My pal Chris McCracken was fiddling around to get fix up of the non-rasterized (is that the right term) totally unprofessional little logo that I invented for The Data Farm when I overhauled my site last year.

Here is the old

and the new

I changed everything over but am thinking, even with its deficiencies, I kind of like the old one just cause it’s brighter etc. Opinions?

Chris works for one of my clients. He is a bright young guy (even though he does use a Mac) who has taken to webdesign and even picked up some asp to add to his bag of javascript tricks and put together some nice stuff. What’s been also interesting is because he is very interested in computers and programming, he has become a great point person at my client’s site for handling user issues, training people, adjusting their i.e. proxy settings, etc because he picks up on this stuff pretty quickly. We have had fun working on a bunch of projects together over the past year.

Shelley Powers is in a quandry that comes from becoming what is oft-referred to as an “A-List” blogger. She has definitely risen to the top of the pool of a gazillion bloggers because she has a strong, intelligent and fascinating voice. However, that voice carries a lot of weight and Shelley is now pondering the effects of that. My reading of her post is that she is afraid of getting into a position of having to watch what she says and/or how she says it because her words are not taken lightly. The beauty of Shelley’s writing is that she is wide open. She now views that as a potential problem, but wonders if, for her, there is a point in writing if she has to edit herself.

I have edited this post as I have written it. I do not want to misrepresent Shelley or my high esteem of her by any possible mis-phrasing of my words. Luckily Shelley knows (has learned) that I’m a pussy and that I always mean well in my Pollyanna ways. But this is exactly what I think is distressing her – that she is almost feared, and that no matter what she says, people will read it with pre-conceptions. But, just like Sears , there is a software (eek what a geeky typo!) softer side to Shelley – she is a very sensitive and creative person and doesn’t want to be thought of as just a thick-skinned tough woman.

But it is because of Shelley that I would even dare to write a post like this.  It is why I moved away from the dotnetweblogs so I could feel free to write a little “outside” if the mood struck me. It took a long time to get comfortable with writing technical posts (and exposing possible complete stupidity). It takes nothing to write about how pretty Vermont is or how much I love my dog. But just plain old writing what I think and what I feel is probably the scariest. And I can easily credit Shelley for giving me the inkling to do so in my own way.

It is fascinating to me that through blogging, we have the potential to expose ourselves so much and because of the nature of blogs, it’s hard to erase our little exposes (that is supposed to have little accent over the 2nd “e“).

I certainly would like to spend another hour at least revising this post to make sure I am not misunderstood in any way shape or form – but I’ve got work to do!

So this trick of naughty websites to add themselves into your referrals had affected one post of mine on my other blog. There are a variety of porn sites referrals hitting just one post of mine which is about Scott Guthrie on DotNetRocks. I saw something in Joy’s blog a while back on this. Hmmm – I wonder what the connection is? Scott? 🙂

I find it interesting to watch the larger scope of how blogging in our community is evolving. A few to note: Shelley Powers bags the blog roll (which made me realize that I still haven’t bothered “creating” mine on this site after almost a month), removal of comment options to many blogs (notable to me is Sam Gentile), a desire and new comfort level for people to expose more sides of themselves in their blogs (Sam again, is another example as am I in my move from the weblogs.asp.net – though there are just so many examples coming on every day). Some more thoughts on this – without comments people are starting to have more conversations via their blogs (this is not new, just growing). I am unsure about this from a selfish perspective. Sometimes I’d much prefer to leave a comment rather than create a web post of my own in order to comment on something. But then this creates more links and Shelley says that links speak MUCH louder than a list (blogroll) that probably gets outdated pretty quickly. As I have gotten to know many bloggers in the past year, I love reading more about their personal lives. Even reading Don Box (though he’s not someone I really know personally) suddenly talking about his 3 kids and their favorite xmas present. When we see someone like Don in front of an audience of 8,000 doing his “thing” – who stops to think that this is a man with a life outside of Microsoft – a father with little kids? That to me is an important part of what community is about – not just getting access to technical information overload. Well, there seems to be another focus that has been interesting to me also which I see a lot of in Raymond Chen’s blog (on what a pain in the ass it is to try to keep everyone happy all of the time – orchestrating the dance that is Microsoft’s OS working with so many varieties of software) and have always loved about Laura Johns’ blog (often about how things tick at Microsoft). Anyway – just some random thoughts. Back to work…

Here are two things that I noticed about the blogger and metaweblog api’s that were of interest that I have to look further into. First, the metaweblog passes up a combination of strings and structures. I want to experiment with passing structs to a webservice.  In both blogger and metaweblog, one of the strings that are passed up is a password. I have to dig further into how these are working on the client end and on the server end because there must be something else happening on the client end to encrypt or do something to the password before just sending it up as a string, right?

I wonder if anyone will ever get the sick joke that is my blog title… heh heh heh

I noticde dasblog.com a few weeks ago and wondered why newtelligence was wasting their time with webhosting and since I hadn’t seen an announcement, did not mention it myself. The real site for dasBlog is dasBlog.NET. This morning I see this from Clemens Vasters assuring us that this is just some unknown person using the dasBlog engine, but it is not associated with them (newtelligence) at all.

Today’s NPR Commentary by the ever-enlightened and very entertaining poet, Andrei Codrescu, talked about blogging. I have been a fan of Codrescu’s for years, though I can’t say his take on blogging is too flattering! But that’s okay by me. Listen here.

Commentator Andrei Codrescu talks about a spider in his backyard and how it relates to Internet web logs, or blogs. The blogger is at the center of a web, like a spider. Both eventually die — from the cold or from being unable to pay the server’s bill.

I haven’t done this myself yet, but as per Clemens:

The Releases section over at the GotDotNet workspace has three variants of v1.5:

“Source ZIP” with the code, “Web Files” with the runtime files (to update existing installs and do manual installs) and “Web Setup” which is an MSI to install the web site. Because the feature list keep growing, but we haven’t done a language update for the various local languages, yet, updates to the string tables are welcome in the workspace source control system. And before you update: make a backup.

I am running v1.5 here without any problems. Let us know in the GotDotNet workspace message boards if you find any. I likely won’t be able to answer any support questions this or next week.

Please note that you must not have the Whidbey Alpha version of ASP.NET mapped to the web into which you install this version; it can be present on the box, but not on the web for dasBlog. Otherwise you will get all sorts of assertions and error messages that aren’t my fault 😉

Wow! Lots of “tests posts” on the dotnetweblogs yesterday. And did you notice who they were from? A whole bunch of folks from Microsoft. That’s pretty cool that this is where they want to be and it says a lot about this blogsite as well as the great tool that Scott has built.

This morning when I opened up Sharpreader and looked at the mainfeed from there. I have to say it was overwhelming. Because the authors are not exposed in the display of post titles, it is really hard to pick and choose what you want to look at when you just cannot look at them all. I actually just went elsewhere though I came back later and started digging through the posts.

I think I went “south”  (to my new blog) just in time. I don’t know why, when presented with so many new posts, someone would choose something of mine over something from a Microsoft developer/program manager/etc that is more likely to be full of useful technical content. I know that only people who are explicitly looking for my posts will ever read them anymore rather than the coolness of having someone discover something you wrote because they were looking through the main feed. But I knew that when I moved my weblog.