CodeClimber

A month ago, when I first updated my blog to Subtext 2.0, a reader commented that: Images embedded in RSS are not correctly linked I thought it was due to some problems with the new version of WLW I had just installed. But the link were written with the full absolute url, so that couldn’t be the problem. Then I thought that it was due to FeedBurner that decided to do something strange with my urls, but that was not the case either. A few days ago, while I was testing the RSS...

If you subscribed to my blog through an RSS reader you will notice an advertisement at the bottom of this post. That’s because I’m testing the RSS Room of the The Lounge advertising network: it’s creator James Avery unveiled the RSS Room it only a few days ago and in the next weeks it will be a test period and will show only Lounge related ads. For people that are reading this post from my blog, here is how it appears on the RSS reader: I’m still tuning it in order to be less...

As you might have noticed, a few days ago I added to my sidebar an ad space. The reason for the ad is that I joined the Lounge, an advertisement network on the .NET space with quite a few famous bloggers. I'm not in the same with them, since I don't have the same audience and influence, but in another room, the .NET small publisher room, together with Subtext mate and new MVP Steve Harman, "ASP.NET MVC in Action" co-author and CodeCampServer key contributor Ben Scheirman and a few more. When James Avery says: Simone Chiaretta is one of the developers of...

Yesterday it was the first day of Spring, and it think I'll spend a few time in the next weeks doing a bit of Spring cleaning of my blog (maybe a redesign, but not sure yet). I've already something in mind, like implementing a real print-css and fixing the misalignment in IE6, but I'm open to suggestions: what do you like in the design and structure of my blog? What do you like? And while I'm asking suggestions: any topic you prefer or you don't want me to ever talk about it again? Please, write in the comments or via the contact page. blog,...

I'm thinking about redesigning my blog and just for curiosity today I tried BrowserShots. It allows you to test any website on 60 different combination of browsers and platforms (35 on Linux, 20 on Windows, 5 on Mac). And as result it takes a screenshot of how the website is rendered. I tried it with 40 default combinations and in 1 hour (the time after which shots in queue expire) it took 34 different shots, from the latest Safari 3.1, IE8 and FF3 to the older IE4. My blog looks as I expected it to be on 30 out 33 browsers: the...

Yesterday looking for CodeClimber on Google I found out that Google is listing some posts as SiteLinks. The same happens with all the blogs I tried so far (it seems to work only if the blog is hosted on 2nd level domain): codinghorror hanselman haacked cre8d-design Not sure why it shows the posts he shows (since some are not even in the homepage at the moment), but nice to see this. Technorati Tag: google,search,sitelinks

This weekend, while checking my RSS stats on FeedBurner I noticed that the "all time" option of RSS subscribers was gone. This thing raised a nest of hornets, with some bloggers accusing Google not to communicate with users, other looking for alternatives, and yet other offering hacks to download the historical data. The official forum was full of people asking for an explanation since last Saturday. On Monday Steve Olechowski, Product Manager of FeedBurner, posted a comment saying it was a bug and would have been fixed in the next code update, and the same was done on...

Already 10 days are gone in 2008 and I just realized I didn't have time to write a post looking back at what happened during last year: 15 days before the beginning of 2007 I quit the job for the company I worked for since 1998 in January I moved to Wellington, NZ, and started working for Calcium, a young and innovative software company in February I held my first presentation speaking in English at a Wellington UG meeting about NHibernate in March my old laptop started to slowly die in April I released the...

Here is a funny picture I just took off my digital camera: all my ice climbing tools, hanging drying with my clothes This is also a test of Ecto 3 beta: after my post of yesterday about my thoughts on the applications available on the Mac, I exchanged a few emails with Adriaan Tijsseling, the developer of Ecto, and he was very nice, and immediately released a new build (b20) that fixed the problem with the categories not being downloaded (actually it was a problem in Subtext MetaWeblog API implementation, that is missing the method blogger.getUserInfo). He also pointed...

A friend just made me notice that yesterday it was exactly one year from my first real post on Codeclimber. With all the excitement for tomorrow event and for the new Mac I missed this important day. I'm not going to do a detailed analysis of what happened during this year of blogging as the one I did in July, but I only want to share with you a few numbers. The number of subscribers to the RSS feed is steadily growing at the rate of 100 new subscribers every 2 months (actually a bit more than 2 months), and...

He made the step and now he has his English only blog, hosted on the MyOpera community site: Lorenzo was the co-founder of the company I worked for before going to in New Zealand. I worked with him for around 5 years: I owe him a lot of my knowledge about web site design and general web development. He might not be a developer, but he is a geek, one of the best web designer I ever worked with, and his blog is full of interesting posts. And he even started blogging a few months before me, in Sept 2004....

Not a real censorship, like the Chinese one, but the Italian government is about to issue a new law to "organize" anything that can inform people: newspaper, magazines, public website but also private ones and blogs. In order to have a blog, if this law is really issued, its owner must be registered to the ROC (Registro degli Operatori di Comunicazione), and must have a registered journalist as "Chief Editor". I know this sounds like a joke, but it's not. Not a real law for the moment, but has been proposed in August and seems like it has been approved...

A few weeks ago, while browsing my blog from a friend laptop with IE6 I noticed that the right sidebar sometimes was under the main content area of the blog, probably the width of some post was too wide for the main column of my skin so, with IE6, the broke the layout. Today I finally downloaded the IE6 VPC image, tested it on my laptop, and fixed it. But if I waited a few more months probably the percentage of users with IE6 would have dropped, since last Friday the IE team announced that from now on IE7 will...

Blogging engines don't allow a quick way to change categories, or to add tags to many posts at the same time, so managing your old posts can be a lengthy process. A friend of mine, Marco De Sanctis, had to add tags to all his old posts and to reorganize the categories of his blog, so he built a small tool that retrieves all the posts via MetaWeblog API, and allow to select many posts, and add tags or categories in batch. More information about this wonderful tool, named "Blog Manager", on Marco's blog: A tool to manage your blog categories and Technorati...

Last week the old version of Google Analytics was dismissed and the only available UI is the new version, which is great, much more user friendly, but misses 2 features I used a lot: Today users by hour Users by month I didn't find the user grouped by month report yet, but after a bit of URL hacking I found how to get the hourly report for the current day. The biggest problem is that the date validator in the analytics UI validates the user input based on Google server date, which happens to start 19 hours...

Why don't you just send an email or mail newsletter instead of sending paper magazines or "snail mails"? "Save the cheerleader, save the world" "Send an email, save a tree !" is the name of the campaign that Calcium started in order to try and preserve the native New Zealand trees. If you go to saveatree.co.nz and refer a friend "...Calcium Communication and its participating partners will make a donation towards the purchase and planting of a native tree in New Zealand." So, please, check out the website, and refer some friends: you will do a good action to...

I decided to learn Spanish Castellano, and looking for free resources on the Internet I found a very nice way to learn a new language: a podcast. I already listen to podcasts related to technology and .NET development, but I never thought to a podcast as a way to learn a language. So I subscribed to CoffeeBreakSpanish, hosted by a Scottish Spanish teacher. I only listened to the first 3 lessons, but seems to be well paced and also teaching things in a friendly and practical way. The lessons are only 15 minutes long, so I can listen to...

Last weekend I released a small ASP.NET User Control to display the Text Links provided by LinkLift. I also promised that I would have released the code for it. This weekend, among other things, I cleaned it up a bit, I fixed a small bug and here it is: Download the source of the  LinkLift ASP.NET control. I also set up a project on Google Code to store all my opensource projects that are too small to have their own repository, and I called it, ala Ayende, CodeClimber.Commons. And will move all my personal code on it soon. Technorati tags: linklift,...

Almost seven months ago I started this blog in English, a bit more than 6 months ago I landed in Wellington and a few days later I started working for Calcium. And furthermore, in a month (actually a little bit less) I'm going back to Milano to enjoy the end of northern hemisphere's summer and hopefully to do some good climbing. So it's time to draw a line and make some considerations about the past. First let's speak about the Wellington .NET user group My fellows in Italy knew that even before coming to NZ I was more for a decentralized user...

Today FeedDemon 2.5 has been released. Here are the top 5 new features: Synchronized news bins with shared RSS feeds - share a FeedDemon "news bin" (similar to a link blog) as an RSS feed so that others may subscribe to it. Simply copy a post from any feed into a shared news bin, and everyone subscribed to that news bin's feed will get a copy of it. You can also drag-and-drop FeedDemon browser tabs - or even hyperlinks from an external browser - into a news bin to share those links. Vastly improved offline support -...

I started this blog back in last December, so I didn't bother about the spam problem at the beginning. But last month I started getting a lot of trackback spam, some days even 30-40 per day: I guess this is the new way of blog spam since comments are being filtered by all the CAPTCHA controls or other dictionary based comment filters. I decided to give Akismet a try: and in the first week after I enabled Akismet I have no more spam on my blog. All the trackbacks are being checked against the Akismet web service and eventually...

At the beginning of March the WLW team posted some screenshots of the next version of Windows Live Writer: New Version Of Windows Live Writer, with Screenshots The new UI was like all the Windows Live tools, with a new window to add images and other changes to the core plugins. And it also have the possibility to add tables. Today I found a post on <edit>, that linked an exclusive image of a more recent screenshot of WLW. As you can see they removed the Window Live look&feel, and reorganized a bit the menu and panels around...

Phil Haack has been inverviewed by Tim Heuer for his new TimCast podcast. Phil explains why he started working on Subtext, and what his feelings are about the open source community on the Microsoft Platform. I'm very proud of having been mentioned by him during the interview, you know (!), he even said my name "almost" correctly. Thank you for that Phil. Here is the announcement of the interview, and here you can download the mp3 interview Technorati tags: Phil Haack, MIX07, SubText, TimCast

I'm registered to Google AdSense and I've the ads block and some AdSense referrals buttons on my Italian blog. Yesterday, looking at my earnings I noticed that I was giving 5$ for the AdSense referral product. I knew that for that product the rule was: When a publisher who signed up for Google AdSense through your referral earns their first $100 within 180 days of sign-up, you will be credited with $100. So why did I get $5? I thought that it was very difficult for someone that signs up for the first time to reach $100 in...

Today I finally specified a license for my blog contents. Basically I've 2 types of licenses: Creative Commons Attribution License for my textual content, code snippets, pictures and downloadable files not containing source code new BSD license for downloadable files containing source code For a better explanation of my blog licensing terms, please refer to the CodeClimber Copyright and Licensing Policy. I also changed the copyright notice in the footer of each page: Copyright © 2006-2007 Simone Chiaretta This work is mainly licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. To understand what "mainly" means read the full license and...

Every now and then I add a YouTube video to my posts... but one of the biggest problem is that reader that read the RSS feed don't get the video, because all the feedreaders I know don't render the object or embed tags, the one used to display the flash player for the youtube video. A few weeks ago I found a very nice WLW plugin, that allow you to select a video from youtube, google video or MSN SoapBox, add it to your post using a javascript function that renders as embed in a full featured browser, or as...

Yesterday I added Lightbox v2 to my skin. So here is a step by step guide on how to do it. Step 1: Download library Download Lightbox 2.02 and extract it on a folder of your choice. Step2: Skin Definition Change the skin definition inside skin.config or skin.user.config adding the following lines inside the <Scripts> tag: <Script Src="scripts/prototype.js" /> <Script Src="scripts/scriptaculous.js?load=effects" /> <Script Src="scripts/lightbox.js" /> And that inside the <Styles> tag: <Style href="lightbox.css" /> If you are upgrading from the version of lightbox that is coming with Subtext you have to remove the following lines, too: <Script Src="~/scripts/lightbox.js" /> <Style href="~/scripts/lightbox.css" /> In the case you don't...

As I promised a few weeks ago, I just upgraded my CodeClimber skin to version 2 of Lightbox. To see the new features have a look at my post about picture of vacations and click on the images: the first one is a normal image (but you will notice the new image loading animation), while the second and the third are setup as gallery, so, clicking on the first (the Kilimanjaro one) you have to possibility to move to the other (Kalymnos one) always staying on the image popup. I'll write more on how to setup this on any Subtext blog in a...

Today is the launch day for my new blog: CookingPiyo. It's a blog about cooking, with recipes, wine reviews, restaurant reviews, cooking tips, and sport eating tips, between Milano and Wellington. My wife designed the skin, while I made a few customization to wordpress (made a few plugins). I decided to use WordPress instead of SubText because I wanted to test in first person how the user experience of that great blogging tool is, and maybe get some inspiration for the plugin API and the redesign of SubText admin interface. At the moment only Italian reading people will be...

A month ago FeedBurner unleashed a new very cool feature: Blog Statistics. They integrated into their RSS feed stats also the tracking engine they got when they acquired Blogbeat. For a complete overview have a look at their announcement: A 360 Degree View of Audience Engagement. Now that performancing metrics is an opensource project (and not a service anymore) and measuremap doesn't have new features added since it has been acquired by Google one year ago, the only solution for specific blog stats is this service. I tried it, and it rocks!!! How to add the tracking...

Andrew Butel, the CTO of my current company Calcium, has finally started his own blog: Business Savvy Software. The subtitle of the blog is "The crossover between business and software" and the focus of his blog will be software development seen with a business prospective. He already wrote some intersting posts about some truthes about software development, and what his development priorities are. And, of course, the blog is running on Subtext

A few months ago, following the advice of my dear friend Janky, I switched from RSSBandit to FeedDemon. I couldn't stand anymore that an rss reader was using more memory than Visual Studio Team Suite while debugging a Pocket Pc application running on an emulator . It costs a few bucks, but allows me sync the read feeds between my laptop and my pc at work, so I don't have to read the same posts twice: this is possible since FeedDemon uses Newsgator to retrieve the feeds. Last week I saw on Nic's laptop a nice effect on his FeedDemon (yes, he...

Finally I made it: starting from today, December 11st, 2006, almost 2 years after my first blog post on my Italian blog, I've got an English blog, too... Why did I choose to have a blog written in English? Because I'm moving to Wellington, NZ in less than a month and I'm taking part in the global .NET community. Also, last April I saw this post from Jeff "Coding Horror" Atwood about creating one's own personal brand, and since I'm a free climber I decided to go with CodeClimber: a good mix of the 2 things I like the most. If you want...