I’ve read alot of posts on how to interpret and evaluate your blogs statistics, most lately Scott Hanselmans post entitled 7 Blogging Statistics Rules – There is a life after page views so I realise and agree that how many people has visited your blog isn’t everything. I’ve had ClustrMaps from the start and that’s what I’m using as measurement in this case. ClustrMaps definition of visits are hits from unique ip adresses during a 24 hour period. I think it’s a good definition as oppsed to hits or something else. The landmark I’ve passed is probably small and insignificant to all of you veteran bloggers out there. Still, I can’t help but to feel a little happy that I’ve passed 1000 visitors. And I’m just getting started… To celebrate the event I put the feeburner subscriber count up on the blog, although I feel a bit silly doing it since some of the blogs I myself read have 27000, and I have 27. I don’t have a wide enough subject to get a really wide reach, and that isn’t the goal. I don’t need alot of subscribers, I just need the right ones. And hopefully my posts can help or amuse someone out there. Have a nice weekend all.
Category: Blogging
Note to those who comment – captcha enabled
Due to an ever increasing amount of spam I installed the (Ajax enabled) captcha control for CommunityServer 2007 written by Brendan Tompkins today. The installation documentation was clear enough, kinda. It still took me a little bit to get it working. At first, however I configured it, it just wouldn’t show up. I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong – double checking my configuration I was sure I hade it down right. As I went to review the source code I noticed what caused the issue. It had an if (!Page.Request.IsAuthenticated) in there causing me, an authenticated user, to never see the captcha. At that point all I had to do was logout, and there it was. So now when you comment on posts on any of the blogs on this site, you have to fill out the captcha (if you haven’t created an account and logged in – but who does that?). Also note that I moderate all anonymous comments, so they wont ger published until I say so – usually within a day.
As I sidenote, I experienced something when trying to download the file that I haven’t experienced before. When downloading with IE the file came down corrupt. Someone tipped about using a simple downloader named WGET. When using that the file got down correctly and I was able to open it ok. Strange thing…
How do you track the latest Microsoft Downloads
Do you ever wonder how alot of bloggers seems to know when downloads become available on the Microsoft Downloads site? And blog about it almost instantly. I am not a download chaser myself, mostly because I don’t have the stamina to check up on the latest news often enough. And to be clear, I think a simple blogpost about an available download that might interest the audience of the blog is a perfect way to make people aware of the download becoming available. In fact, an RSS feed over latest downloads is exactly what I’m missing at the Microsoft Downloads site. Unfourtunatly, even in the new Silverlight version, Microsoft doesn’t provide it. For now the only thing you can do at the site is to use the advanced search features to look for recent additions. For example:
You could sign up for the weekly download notifications newsletter, but it’s not nearly as useful and doesn’t allow you to receive truly targeted conent.
Luckily, I’m not the first to miss an RSS feed over latest downloads, this feed will keep you up to date with the latest downloads. It won’t let you define keywords like BizTalk, but you can live without that… As far as I know, it’s not an official feed, and not connected to the actual download site, and as such it can at times be a bit (hours to days) behind on the very latest downloads just released.
Are you a collegue? Would you like to blog here?
One of the cons of working for a large company such as Logica is that you don’t really know your collegues. Those closest to you and those you have worked with or met at social getogethers you have a fair concept about who they are and what they do, but with a company with several tens of thousand of employees the vast majority is simply out of reach. So, if you are a Microsoft BizTalk Server specialist or Microsoft architect or developer or just all around nice guy and happens to have the same employeer as I do, I invite you to host your blog here. Note: This blog is run on a completely personal basis. Views, opinions and content are those of the individuals themselves and is not sanctioned or sponsored, and might not always be shared by, the company we work for. With that said, should you happen to work for another company, but be active within our areas (of expertise rather then geography) in Sweden, you can still host your blog here if you’d like. We’ll help you get started.
Getting formatted c# code into CommunityServer
After looking at a couple of different solutions I ended up using csharpformat for one of my previous posts, and I will probably keep using it. It’s not perfect, most of all I would have liked getting CopySourceAsHtml working, since judging from the description that would make the snippets in the blog look exactly like in Visual Studio, which is what I really want. However it just keeps throwing exceptions and I am in no mood of debugging it at the moment. Csharpformat with some small adjustments to the css file does the trick, and most importantly it makes the code itself searchable and copyable instead of it being an image – which isn’t really helping anyone. CSharpformat seems to also be mirrored here, and is available as a VS.NET 2005 plugin here, although since it builds on the same principles I am not sure what extras it gives you, but then I haven’t tried it.
Be Logical - Notes from Johan Hedberg 