Developing Upwards

So after staying up with my sick son until 4 AM, we took him into the emergency room just before 6 AM. Needless to say, I've got little sleep to go on. I figure its a good time to jump into that polyphasic sleep stuff. Obviously, I've gotten little done today in light of this.

I've been reading an eBook in my attempts at being a better blogger and reaching a wider audience, and although I recommend it to read by anyone with similar goals, its more how I got it than what I got that I wanted to bring up. Some might know that I recently looked into ways of capitolizing on my feeds. Nearly 70% of my traffic (maybe more) is via feed subscribers, who never see my advertising. That is quite a bit of lost revenue, not that it would add up to much if they all went straight to my front page. None the less, its a problem I want a solution to. Now, I really like feeds. I don't want to make you come to my website if you prefer feeds, because I know I don't even read websites these days unless they have a feed. Even if I find a particular article I like, I typically just subscribe to the feed and wait for the article to get to me through it. Still, others are not so open to the new medium, and often treat feeds marketing. Maybe they are. These people will give...

I read two 101 Ways to Blog Better lists and found this nice article about mapping what your reader wants with a fun grid. I made my own via Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Do you fit my grid of you? Check the article if you blog. A Fool-Proof Method To Brainstorm Blogging Ideas Technorati Tags: blogging Powered by ScribeFire .

So I've been not using my Feedburner account for a while, largely because If I did people would still autodiscover the normal, Blogger-made feeds, so I would just segment my readers. Yes, I have readers . A little investigation lead to the forum post I link to below that shows how to solve this. I was motivated by two factors. First, that Google is buying FeedBurner. Two, that I want to move away from Blogger sometime, and this way I can keep the same Feed URL when I do. Change your feeds to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RavingTechnoRant FeedBurner Support :: View topic - Modifying "Autodiscovery" in Both Blogger Versions Technorati Tags: blogging , blogger.com , feedburner.com Powered by ScribeFire .

Vias the Vista Smalltalk Wiki , it looks like the DLR has gained a new language by a third party, implementing Lisp and Smalltalk. Correct me if I am wrong about that, but I am quite the Lisp-history Luddite and have no concept of the separation of Lisp, Scheme, and Smalltalk. Still, what I find most interesting about this is how the way the CLR and DLR works means we can put new languages into them and deploy with pretty much whatever we feel like so easily. Just think of all the purists out there that would love to put their half-a-century-old-baby into so many hands, although I suspect many of them aren't kind toward Redmond, so its another interesting pairing, for sure. What's next? Subtext ? Powered by ScribeFire .

I don't know why I needed to take a week break from blogging. Maybe I was getting creatively burnt out, or maybe I just forgot. Getting back into the swing of a habit after suspending it for a while is not easy. I'll ease into it over the next few days, I guess. I started a silly little multiprocess module aimed at: Very long running jobs Minimal inter-process communication Growth possible to multi-machine Minimal dependancies. Works only with Python 2.5 standard library modules. You can check out the attempt over at the cheeseshop . I finally found myself a Javascript library I really like, so that I can move from doing so much back-end centric work to putting some of my interface ideas to work. I've been growing wary of the server-heavy AJAX libraries, like Athena. They are great, but I worry about scaling, long running use of pages holding up connections, user experience when connections are lost, and a whole host of other things. Besides the worries, I'm just plain ...

Not every geek hits it rich with just the right algorithm and moves to Miami when he (or she!) retires at 35. I am not among that group, or any group near it. Cutting budgets can mean crappy food while you work. Cheap and quick recipes can be useful. At the very least, some way to mix up the usual stuff with a minor twist can at least make the daily drudge a bit more acceptable, for the moment. This is my recipe for what I call Cheap Cheese Bean Casserole. Ingredients: 1 Cup Baked Beans (I prefer Bush's Maple Cured) 1 Slice Chedder Cheese 2 Beef Hotdogs (Cheese Dogs work well here) 1/2 Cup Slightly Crushed Saltine Crackers The instructions are dirt simple but the result is delicious, filling, and perfect on a cold day. Cut up the hotdogs and add to the beans. Cover with the chedder cheese and evenly cover the entire bowl with the crackers. Microwave on medium for 2:30. The cheese will melt into the beans, the crackers will be protected from the sauses and remain crisp. The result i...