Brennan’s Blog

Kevin over and ScribeSonic is cleaning up the vast collection of feeds taking up space in his blog reader. You might say he has a plethora of feeds.

He is using Google Reader, which I also use. An easy way to subscribe to a new feed is to use the little bookmarklet/favlet that you can find on the Settings tab. It is buried towards the bottom. As you come across a good blog entry via services like DotNetKicks.com or DZone you can click this link in your toolbar to send the feed to Google Reader to subscribe to it immediately. This link is copied below.

[ Subscribe... ]

Also keep in mind that RSS content can be more than just comments from some blithering blogger. One useful kind of feed is the latest activity on your source control system, such a project hosted in Subversion. I created a little RSS generator that uses the log and list commands from the Subversion command-line tool to generate an RSS feed for any URL you throw at it. There are a few query string parameters that you can use to customize the behavior. Just look at the sample links to see how they can be used. They are pretty self-explanatory. (url, title, username, password)

[ SvnTracker ]

It is a very tiny web application and the source for it is available via the link at the bottom of the page. It is a bit sluggish, but when it placed being an aggregator like Google Reader you should never notice the delay. If you want to use it, please host it on your own server as this is just a temporary location.

I am starting a new blog called SmallSharpTools.Blog. It will be an improvement on this blog because it will focus on higher quality content that I only achieve on this blog occasionally.

The higher quality may mean the posts will be less frequent, but they should be more worthwhile. I have worked out plans to ensure the quality of the content. Read about it at my first post.

As a developer I find that writing for this blog has been extremely helpful. I do it for selfish reasons as well as to help others who come along who are experiencing a problem I have already overcome. And whenever I do solve a common problem I make sure to write it up in tutorial form to help others. I find that I also help myself down the road.

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I have finally figured out what all has to be done to publish a BitTorrent feed. And it seems that there is some interesting support in Internet Explorer 7. My plan is to create screencasts on various topics and publish them exclusively through torrent feeds to reduce the bandwidth I use from my hosted server.

I am hosting the tracker files on my FreeBSD server using TrackerBT and to start the seeding I am using RTorrent. And to create the torrent file I use µTorrent (pronounced micro-torrent). To ensure that RTorrent would stay alive to seed the torrent I am also using Screen, a utility for a Unix environment (FreeBSD, Linux, MacOS X) which allows me to leave RTorrent running after I have closed the remote connection to the server.

It just took me a while to get all of these pieces together...

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It seems to me that Microsoft has changed quite a bit the past few years. The company grew too quickly and earned a bad reputation for several years, and over the past few years have made strides in changing their ways. The phrase I often hear applied to Microsoft is "over sell and under deliver" which was due to Microsoft's marketing teams making promises that their research and development teams were unable to deliver.

It appears that the research and development teams are now wearing the pants. I have personally been quite happy with Windows Server 2003 and the .NET 2.0 framework. It is stable and modular enough for me to turn off the bits I do not want active, such as the Frontpage extensions. It is still not nearly what I want it to be, but I am seeing efforts pushing it in the right direction.

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I have had Scuttle installed on my website for over a month now and I have been adding a few links to it each week. I find it is really useful, especially when others subscribe to the RSS feed. I also use Bloglines.com to subscribe to other Scuttle feeds. Do you have a Scuttle link blog? Post a comment with a link here. I would like to subscribe to it.

The other night I came across Scuttle, a open-source port of the Del.icio.us service which allows you to post links to a website as a way of managing bookmarks. I installed Scuttle and have put in a few links so far. What is really interesting is that you can subscribe to the RSS feed and see updates or new additions to the bookmarks list. And more than one person can have an account so everyone can add links to it.

I have found that MovableType is limiting so I am strongly considering a move to WordPress. The conversion process is not hard and I did it a while back after I read how Vinny liked it. I have kept my eye on it and saw that in the latest release there is direct support for Podcasting. I still do not like PHP and I seem to have a performance issue with how it is running on my server, but I feel the interface is better and it has more feauture that I want, for free.

And recently I set up a site to run WordPress so that I can let anyone publish content so I do not have edit all of the HTML directly. What I have found is that the URLs are much more readable. When I view the stats on my website I can see the most viewed pages but they are by number. With WordPress it uses the title of your entry to form the URL. And then when you view the stats it is actually readable.

As yet I have not see how I can do podcasting with WordPress. It claimed support but it may be a plugin I need to find and install.

On this day last year I wrote my very first blog entry. At one point I kept a sort of online journal which a few people knew about, but this was my first effort to publish useful information instead of just personal comments.
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My friend Dan Bartels has been messing around with his fancy MS phone and recently found podcast software called iPodderSP. This podcast thing is really catching on.