Joel Spolsky (of http://www.joelonsoftware.com/) and Jeff Atwood (of http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/) selected my audio question on their new podcast, episode #6.

Stackoverflow is a new property created by a joint venture between these two blogging juggernauts.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/

So far, their podcast is interesting like Paris Hilton. She’s famous for just being herself. Nevertheless, I am now famous.

I really do look forward to each new episode. Its a nice change of pace from the others that decorate my new iPhone. It's a little like a Seinfeld episode too, its a show about nothing, but in that span of 30 minutes, something interesting always happens. I love the history that Joel sprinkles in and the minutia that intrigues Jeff so much.

My question picked a little bit on Jeff, but hopefully the core of it came through. It was essentially a version of the eternal buy vs. build issue, or in this case "use what's in the box" vs. "build your own" scenario. Jeff had a respectable answer that centered on what he felt was important and what he was happy to inherit from the .Net Framework.

These are the types of debates I have every day building software. Its fun to ping someone outside your normal group every now and again and see what they have to say about it.

I got a favorable message, so I reckon its not all that bad.

http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/MagenicWantsYouThisTimeWithAQuiz.aspx

After all, Rocky got an 84. I think I rocked most of the ASP.Net questions, but the smart client stuff and multi-threading is a little foreign to me.

What did you get?

About a year ago, I attended an MSDN event in my area and won the boobie prize: 12 months of free hosting from an vendor at the event. I had been hosting my site on my company's web servers, so that seemed like a good opportunity to leave the nest and test my skills in the wild. Plus, the price was right.

Man, did that suck.

On Wednesday, I signed up for 12 months of hosting with DiscountASP.Net. They advertised on www.asp.net, and had a lot of good word-of-mouth referrals that eached my ears.

In the matter of about an hour, I did the following:

• Completed an online transaction with DiscountASP.net
• Accessed my new site through the Control Panel provided by DiscountASP.Net
• Downloaded the latest dasBlog bits for ASP.Net 2.0, medium trust
• Uploaded the dasBlog bits to my new site
• Switched the DNS servers to my new ISP
• Moved the content folder from my old host to DiscountASP.Net
• Minor configuration to secure and customize my blog

I'll have you know that I have not yet contacted DiscountASP.Net by phone or e-mail, nor have I had to read their online help documents. The entire process was smooth as silk. I was shocked. My previous personal and professional experiences have always left me in need of some type of resolution.

This is how it should be — DiscountASP.Net has done a great job and I'm grateful.

I was also relieved by the ease of my dasBlog upgrade. I was about a year off the head in their source code repository. The new version has several sweet skins out-of-the-box and they're easy to customize.

I highly recommend dasBlog for any type of blogging solution — it's a rock solid open source system under active development. Now that I'm 99% out-from-under of my enormous eight month project, I'd love to saunter over to that open source project and try my hand at helping the dasBlog dev team. The weekend is just starting, Le Wife is out of town, and I'm dinking around on a new laptop with Vista. Can't ask for a better set up than that!

I've been using Google Reader for a while now and I love it. Its very quick to launch with my SlickRun shortcut of "gr" and it manages my current list of 96 RSS subscriptions very well.

In fact, I recently figured out that this application is perhaps one of the worst web applications to use with the mouse. The mouse is such an impediment to reading several posts efficiently. I launch Google Reader several times a day and its common for me to have nearly 50 unread posts from over 30 RSS subscriptions at any given perusal session.

Here are the Google Reader keyboard shortcuts I use on a regular basis.

1. Click the "Show Updated" hyperlink in the left column to show only the RSS subscriptions with unread posts
2. Click the first RSS subscription link of the list in the left column (getting in the mood)
3. Click the first unread post of the list if the right column (tee it up)
4. Press space bar to traverse multi-page posts and advance to the next unread post for a given RSS subscription
5. When all the posts are read for a given RSS subscription, press Shift+N to advance the highlight to the next RSS subscription of the list in the left column
6. Press Shift+O (this is my Oh face) to open the list of the new highlighted RSS subscription
7. Press the space bar to traverse this new feed like the previous RSS subscription

To Summarize:

 There are a bunch of other keyboard shortcuts for Google Reader. These are the ones I use the most.

Hey, did you ever have a booger on your nose and walk around for a while before anyone told you about it? Maybe no one told you about it at all?

That's how I feel right now.

For some reason, I had Trackbacks enabled in my blogging software. So idiots all over the Internet were taking pot shots at my blog and adding their links to posts on my site without my explicit knowledge. I had barnacles all over the damn place. Damn!!!!

Shame on me.

I've disabled this cool feature on my site now. Furthermore, I've deleted all of the existing trackback data so the links to unscrupulous websites have been removed. I don't think there are ways to make evil links to my site now, outside of going through the steps to leave a comment. I suppose time will tell if I'm right.

Frankly, I'm surprized the search engines even ranked my site with all of these crap links on it. I ought to have paid more attention to who was reading/linking to my blog when it started getting popular.

I'd disable comments, but (a) I like getting them and (2) Scott Vandehey would say it isn't really a blog then.

I used SharpReader for a long time, then briefly used the RSS Reader in Outlook 2007, after an even briefer stint with IE7's RSS reader client (ack!). I don't categorize myself as superstitious, but was else do you call it when you suspect all those posts and media downloads in Outlook 2007 are slowing down your system and you have no real data to back it up?

I liked the Outlook 2007 reader because I was horrible at opening SharpReader on my laptop. I always had Outlook open. It took a while to launch SharpReader, but it was a great application. Then, I'd open SharpReader on a weekend and be horrified by (a) the number of posts that I was behind, and (2) the amount of information that I could have used during the previous week. I'm always looking to get my compile time down, so right or wrong, I'd close applications left and right to give my Dell Latitude D610 as much horsepower as it can wield during the week.

My buddy, Scott, turned me on to Google Reader. As a big time RSS fan boy and an even bigger nerd than I, his opinion is to be respected.

So this weekend, I imported my OPML file into Google's RSS Reader and away I go. So far, I'm pretty impressed. There's a few things I'd like to do, such as return certain posts to "unread" status as I want to come back to them later and rename some folders, but all in all, I likey.

Now, I can open my RSS reader without the cycles of a big application. ( type my new magic word, "gr", in SlickRun and launch my reader anytime I like. Booya!

I attended the Software Association of Oregon (SAO) event today. The Development Special Interest Group (DEV SIG) hosted a discussion about Microsoft CardSpace, the open source framework of OpenID, and basic identity management.

Stuart Celarier walked the audience through Kim Cameron's paper called The Laws of Identity that articulate seven desired aspects of a good identity system.

Microsoft CardSpace was formerly named "InfoCard". This is a joint effort to implement the identity metasystem defined by the laws of identity. CardSpace is the "identity selector" for Windows. It needs IE7 and Microsoft .Net Framework 3.0 to operate. It implements the WS-* specifications in this service.

OSIS - Open Source Identity System: This is an open source group that's involved in the identity space.

Stuart also showed a demo of a system he's been working on. It logs a user into Wachovia banking site using CardSpace.  Scott Kveton of JANRAIN presented OpenID to the SAO DEV SIG group. OpenID hopes to solve the problem of having too many usernames and passwords.

• Single Signon for the web
• Simple, light-weight
• Easy to use, easy to deploy
• Open development process
• Decentralized

Your OpenID is a URL: http://kveton.myopenid.com/

• OpenID comes from the blogosphere
• Biggest problem with identity; namespace
• OpenID solves this by using DNS
• Your identity is a destination
• You have a unique endpoint on the web

Scott Kveton explained how sites enabled with OpenID enable users to authenticate. Visitors type in their OpenID, and the browser redirects to your OpenID provider. The visitor makes the appropriate decision and the browser redirects back the website.

Scott's site is http://scott.kveton.com

Last week Bill Gates announced support for OpenID. AOL announced support for OpenID this morning. More companies are about to make similar announcments. Here's some interesting stats on adoption:

• 12-15 million users with OpenIDs.
• 1000+ OpenID enabled sites
• 10-15 new OpenID enabled sites each day
• 7% grown each week with new sites

Kveton also brought up "Microformats" - a way to describe data in an HTML format (contact info, social network, calendar). These can be embedded on pages. There are some interesting ways to use OpenID with these technologies:

• OpenID + iCal
• OpenID + hCards
• OpenID + Social Networking (XFN, FOAP or FOAF?)
• OpenId + Reputation (jyte.com)

OpenID Predictions from Kveton:

• 7500 sites supporting OpenID
• 100 million users with OpenID
• Big players adopt OpenID

OpenID.net has a ton of info.

Scott Hanselman explained how he enabled OpenID on his blog. Hte added two HTML <link> tags to his website. Simon Willison has an OpenID enabled blog. A visitor can click Sign in with OpenID. The OpenID logo lives inside the textbox. Scott entered his OpenID in the textbox on Simon's site. Using a web service, Simon's blog discovered Hanselman's OpenID provider, then it redirected the browser to Scott's OpenID provider.

Scott's website indicates the OpenID provider is www.myopenid.com. 

The OpenID provider prompts Scott to authenticate. After a successful login, the browser redirects back to Simon's page and recogizes Scott Hanselman. This is how Simon doesn't need to keep track of usernames and passwords for his blog; a huge benefit.

Stuart helped explain the difference between self-insued cards and managed cards: Business Cards from Kinko's versus a card issued from Visa.

Scott Hanselman displayed a different identity selector using Firefox on Windows. The page contains an HTML <object> tag of type "application/x-informationCard". It wasn't as pretty as the CardSpace in IE7 and .Net 3.0, but it had the same behavior.

There was some last minute discusson on "I-Name", an XRI technology (extensible resource identifier). It sounds like its still being baked.

2idi relays comments on Scott's blog. They will issue an I-Name. =kveton is Scott's I-Name. They have an DNS resolver where visitors may enter xri://=scott.hanselman/photo to redirect to his Flickr account.

This link went around the office a few days ago about the rendering engine used to display HTML email messages in Outlook 2007. Evidently, the folks from Campaign Monitor are not impressed.

The issue is that Outlook 2007 uses Word to render the HTML email messages instead of Internet Explorer. This leads to some limitations on the HTML and CSS that authors can use in their message.

Zeyad Rajabi and Erika Ehrili wrote this document to help folks understand the rendering capabilities of the Outlook 2007 email client. Its well done and easy to understand.

It looks like a fair number of people are in a tizzy over this. If you make a large percentage of your revenue by designing complex email templates for your marketing clients, you're probably interested in how the email renders in the reader's email client program. Just thinking about the number of email client programs is startling. That's a lot of testing to do before you send out your mass e-mail message. Plus, you have to comply with the federal anti-spam laws. I suppose the marketing folks deserve a little bit of a hassle for all of their networking events and schmooze fests... :-)

I like a pretty e-mail as much as the next person, provided that its relevant to my interests. I don't like the crippling affects that I see when one is forwarded to me by the original recipient. It seems to me that the message needs to be short, with a clear call to action, and trackable. I'm fine with a details link to a web page.

These are some of the choice excerpts from the comments on the Campaign Monitor page:

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jaw - floor.... Where is the frick'n sense in this? Is it 'cuz they didn't employ people who can understand CSS?? WTF??!!

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Hey there... I guess this is attrubuted to Vista's. IE has been split from the windows shell thus meaning that if IE is not installed on the computer Internet Explorer cannot render the HTML. See when you are in XP if you type in a url in Explorer it will go to the page "inplace" however if you open up Vista and try to put in the URL windows will open up your default browser to open the page. :)

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I like it. I've gotten emails from clients using the background images just b/c they look "pretty" and it ends up destroying the message formatting when I try to reply. Also, it's less junk taking up bandwidth. If you need graphical pretty things sent to specific people, find another way.

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Hate to be a spoiler, but I long for the days when my email didn't look like a webpage.

Email should be fast and efficient.

Graphical email is not.

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I'm no fan of using the Word rendering engine, but the real problem lies in the overuse of HTML mail. Anyone who doesn't use Outlook already has problems similar to the ones this switch will cause, and there are only two ways to ensure perfect rendering; Use plain text for emails, and use PDFs for pizazz.

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I'm almost positive it has to do with the whole Anti-Trust issue. The answer that would make the most sense to me would be the word rendering engine is part of Office. IE is not and therefore instigate the issue that people are being forced to upgrade and use IE versus alternatives. I think its a step in the right direction but i believe that it has hindered the users experiance because of it. Only time will tell if they stick to their guns and give some resolution on it.

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I think this is a great move. I'm sick and tired of html email and hopefully this will reduce the number of people that think its cool to put html, background images, and all that other crap in an email.

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Currently using Vista and Office 2007 and I do not see these problems problems. I even make HTML based newsletters an I have do do not changes to the way i create them. It looks like FUD to me.

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stop crying... BUY A MAC!!!

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Hey, maybe now we can get email back to what it's supposed to be. Text-based. HTML email has always been problematic and you've never been really sure about what the other person would see depending on their email client.

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Let's talk a little bit about spamminess, and why HTML might not be the way to go in email.

We run SpamAssassin, a requirement when each email account averages 150+ spam messages per day.

HTML is already suspicious and gets -10 -- -40 if HTML only. Since -50 is quarantine, your beautifully crafted HTML only message is precariously close to deletion already.

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Sweet goodness. Hearts and bunnies, as The Wife and her sister would say.

I'm authoring this post from Windows Live Writer, a Windows client application that provides a place to author a post offline and then send 'er up the tubes to my blog site.

DasBlog has long provided alternatives to the HTML form based post, such as email based submission, but I've never delved into them. I read about Windows Live Writer on a couple of posts, nothing too detailed, just a quick mention and on a lark I looked it up online.

It seemed interesting, lots of features too. I downloaded a small .msi file, and it was running great in seconds on my laptop. Right off the bat, it asked for the URL to my blog and my credentials. It proceeded to chat with my blog to learn some things about it; I didn't have to do anything.

Sweet!

Then a window opens and prompts me to enter a blog post. I think I'm going to really like this.