Thomas Krehbiel

I was curious to see the Diaspora code base when it was released on September 15.  Ever since I heard about Diaspora, I – like many other developers before me – have been pondering how I might architect a distributed social network myself, so I was curious to see how they had solved certain problems I was running into.  The short answer is:  They didn’t.

Read more…

I'm not much into SEO (search engine optimization).  It's a booming industry for some, but I still have this crazily naive idea that good content will just naturally rise to the top of search results.  That said, there are a some basic SEO guidelines that I try to follow on my site.  When I recently discovered my site was disappearing from Google results, I learned a very important SEO lesson.

Read more…

I'm not much into SEO (search engine optimization).  It's a booming industry for some, but I still have this crazily naive idea that good content will just naturally rise to the top of search results.  That said, there are a some basic SEO guidelines that I try to follow on my site.  When I recently discovered my site was disappearing from Google results, I learned a very important SEO lesson.

Read more…

[...]Like many people, I read about Diaspora a while back and thought it was a great idea.  It's one of the few open-source projects I could see myself contributing to.  Unfortunately, it's not "open" in the sense that the technical architecture is open to discussion - it will only become open after they define the architecture, good, bad or indifferent*.  So, as any programmer would, I thought, "Okay, I have some ideas on this, so if they don't want my help, I'll just write my own distributed social network.  How hard could it be?"

Read more…

There has been an explosion of talk about "NoSQL" lately (ie. I've seen a few posts about it), and since it is every blogger's obligation to follow the crowd and re-write what everyone else is saying, I shall now present my thoughts on NoSQL.

Read more…

A look back at how I did on my goals for 2009.

Read more…

So I'm looking over this Google Web Toolkit thing since someone around here thinks it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.  I hate to disappoint but it's conceptually the same as the much-hated ASP.NET WebForms - it's a framework to abstract HTML and Javascript away from the programmer.  But instead of .NET and Visual Studio, Google's version is based on Java and Eclipse.

Read more…

I’m happy to report that I’ve completed resurrecting JWebTrack, the terribly feature-incomplete bug tracking project I did for a Java class oh so long ago.  After building an appropriate database and populating it with some data, the app worked like a charm.

Read more…

This is a nightmarish combination to deal with in ASP.NET 3.5.  I will attempt to document what I learned today about how to get this combination working.

Read more…

Day two of reacquainting myself with JSP development, wherein we learn that IDEs are powerful tools but they are not very friendly to newcomers.

Read more…

Out of curiosity and recent disgruntlement with ASP.NET I decided to look into Java web development.  I haven’t done this since around 2002, so of course I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew about it.  Herein I will attempt to document the knowledge I uncover.

Read more…

I’ve had some ideas for a more, let’s say, “animated” web site, but frankly large-scale Javascript development is tiresome and the thought of delving into Adobe Flash or Flex or AIR or whatever they call it now is too depressing to contemplate.  With the release of Silverlight 3, I figured it was a good time to take a hard look at the Silverlight platform to see what it can do.

Read more…

I was working on an Atom publishing API for my blog, since I want to use more secure authentication than is possible with the MetaWeblog API.  But I had no luck getting Windows Live Writer to authenticate against my API even though it tested out correctly in every other way.  I finally discovered it was a quirk of Windows Live Writer.

Read more…

I’ve started working on a major update to my RSS feed aggregator.  With this new 3.0 version, I hope to resolve a lot of outstanding problems and polish things up.

Read more…

I’ve started working on a major update to my RSS feed aggregator.  With this new 3.0 version, I hope to resolve a lot of outstanding problems and polish things up.

Read more…