, Michael's baby is in intensive care with burst intestine. I wish her happy, full and speedy recovery, Some of what Michael is telling is hard for me to understand, what is this about buying blood? It sound like a supermarket for vampires. I all the hospitals that I know, they have blood stored inside the hospital, and the patient's family certainly have nothing to do with that.
Google finally got it
This blog is about programming, not about blogs. I used to get all sort of blog google-ads about blogs, now I get them about refactoring and UML.
Mugshots
As a tribue to my time in prison, here are some mugshots of me: "This message transmitted on 100% recycled electrons." -- Tech Support Slogan "If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried." -- Tech Support Slogan "Adult: A person who has stopped growing at both ends and is now growing in the middle." -- Definate Facts[Listening to: Shir Mispar Ahat - Mika Karni -...
Amazon Links
[fair disclousure]Just so you would know, any links on the site to amazon were changed to include my affiliate id, so I would make a cent or two if you buy a book that I recommend here.[/fair disclousure]
Wiki
I'm created a Wiki for NHibernate Query Analyzer, which can be reached at http://www.ayende.com/NHibernateWiki/ The main idea is that I'll finally have some place to write documentation when I'm stuck with writing code. As well a place where I can just pour out technical details that are too spesific for the blog. Currently the most interesting pages will probably be: NHibernateQueryAnalyzer - the initial documentation RefactoringNhibernateQueryAnalyzer - all the...
Best Firefox Extention for Web Developers
, it's not the Web Developer Toolbar, although that is very useful by itself. I'm talking about ColorZilla. This is an extention that does quite a bit, but the most important thing that it does to me is that it allows me to point at a part of the page and get it's color (but that is not the reason I like it) and it's class / id identity. Why is this so important, you might ask? In a world of CSS design, this mean that you know what that element is, instead of having to...
Blog Update
I've updated the blog software from dasBlog's CVS Repository, so now I've a blog statistics on the page. I'm very impressed by this work. It was my own request that caused this to happen, and I'm very glad of that. So, 249 (including this one) in 1 years, 3 months, and 6 days that I've been blogging. I also reduced the size of the Google ads, they were too intrusive.
Google Adsense
I've added google ads to the site, I want to see if I can at least make the site pay for it hosting.
Who goes there?
Now that I can easily see what searches bring people to my site, it gets... interesting. Here are some of the more... unusual searches: earth mother clothings RED DRAGON SYMBOL racing frogs password File or assembly name Cuyahoga.Web, or one of its dependencies, was not found. ...
Scaling out your blog reading
An interesting post from Mitch Denny: HOWTO: Scale-out your blog reading. I'm currently subscribe to ~300 Blogs, and I read them almost exclusively during weakends (it translate to ~500 posts). The main reason I use blogs is to see what is happening in the industry while I'm away. This mean that I read most of those blogs. Now, I'm interested in a quite a few subjects, but quite a few of the posts aren't really interesting, things like Web Services or SOA bore me because...
Free Mojtaba and Arash
The Committee to Protect Bloggers has declared February 22nd as Free Mojtaba and Arash Day. The commitee asks that bloggers dedicate their blog to the release of Iranian bloggers Motjaba Saminejad and Arash Sigarchi. Why not me? I'm in prison for a much longer time then they are, and there is no cry to release me :-) Anyway, I'm all for freeing prisoners, so let them go!
Security on haloscan.com
I just got the standard referrer email from my blog on my latest post. Only this one wasn't the usual one. I usually check the pages that link to my blog if I can, and so I followed this one, to find myself in Haloscan's page.
HaloScan.com provides a free, easy to use commenting and trackback system for weblogs and websites, allowing visitors to leave instant feedback. By copying and pasting just two lines of code into your site, you will enable your visitors to easily leave their feedback, opinion or a comment on the subject at hand.
The problem...
Blog System
I'm thinking about replacing my dasBlog with another system. I'm very happy with dasBlog, and not so eager to replace it, but the project seems to be dead. Going here: http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/dasBlog/ - where I used to be able to download it leads me to GotDoNet workspaces page. I have a single problem with dasBlog, I don't have a rich editing in Firefox. But this is a killer for me. AFAIK, there is a new version that fixes this, but I can't find it! ...
I've been Googled!
For the first time, my blog actually appears on Google*! Whoa! :-D [*] I'm the sixth result when searching for "Ayende Rahien Blog", but it a start!
GMail Invites
Got some to spare, first come first served.
Enjoy :-D
Logo evolution
Shortly after I decided to create myself a web site I'd a very annoying problem to solve. The web site look & feel.I hope that I don't need to tell you how important that a site will have a recognizable and pleasing to the eye look.
You can see that I pick a warm scheme for my site, simply because I like the colors.I don't like the cold color schemes, the blue on gray or the gray-scale sites may look proffesional, but I think that they lack life.There are many ways to create a color scheme, I simply choose a warm...
The limitations of open source
Well, it was too early to brag about open software. I always supported the idea that having the code is nice, but making any useful changes to it is hard.The reason is simple about the amount of time you can invest in the project. If we take dasBlog as an example, it support FreeTextBox, which is a rich text box editor that output HTML.All is good, as long as you remain in Internet Explorer. I’ve recently moved to Firefox, just to try the platform, and naturally I thought to use it to post to my blog.The problem is that while...
A Blog about Blogs
After several months of trying, I’ve finally managed to setup a blog on my site. It wouldn’t have been that hard, if I wasn’t so locked on using .Text blog, unfotuntely .Text require the really expansive Ms Sql Server. I’m hosting this site on shared computer, so I don’t get the privilege to use MSDE, and shelling out for MS Sql Server would cost an arm & leg be quite expansive.
I wanted to use MySql since I got it for free, but .Text doesn’t support it. I wasn’t worried, after all, I’m a...
Mandatory Hello World
Welcome to my humble abode, traveler.
My name is Ayende Rahien, a little known mage that deals with the mysteries of the modern world. I dabble in programming and science fiction and occasionally I attempt a work of fiction. I welcome you to my place, and invite you to share a drink and relax, we've much to discuus.
Do not fear me, for I'm nice.
But remember: "Never anger a wizard, for they are subtle and quick to anger."