Scott Hanselman

I'm down in San Diego (Del Mar actually) at the Corillian Connect Conference (our annual Users' Conference). We had Jakob Nielsen give our keynote presentation. If you're not familiar with Jakob, you should be. He's a usability guru and has been since darn near the web's inception. He started the Nielsen Norman Group along with Donald Norman and added Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini a while back. They're giving a User Experience Conference in Boston and London this year that looks pretty amazing with talks from Amazon and Ebay.

I've been a fan since Jakob's original book Designing Web Usability. A classic and largely still valid today. He also runs UseIt.com. (No RSS though?)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I was opening a Web Project that was part of a larger solution (SLN) file in Visual Studio.NET 2003 recently. A regular old directory with other directories below it was suddenly showing up with a strangee Globe Icon overlaid on the folder. I couldn't open the folder from the solution, but I could totally see its subfolders from with in Explorer. I was stymied. Totally confused. What is this icon trying to tell me? I looked in the .CSPROJ, the .SLN, everywhere.

I finally turned back on "Show Hidden Files" and noticed that a bunch of Front Page Schmutz^(tm) was in that folder. Specifically the hidden "_vti_pvt" folder was causing Visual Studio to show this icon. I deleted it and hit the refresh button in the toolbar and all was good.

It reminded me that not everything is in the .csproj, .sln, .suo, .user files as much as I'd like to think so.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Bryan and I are going to try and release an update to the USB Wireless Security Lock (Froogle) that I wrote about in Coding4Fun and Bryan wrote about in MAKE Magazine.

Consider this a Call For Plugins. If you've written a Plugin for USBWiSec, please let Bryan and I know so we can collect them into a USBWiSec-Contrib package and distribute them.

If you haven't heard about this little enterprise, well, click on the links above as we really think the potential for this device is great.

Remember, "USBWiSec - Replacement Sofware for your USB Wireless Security Lock: Sucking Way Less Since 2005!"

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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There's a rumor going around that Comcast will start broadcasting CBS in HDTV in Portland on October 4th. We shall see, but Cold Case in HDTV may find me watching CBS again.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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After hearing good things about FeedBurner, I set up a syndication account through them. If you're not syndicating ComputerZen, or you're not familiar with RSS and you'd like to have my nonsense delivered to you rather than you coming to me, subscribe to my FeedBurner feed. Personally, I use and highly recommend FeedDemon as a desktop RSS Reader. You can use feed:// links with most desktop aggregators. That means you can click here to subscribe instantly! FeedBurner offers me a number of useful options for managing my content and it will also include content that my regular feed will not, including daily summaries of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

So, I modified DasBlog to support FeedBurner as an optional feed. If you tell DasBlog your FeedBurner username it will automatically do a number of things:

• Makes all HTML instances of your RSS or Atom Feed point to FeedBurner instead.
• Updates HTML source  <link rel="alternate" href="http://whatever" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" > AutoDiscovery links to point to FeedBurner.
• Automatically returns an HTTP 301 when the original DasBlog "SyndicationService.asmx" is requested by a User-Agent that is not FeedBurner. This will automatically update your current feed.
• This works around the hack that ScottOnWriting had to use with a hidden FeedBurner-specific feed.

• Category-specific feeds remain untouched and will still be served locally.

In a nutshell, the point is that this requires NO ACTION ON YOUR PART as the subscriber. And that's why it's cool.

However, if you haven't subscribed, this is a great opportunity. Here's the feed:

If you want to subscribe online, you can try one of these:

You can also visit the feed here http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottHanselman for more details and ideas on how to subscribe.

If you're a DasBlog user, this experimental feature is currently checked into the CVS HEAD on the DasBlog Project at SourceForge. It may be released in a DasBlog 1.8.1 patch along with post 1.8 bug fixes.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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