Carl IM'd me to see if I could call into a long conference call. I said that I would, but couldn't 'til the brothers Sells had gone to bed (doing the dad thing, don't you know). Anyway, I called and got to swap conference stories with Carl, Rory, Dan, Bill, Mark, Kathleen and Robert. Then they told me I was actually broadcasting on an episode of .NET Rocks live focusing on conferences and today I got the URL. Ooops. Hope I didn't say anything I shouldn't have... : )

Here.

The one where I reminisce on 3 years of The Sells Spout and my blog as a whole and wonder what it is that brings so many people to the site.

Sunday, May 16, 2004

Yesterday was my 3rd anniversary of The Sells Spout. It’s hard to remember back that far, but this was before any wide-spread blogging software, either client or server, before RSS and before personal email addresses were rendered nearly useless by 157 messages/day about how to enlarge our genitalia, necessitating the eventual move away from newsletters.

At the time, I used FrontPage and <a name> tags to run my blog. I still use FrontPage + <a name> tags, but I also use web forms and SQL Server to track comments and generate RSS. In general, I see my site as a giant, categorized blog, e.g. Tools, Fun, Spout, etc, with a front page of descriptions of the items I add to my site and of interesting things I find in the world. Towards that end, I’d like to rebuild my site from scratch using some kind of content management system so that I can get a bunch of flexibility that I don’t have now, e.g. referral logs, auto-archive pages, comment notifications for me, rich comments, a smart client front end for reading from — and adding content to — the site, etc. I could add all of that to my own homebrew software, but I’d prefer to use something like .Text. In fact, assuming ScottW integrates .Text into ASP.NET 2.0, rebuilding my site with both is something that I’ve very likely to do.

The site itself is 9 years old, but my normal outlet of tools, code samples and technical writing wasn’t enough for me, so 3 years ago, I started editorializing on The Sells Spout. I don’t know what my site traffic was 3 years ago, but I know it’s grown ridiculously since then for no reason that I can discern. For example, last month my site served 885K sessions and 2.5GB in small pages, zip files and RSS feeds. While full 55% of the page hits were the RSS feeds (quite a number of you are keeping a close eye on me, apparently), that left 398K people/month visiting my site to read or respond to a topic from my blog (18.7% of the total), read about interviewing at Microsoft (10.6% of the total) or download a tool (4% of the total).

BTW, for those of you who would point out that my RSS feed is syndicated as the Editor’s Blog for the Longhorn Developer Center, throwing off my site stats because of the traffic on the DevCenter itself, I’ll counter with one word: caching. Kent Sharkey, the editor of the ASP.NET Developer Center and expert in all things ASP.NET, has built caching into the control that displays the Editor’s Blog from my RSS feed. Since it’s set to 60 minutes of cache per server and hosted on the 11-server MSDN web farm, that’s at most 8184 sessions/month to serve my RSS feed on msdn.com.

I don’t really know what draws that many people to my site, but 3 years ago, I stated my rules of engagement as follows:

I want to make people’s lives better.

I’m interested in putting food on my table.

I’m interested in what I’m interested in.

After 3 years, my agenda remains the same. I find that strangely comforting.

Discuss

The American version left me completely cold, but Melissa and I have just watched the 1st season of the original BBC series Coupling and I actually laughed several times ’til I cried. In fact, there was one phrase that I tried to repeat to my wife because it struck me so hard, but I literally couldn’t say it without losing my ability to speak (btw, “the pride of my ear bucket” is the phrase and I’m typing it through the tears).

As much as I love the Friends show for it’s portrayal of unconditional love (as a geek, people loving me no matter what I do is appealing), I have to admit that it works best on a backdrop of few money worries (Monica’s apartment is worth $6000/month?!? No wonder I don’t live in NYC…). NPR’s Mike Pesca opens up my eyes to the lies and hypocrisies (hyprocrisi? [see? geek!]) in the Friends theme song and is hilarious about it.

Kam Vedbrat, a member of the Longhorn User Experience team (aka the Aero team) talks about the warm, fuzzy tasks that they went through to come up with "what innovative" looks like in ways that I admire, 'cuz I never would have thunk of them.

Chad says:

“You are important to me! You spend your money and time on VS, and you expect VS to help you make more money and time. You will be using Whidbey to make your living, paying for braces and college and retirement, buying coffee and beer and cigarettes, contributing to political and social causes, paying income taxes and mortgage interest, ordering pizza and books and flowers.”

Chad wants you to send him your picture and some info so that he can show his VS team that their customers are real folks. I sent him mine; I may be an MS employee, but I’ve been using Visual Studio non-stop since it was called QuickC and I care what those guys do with my development environment of choice!

Today Jonathan Hodgson has posted a very cool article ostensibly about implementing Squarified Treemaps in Avalon, but he goes much further than that. First, he shows us what his Avalon implementation of Treemaps look like, including providing the source and a Maslan-ese video showing off his creation for those folks that don’t have the Longhorn PDC bits.

Then, Jonathan goes compare standard grid and graph visualizations to Treemaps and to describe the intimate details of the Treemap algorithm.

Later he provides the code-by-code description of his Avalon implementation, showing off the flexibility of XAML and Avalon, but before he does that, he gives us his opinion of why Avalon, the new Longhorn User Experience (UX) and XAML are all important and how Windows Forms fits into this new world.

And as if that weren’t enough, Jonathan than goes on to describe other visualization ideas that he thinks (and I agree) should be considered in this new, more flexible world that Longhorn is going to provide. And at the end, he provides an extensive set of references for further reading on these subjects.

All in all, Jonathan provides a 9500+ word tour de force, spanning prose, pictures, opinion, working code and even video! If he’d have done the voice over, he’d have gotten the whole thing. I put my feet up and worked my way through two cups of Chai tea, three biscuits and several pieces of teriyaki turkey jerky on and off during the day while reading his piece and enjoyed the experience very much. Jonathan covers a great deal of the reasons that we’re going to have to see passed our old barriers in Longhorn and he does it well, mixing his own thoughts with references from around the web on these topics. If you only read one piece on Longhorn this month, read this one.