2008 January | Caffeinated Coder

Archive for January, 2008

Dear GeeksWithBlogs, Let’s Just Be Friends…

Posted January 14, 2008

Yes, it’s true. I’ve packed my bags and am moving to a new location.

For those of you with RSS Readers, please change your feed subscriptions to use my new feedburner location. I do not plan to do any new posts on GeeksWithBlogs with the possible exception of a few redirection reminders.

For the rest of you, you can see my shiny new blog on caffeinatedCoder.com. It may not look like it, but I’ve spent quite a few late nights over the past few weeks dusting off my PHP and CSS skills so that I could get my new WordPress blog up and running. With thousands of plugins and themes to choose from, my blog tinkering days have just begun but you can see the”good enough” version here.

I want to thank Jeff Julian and John Alexander for letting me try my hand at blogging on GeeksWithBlogs over the last six months. I’ve had a great time and have appreciated feeling part of a large, healthy blogging community.

I also want to give a special thanks to Max Pool at codesqueeze for all the help and advice he has given me over the last several weeks. I met Max at the Alt.NET conference in Austin this past year and was impressed with his passion for blogging and his deep knowledge of the black arts of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and internet marketing.

He’s given me dozens of resource links and plugin suggestions and I’ve used his site as an inspiration while I was setting up my new blog. For a good demonstration of his expertise and some practical tips on how to increase traffic to your blog, check out his Blog Setup: 40 Practical Tips.

In conclusion, GeeksWithBlogs…it’s not you..it’s me. I just think we should start seeing other people…

So long and hope to see everyone at the new location,

Rory’s Minions Rout Canucks in a Landslide

Posted January 13, 2008

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The 2007 Caffeinated Codey Showdown is officially over and the votes have been tallied.

Despite an early lead by the Canadian contingent (Justice Gray and D’Arcy Lussier), Rory Blyth rallied the troops and surged ahead to win both the Best Blog Humor and Most Fun with Multimedia categories in a landslide. Justice still dominated in the Best Post Title category and the anonymous ALT.NET Pursefight blogger edged out Fake Steve Jobs to claim the title for Best Technical Satire.

Congratulations to the winners! I will email Justice and Rory their Despair.com gift certifcates shortly. Unfortunately, I don’ know who the ALT.NET Pursefight blogger is, so I’m going to have to hold on to this award for now until the secret identity is finally revealed.

Lessons Learned from this Inaugural Contest

I like the idea of rewarding bloggers for their creativity with novelty gifts. I am going to try to do this on a monthly basis by including a poll at the end of each Caffeinated Codey award post and then giving an actual prize to the blogger with the most votes. I would also like to open up at least one slot each month for a submission from a guest Caffeinated Codey judge and award them a prize as well.
Rory, the “independent web-based community writer“, doesn’t like being called a blogger, having his last name spelled incorrectly, or being publicly associated with any of his former techie cohorts for fear of being made fun of by his new writer friends. I apologized to him for so carelessly misplacing that ‘e’ at the end of his last name, but I fear that I am now on the Rory’s poopie list and have given up hope of ever making a cameo appearance in his creation story. I just know I would have made a great Sandwich henchman…
Although my contest probably had a better voter turn-out than most local political elections, it was kind of sad to see the votes tallies struggling to make double digits for the first several days. Luckily, Rory’s minions swept in and nudged the vote tally up to a slightly more respectable number. The good news is that there is nowhere to go but up in terms of readership.
“Integrity gets in the way of selling out.” When you are busy rallying the minions, don’t distract them with choices. If all else fails, threaten them with death by pulmonary embolism via excessively long and boring posts. These are all sound pieces of advice dispensed by our resident “independent web-based community writer”. I know that I personally will take them all to heart if I ever decide to run for public office or engage in any other equally shady undertaking,

A Call To Action

Do you want to be a guest Caffeinated Codey judge? Just pick a post from this month that you like, come up with a silly award name, add a touch of sarcastic commentary, and send it to me. If I publish it in the January 2008 Caffeinated Codey post, then I’ll throw some swag your way.
I got no love from Despair.com in my quest to attain contest sponsorship. Although I’ve had some encouraging conversations with people from Jetbrains, I am still looking for sponsors to supply prizes for future contests. If you know anyone with swag bestowing powers, please send me an email with their contact info so I can start begging them for free stuff.

Thanks again to all the nominees for producing such amusing content.

Mystery Solved!

Posted January 8, 2008

Comments(3)

In my last post I hypothesized what could have caused Scott Bellware to disappear from the blogoshpere so quietly and abruptly.

I admit that I was leaning towards one of the options that involved alien abduction, but then after doing a little detective work I uncovered this little bit of photographic evidence.

Apparently Scott was just playing hard-to-get with Microsoft as a bargaining tactic. Well played, sir!

Has Scott Forsaken Us?

Posted January 7, 2008

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Imagine my surprise the other day when I discovered one of my Scott Bellware links was broken. Panic quickly set in when I went to CodeBetter and noticed that his blog was no longer listed on the site.

I did notice that my Bellware feed hadn’t been updated in a while, but I figured he was just taking a break after the comment section of one of his recent posts devolved into the equivalent of a Jerry Spring episode. I had no idea that he was going to pack up his bags and leave codeBetter for good.

What is even more puzzling is that he left without so much as even a Sam Gentilesque farewell rant.

This leads me to believe that one of the following things has happened to Bellware:

Scott is busy founding the “bald is beautiful” cult which he will then lead on a suicide mission to shave Justice’s wild, lustrous mane of hair.
He is busy being the mysterious anonymous blogger for the Alt.NET pursefight blog**
He has taken a job at Microsoft.
He has been abducted by aliens.
He has been abducted by aliens working for Microsoft.

If aliens are somehow involved in this equation, the only thing I ask is that the next time there is a break in all the anal probing action, could they please be so kind as to republish all of his old codebetter postings somewhere else?

Scott may have not been the most tactful blogger in the world, but he also had some pretty thought-provoking ideas at times that would be missed in the blogosphere.

**Justice - no fair hiding the identity of the real Alt.NET pursefight blogger if really know who it is.

Guest Blog Post History

Posted January 7, 2008

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My official “homage to Justice Gray” guest blog post has just been published. Besides providing me with some of the most fun I’ve had in blogging yet, this post also inspired me to finally learn some basic photo editing skills (beyond just cropping and resizing) so that I could provide some appropriate visual aids to go with the post.

Many thanks to my lovely wife for sharing some of her image manipulation prowess with me and to the creator of paint.net for providing such an awesome free tool. I apologize in advance to all future victims of my new multi-media skills. Your safest bet is to quickly do a google image search and promptly remove any photos of yourself that you find floating around on the internet. Consider yourself forewarned.

I also wanted to thank Justice for encouraging me to write the guest post and for producing such entertaining content on his blog. To get inspiration for this post, I went back and read many of his older posts that I had never seen before because I only started subscribing to it this year. I found a plethora of truly excellent content that I linked to in my guest post.

By the way, if you’ve never tried historical blog spelunking before (reading all or many of the posts from a single blogger in one sitting), I highly recommend it. It gives you a unique appreciation of the writer and person that you just don’t get when you are bouncing back and forth between a hundred different writers every day.

With any luck I will totally dominate on his contest and perhaps even earn one of his coveted “Potential Friend of Justice Gray” certificates that he offered Martin Fowler.

2007 Caffeinated Codey Final Showdown

Posted January 2, 2008

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The regular panel of judges used to select the monthly Caffeinated Codey winners are all far too hung over to competently decide the overall winners for the year, so I’ve decided to let the nominees fight it out pollDaddy style and then actually award the survivors real prizes for a change.

Rules

I have selected 4 categories with 5 nominees per category. All the nominees were either previous Caffeinated Codey winners or else featured in one of my review posts this year. For now, all of the categories revolve around humor, but perhaps if I can secure some proper sponsorship then I will do a second iteration that is slightly more technically focused.

In order to choose your favorites, click on the Vote link next to each category below. I apologize for not embedding the polls directly in this page, but the Jeff Julian and Subtext project team were wise enough to prevent me from entering script tags in the source page, so I had to settle for low tech polldaddy links instead.
The nominees with the most votes in each category as of 8 am on January 10th will be declared the official winners and receive full bragging rights for the entire year. But that’s not all…

Prizes

The four lucky winners will also each receive gift certificates to one of my favorite shopping destinations, Despair, Inc. I’m not sure about the exact amount of the certificates yet because I am trying to get some official sponsorship from this most excellent site, but if all else fails I’ll at least hook the winners up with the cheap-bastard $10 gift cards so they buy cool stuff like this.