Hello All 89 of My Friends: I'm Now on FeedBurner
I apologize for the duplicate posts that appeared in "all y'all's" RSS readers; I signed up with Feedburner a few days ago and it slightly changed the content of the feeds.
I'm surprised I signed up with FeedBurner, honestly. As someone who's hosted my own mail/dns/web/database/everything since 1998, I've always been a proponent of "do it yourself" when it came to technical feats. Now, however, I find myself starting to outsource services more and more. I think this is because not only do I have less time, but because the services are more useful and reasonably priced (or free).
A couple years ago, I saw people flock to FeedBurner but thought I'd be happier just keeping the stats myself and dishing out a few SQL queries when I wanted to find out more about my visitors. That takes time, though, and I never actually took the time to look. Up until today, I had no idea how many readers actually subscribe to this blog's feed. I was pleased to see I had 90! Well, 90 minus one since I subscribe to my own feed to ensure the formatting looks proper. It's a modest number but it's my number.. and I appreciate your interest in my blog.
So, other outsourced services I now use are: Google Analytics, Gmail as an anti-spam ASP (I'll blog about that next), flickr pro and soon enough, mozy pro. I also use Wordpress instead of building my own blog engine. Oh, oh and recently, I decided to hire a real graphics designer to redesign RealCajunRecipes.com ("RCR"). It won't be cheap but thankfully, Google Adsense and our cookbook sales are going to pay for most of it. Out with tables and images and in with CSS! Out with that 2002 design too. That will give Brandon (my best friend and co-creator of RCR) and I time to focus on backend development instead of stressing over something we're mediocre at like graphics design.
Speaking of development, I have a couple questions for you, my #1 reader.
| 1. | Are any of you ASP.NET developers and if so, do you use the user controls that come with ASP.NET? If so, are you happy with them? If not, why not? We currently have a user database that can be easily imported into ASP.NET's built in user database but I don't know if that's the best way to geaux. |
| 2. | We're going to use ASP.NET 2.0 (Longhorn & Orcas) to redevelop RCR and are considering setting up parts of the site to be written in both English and Cajun French. I'm familiar with localization but I believe that looks at the encoding info that the browser provides. I'd prefer that visitors just click a link that says English or Cajun French. Do you know how to best do this in ASP.NET? |
Also, a bit off topic but I'd like to write about more personal things (dealing with a 17 year old seizuric cat, general stuff about living in San Francisco) sometimes, but I often don't. The posts about D-Pie and my cold, blue legs were exceptions and I ended up removing one (and pondering the other). There's something about netnerds.net that often prevents me from talking about non-tech stuff. I noticed that a lot of people have personal blogs and technical blogs. Do you think I should create a new blog or should I just talk about non-tech here?
And finally, I have a poll on the blog that I'd like you to answer if you haven't already. I'd put it in the post itself but I don't think that the AJAX will work in the RSS readers. The question is What's Your Job Title? So far, the top 3 answers (of 151 total) are: Sys/Net Admin (23%), App/Web/DB Dev (15%) and Douchebag (12%). Just as I suspected!