Digital Thoughts @ Wesstyware

With the new year upon us I thought I would take a moment to discuss some of the plans for the upcoming year. Plus, it will be interesting to review this post a year from now to see what I had planned for 2010 and compare it to what I actually completed.

Enter 2010...

Project: ZVGQ.com

If you have been checking out the site in the later part of the year, you may have noticed that a project section appeared at the top. The main reason for this section is the fact that I have a project that I will be working on in the new year. If you want more details, check out the project page here.

Winnipeg .NET User Group

I have been part of the Winnipeg .NET User Group for a while, but playing primarily the role of an attendee. As of late, I have been given the opportunity to take a bigger role with the group by contributing to their events. So far there are a couple of items that have been brought to my attention, but so far nothing is completely solid nor has it been announced. As things develop, I will discuss them further via the blog.

In the meantime, you can learn more about the the group at their website here.

18 (or so) Original Posts + Updates

Last year I had a handful of original posts that actually stirred up some comments from people in the digital woods. Between the Expression Design discussion, Vancouver 2010 Virtual Waiting Room, and the review of Bing from a different perspective I managed to get some people reading and even commenting on my thoughts.

The problem was that I did not really have an idea of the amount of work that it was going to be to maintain the blog. For starters, spam became a serious problem thus responding to comments became exceptionally difficult. Plus, writing a decent post is not something that is simple. It requires some serious thought, and more importantly time.

This year I have a very good idea of the time I need to put into to keep the blog updated and get some digital lifeblood flowing through it. With that in mind, I figure it is possible for me to schedule time to post about one original post every three weeks or so, in combination with the quick updates about events and such.

Other Projects

On the projects page, you’ll notice that there are other projects that I have listed there. I always have ideas of work that I would like to do, but there is only so much time that I can dedicate to my personal projects. The most important thing I would like to see in 2010 is the actual completion of a project from Wesstyware. Considering that Wesstyware is just yours truly, it makes sense to focus my efforts on one thing at a time.

Still, you can probably expect to see other projects either appear or extend over the upcoming year. This stuff is fun for me, and it if it isn’t fun then why I am spending so much time on it?

Conclusion

This is what I predict for Wesstyware in the year 2010 as of December 31, 2009. We shall see how the year goes and meet back here in 365 days to see how I did.

Catch you on the flip side.

Every now and again I come across an article out there that explains to me how blogging is old newsor how blogging has diedor how it has died yet again. I have read over those articles, and they definitely make some solid points. Just looking at my blog experiences where software developers post solutions all over the Internet, and in reality they are really poor solutions. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people that won’t see that and they simply repeat the poor code they have learned in their own code. Heck, I’m even guilty as doing that every now and again.

But blogging is definitely not dead. Let me tell you why.

Why Blogging is not Dead: Matt Weber

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, the development on the Wesstyware.com site has been delayed because I have working on creating a proof of concept for the WCF services that I would like to use to drive the content on the site. I have done this in an environment where I have had complete access and control to the IIS server, but as I’m paying GoDaddy to host everything for me, I don’t have that luxury anymore.

The technical issue that I have been dealing with is determining why I can get ASP.NET applications working, but cannot get WCF service working. I know they work with IIS, but there must be some sort of setting that isn’t configured properly. For the past week, I have been dealing with GoDaddy’s support staff (which have been exceptionally patient and friendly by steering me through their IIS setup and helping me as much as they are able to do) but have had no luck with getting past the wonderful “500 Internal Server Error” that would appear whenever I attempted to load up the page. After searching for a solution for the past week, last night I found what was needed.

Last night I found Matt Weber’s blog. Matt Weber saved my life. Or at least my future web site.

Matt Weber has apparently dealt with the exact same problems I have been dealing with for the past week. When he found a solution, he did a quick post with the changes that were needed to the Web.config and there you have it. Literally every IIS issue that I did not know how to address myself, he had the solution sitting out on his blog. This is why blogging cannot be dead, at least not in the software development community.

So Why Heart Blogs Only Most of the Time?

Although I am exceptionally happy that Matt wrote out those posts, for every solution that I have found on the web, there have been two more that have incorrect or incomplete solutions. For example, when looking up how to do something with CSS in a web application, I have found many solution that address how to fix it in only Firefox, but fail to mention that it will only work in Firefox. I understand a lot of people dislike Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 but a large portion of the web surfing community uses IE and it is probably in the best interests of your web site/application to support at least IE 7 and above.

Here’s the good thing about the bad: blogs are community driven. So, if you come across someone who has explained how to solve a problem, but it doesn’t work properly in IE or just doesn’t make any sense, you can leave comments and let the writer know that they haven’t got it working, or that they might want to clarify how to get the solution working in all browsers.

Sure the blogger has the ability to delete your comments, but I don’t know of any would. The point of blogging about software development solutions, is to get the right information out there to other developers. I know that when the Internet is down and I don’t have access to Google, my productive drops dramatically. That isn’t because I’m a bad programmer. It’s because I lose access to the wealth of knowledge posted on the web by the entire development community. Having that kind of information at your fingertips definitely makes finding a solution to your development issues easier.

And Your Point?

I don’t have much of a point other than blogs are definitely not dead in the software development community. Sure, I don’t read any blogs about celebrities or some stranger’s day. I could care less about that. Although if I were to lose blogs as one of the tools in my software development arsenal then I am pretty sure we would all be worse off.

In conclusion, if you are a developer and feel like sharing your solutions start one! You can do it for free with Blogger or with WordPress. You might not think anyone is reading your posts in the beginning. I certainly didn’t think anyone was, and I had the analyticsto prove it. But it’s a few months in now, and I am getting feedback from people I have never met and getting comments about how my posts are interesting and helpful.

It might not be much, but it is definitely something that I am proud of…even if my friends call me a nerd for blogging on a Friday evening.

Catch you on the flip side.

Resources

Matt Weber: http://blog.mattweber.name/