11 September 2006 in Blogging & Tools | Comments (1)

Jeremy Norman has created a fantastic plug-in for Windows Live Writer for folks out there who use Box.net. Box.net is an online storage provider which is useful for people who don’t have their own servers with FTP or file upload capabilities. You can sign up for Box.net and get a free account which provides 1GB of space. There is a premium version of Box.net available for those who have higher requirements as well (perhaps the box.net guys should hook Jeremy up for free because of the publicity he’s generating? )

Jeremy has done a great job at making his plug-in as rich as possible with what the API for Box.net provides. More information about this plug-in can be found on the Windows Live Writer Plugins blog.

Download the plug-in here.

 - JD

1 September 2006 in Microsoft & Tools | Comments (0)

A couple of days ago I was talking to John and he asked how many hits I get to my RSS feed. The truth is, I get heaps, but how many unique readers does that account for? He asked if I divide the number to give an estimate or how did I manage it? I turned him on to FeedBurner.

FeedBurner is a service that you can use for free that “wraps up” your existing RSS/ATOM/Whatever feed into a URL sitting on the FeedBurner domain. For example, recently I updated my RSS feeds to point to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/JDBlog

I was a wee bit reluctant to do this because I like seeing the raw traffic against my server for how many hits the feed is getting. Over time however I realised that because I can’t get any meaningful figures about my blog feed (see the start of this post) I was better off using FeedBurner.

FeedBurner provides the following statistics for free:

• Number of subscribers
• Graph of subscribers over time
• Pie graph of RSS aggregators being used
• Live traffic reports about people hitting your feed
• How many click through from RSS items to your website
• RSS optimisation services
• Publicising services
• Monetising services (currently invite only)
• Troubleshooting services for resolving common feed issues

If you elect to pay a small monthly fee you can also find out:

• Detailed information about each click through(who clicked etc)
• Enclosure statistics
• Ranking of item clicks for complete stats or search engine stats
• More…

Of course one of the big benefits is that if you move your blog or RSS feed you simply have to associate your FeedBurner feed to the new location and not interrupt all your existing readers. Certainly using a tool like this helps give deeper meaning to how parts of your blog or website are being used.

 - JD

11 July 2006 in Tools | Comments (1)

This week saw the first beta of FireFox 2.0 is out. It has several enhancements over 1.5 including:

• Spell checking on form fields (my favourite feature!)
• Session restore (close the browser with tabs open and they’ll be restored when you open again)
• “Undo Tab Close” for the times when you accidentally close a tab
• New search (similar to Internet Explorer 7.0)

Overall I just like the spell checking – something I’m sure will come as an extension in IE 7.0 (perhaps as part of the Live Toolbar?)

I’m really looking forward to this second round of competition in the browser space – we’re going to see some cool stuff coming out. I’m not quite sure I’m sold enough to move off IE 7.0 though. The future is bright

Download the Windows installer for FireFox here.

- JD

29 March 2006 in Tools | Comments (0)

Just a quick entry for anyone who is at all interested in keeping an eye on RoR but doesn’t check out their blog – Ruby on Rails 1.1 is now out. It includes over 500 changes from 100 contributors. Not bad since 1.0 only came out a wee while back. Great to see so much progress being made (I’m not sure how good that is for site hosts who will need to test the changes before rolling them out however).

For more information on the “wow” features of 1.1 visit the Ruby-on-Rails blog

For more information on some of the lesser known features that just make every day better check out this entry by Mike Clark.

As for the quietness lately, I’ve been playing around a fair bit with Ubuntu and trying out some new technologies (like RoR). I’ll try and post more of what I’m finding soon.

- JD

28 February 2006 in Code & Tools | Comments (0)

A while back I posted some information about some cool things happening with UI on Linux. As it turns out that was all just prototyping for something much bigger.

XGL is the final result of that prototyping and I have to say – it looks wicked. I don’t know about functional but it certainly adds the much needed gloss that the linux desktop has lacked.

Some of the cool features:

• Rotating cube “desktop” to change between virtual desktops
• Applications can “wrap” around the “corners” of the virtual desktops
• Windows wobble seamlessly and naturally
• Windows “stick” to each other and stretch as you pull them away
• Transparency works amazingly (Quake running at varying level of opacity, videos on videos).
• A lot of extra cool stuff

Sure, you could argue that a lot of this is just eye candy and doesn’t add anything to the usability but, then again, maybe it does. I haven’t used it but sure would like to try.

Here is a video demonstrating XGL in action. A word of warning, it’s 54MB but well worth it.

- JD

26 January 2006 in Intergen & Tools | Comments (4)

With my decreased posting while working in Christchurch I thought I would share some various things I’ve found. First there was the Firefox extension, now there is http://www.meebo.com.

Meebo is a “Web 2.0″ application that allows you to chat on MSN/AIM/ICQ/Jabber through your browser. Now normally I would avoid anything that labelled itself “Web 2.0″ simply because I’m not fan of meaningless buzzwords however this is a very cool application.

At first I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy using Meebo but over the time I’ve been here it has grown on me – it’s so much less intrusive to have a web application for chat than what MSN has become these days. It was great getting notifications up the screen every time somebody logged on… back when you only had 10 contacts and you’re friends were still discovering this new fangled internet thing. These days I have well over 150 contacts and I just don’t need to be notified everytime somebody comes online. Meebo – probably not intentionally – has solved this problem for me. I should add that there is probably an option to turn off the notifications but I can’t check since I don’t have normal MSN here

Geek pointed out that he doesn’t quite “get” Firefox. That’s fine, I didn’t like Mozilla but did really enjoy FireBird (precursor to FireFox). I guess you just need to gel with something. The reason I bring this up is because I’ve found that Meebo (and perhaps other modern web applications) seem to be a bit more sluggish in IE and certainly IE starts to die if I run applications like that for many hours on end. I hope IE 7 is a bit better.

Anyway – Meebo is certainly cool enough to deserve a mention. Hat tip to John Lewis.

- JD

19 January 2006 in Tools | Comments (4)

If you’re like me, you use firefox quite a lot. The only problem is that some webpages won’t work too well in Firefox (Outlook on the web for one really annoys me).

This plugin allows you to open links in a new tab and use the IE rendering engine to display it, all the while staying inside FireFox. Very cool.

Strongly recomended for anyone who uses Firefox a lot

- JD

15 December 2005 in .Net & Tools | Comments (3)

I was reading about nHibernate generation over on David’s blog and added a comment which I thought could be posted here as well.

In the last few months a friend and I have been playing around with nHibernate a bit in various ways. I personally found that initially there was a bit of a high learning curve, mostly because I wasn’t aware of how like nHibernate Hibernate was. This meant that I initially disregarded all the Hibernate related content (first mistake ). There isn’t much out there in the way of documentation for nHibernate unfortunately.

So initially we wrote a basic generator to take care of the generation for us. This all went well except when it came to generating the collections (one-to-many, many-to-many etc). That was until I found this site: http://www.xylax.net/hibernate/. After finding that my only problem was not correctly referencing the assembly and fully qualifying the classes used in the collections.

I’m about halfway through reading Hibernate In Action. So far it’s been quite good, it’s pretty easy to disregard any content that is too Java specific. I would strongly recommend it to anybody who is serious about getting their nHibernate/Hibernate data-layer working well. The book focuses on version 2.2 of Hibernate which is great as nHibernate is only functionally equal to this version (mostly ).

Now I’m just looking forward to the next version of nHibernate which will hopefully include some .Net 2.0 features (Generic collections, nullable types). There are currently third party add-ins to enable this functionality but I’m not a huge fan of relying on third party components – it just makes upgrades more difficult.

- JD

P.S. The logo isn’t the official nHibernate logo, but one potential one.