Denied an Adsense activation

I can’t blame Google for this. They’ve denied my request to activate my Adsense account until they’ve seen what’s on the site. Ah well. Start with something else then …

Website Update : Opened an Adsense Account

Step 1: I have registered for an Adsense account. Unfortunately there is an approval process, presumably involving someone or something checking out my website, which is clearly a bit of an issue given that I haven’t redesigned it yet. I may have to re-arrange the ordering of tasks…

Website Plans Coming Together

I’ve been slowly thinking through my plans for the new website in my rare free moments. I’ve decided to come up with a list of technology features that I want to introduce and learn about, then I’ll work out some way of incorporating them into the site. Once the bare bones of the site are up and running I shall start thinking about the aesthetics. Many designers I’m sure would say I have this all the wrong way around, but I’m a developer at heart, not a designer…

Technology List: These are the things I’m going to make sure are incorporated into the site.

• Adsense advertising – After all, if I do manage to generate any traffic on the site, I might as well try and make some money from it.
• Blog Hosting – I’m tired of working with WordPress on a hosted service. Mainly just because I want to have a bit more control over my page. I’m planning on installing an Open Source blog engine on my shared hosting.
  [NOTE: With immaculate timing, the WordPress server appears to be too busy to serve my site at the moment, and the first three attempts to post this have just failed.]
• A Mac Sparkle application for download. The other thing I’m learning at the moment is Objetive-C on the Mac.

Right now, that’s all. I’ll probably expand this list shortly.

Website Rebuild – Interlude

My Parallels trial license ran out today, so there will be a short hiatus in the Website rebuild project while I decide what to do. I would buy the license for Parallels if I thought it was good, but to be honest I don’t see it as a big advantage over the free version of Virtual Box. So I will either go back to using my Vista installation through Bootcamp, or I’m going to wipe it and simply use Virtual Box to run Vista instead.

There is a big advantage to that approach of course. I can keep the Virtual Hard Drive on an external hard-drive or the network, and use it on a number of different computers.

I’ll let you all know what I decide.

Caterham going to car hospital

After more than 4 years of mucking about I have finally managed to arrange for my Caterham to be sent to the garage for a sort out. Here it is in its current sorry state, battery disconnected, small oil leak and quite rusty in the footwell. Hopefully the next time I see it, the Engineers will have sorted it out for me so that its safe and reliable to drive.

Once that’s done, I can start on the software upgrades…

From Car

Website Rebuild (Part 1) Setting Up The Environment

For my ASP.NET MVC Website development I’m going to use a slightly non-traditional setup:

Hardware

I’m going to do all of my development on my Apple Macbook and just for a bit more of a challenge, I’ll do it using a Parallels Virtual Machine running Vista in “Coherence” mode. That means that the Vista applications appear almost as if they’re Mac OS applications. Its not perfect, the mouse focus sometimes gets a bit confused, but at least its stable and I can carry on using MarsEdit to edit this Blog post under Mac OS X.

Development Tools

For an IDE, I’ll be using Visual Studio 2008 with all the latest service packs and ASP.NET MVC version 1.0. I tried MonoDevelop running on Mono on Mac OS X. It was a great start and I’m really happy that they’re doing it, but so far its not quite ready for prime-time and its still missing some important features, I will definitely be trying the next version when it comes out.

To upload the website to my hosting provider I’m probably going to use the open source Filezilla package. A multi-platform FTP client which seems to work really well.

Revision control will be done using Mercurial. In the past I’ve often used Subversion, which would certainly have got the job done for this project too, but I’ve been using Mercurial for very small jobs recently and I thought it was worth trying out on something a bit more substantial. I did consider Git, but then I decided it would be too painful

On the up

My blog stats are looking excitingly upward

8th Of May: 0 Hits

9th & 10th of May: 1 Hit

11th of May : 2 Hits (Correction 3 Hits)

If I manage 3 tomorrow, I shall be very pleased.

Thanks for having a look.

Now for something completely different, the most ecologically sound flying you are ever likely to see:

Website Rebuild (Introduction)

As I am no longer full-time employed by my company (Intraweb Software) I’ve decided that the website (never really nicely designed to be perfectly honest. OK. I HATE my website) needs a bit of a revamp. I’ve decided to do the redesign in the spotlight of my readership and publish a series of blog posts describing the process.

What am I going to do? Well I thought I would learn something new. I’ve been pretty scathing about ASP.NET in the past, mostly because of how unsuited it is to MVC development and because all the UI support is based around the designers built into Visual Studio. Unfortunately if you want to write a real flexible applcation its never supported it very well. Fortunately, Microsoft have realised that it needed improvement, so they’ve recently developed the ASP.NET MVC Framework. I’ve never used it before, so I’ll use the new website to learn it, and I’m going to blog about what happens… Watch this space!

“I’m a Mac” AND “I’m a PC”

I have been following the whole Microsoft Vs Apple advertising campaign, especially in the US with a great deal of interest. As of a couple of months ago, I’m both a Mac and a PC (and several Linux boxes for that matter).

As a software professional and geek, I think its important to be interested in all parts of the computer eco-system. In England it is said (Mostly by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May: the presenters of Top Gear) that you aren’t a real petrol head unless you’ve owned an Alfa Romeo.

As a geek, I have recently got the feeling that you can’t be a really hard-core geek unless you’ve owned a Mac. Fair enough, in former times the operating system was touted purely on its ease of use and GUI, but Mac OS X 10.5 is a proper Unix like operating system based on an open source BSD release. In fact if you start typing on the command line, it really has the power to blow your foot off. Macs even have some very hard-core geek supporters .

My advice, don’t be a Mac, or a PC. Use the most appropriate tool for the job. Today, that might mean Mac or Linux or Solaris or even a PC. To know which one it is, you have to use and understand them all.

My other advice would be: if you want a laptop that just works, get yourself a Mac Book. Mine’s been working hard for 2 months now and its never had to be rebooted and never crashed. I wish I could say the same of any of my Windows machines …

Yet another new Blog Editor

I’m very quickly approaching the point where I will have tried more blog editors than I have written blog posts. Since I switched to using a Mac Book as my main machine (About 2 months ago) I’ve tried Blogo and Qumana neither of which has had the power to make me blog. But I really think that MarsEdit might do it.

So far the experience has been extremely easy. Firstly it had no problem at all working out the settings it needed to connect to WordPress.com, which was nice. After it had connected, it also had the good sense to download all of my previous posts and my tag categories: Which was a nice touch. I also really like the way that it does a permanent “as you type” preview of the post, in a separate window.

So, let’s see how long the love affair lasts. My first real post is partly done in the draft folder as I type this. Hopefully, by the end of the day…

BTW: The current author of MarsEdit (Daniel Jalkut) does a fairly regular podcast which seems to be mostly about Mac development and especially, being an independent developer on the Apple platforms. The podcast is called Core Intuition, and you can find it on iTunes, or at http://coreint.org/