Out with the Old and in with the New
For the past year or so I've been constantly annoyed with the blackapache.net domain. Not because I think it's awful, but because it's such a PITA to say to people. Here's an example of a very common conversation:
Them: "Do you have an email address?"
Me: "Yes, it's 'oh-oj' ..."
Them: "ooohhhh-jaaaaaay"
Me: "at black ... apache ..."
Them: "at back scratchy ..."
Me: "No no! 'black' bee-ell-ay-see-kay"
Me: *thinking* - sh*t, if they're struggling with 'black' this next bit is going to be fun.
Them: "Oh BLACK! Yes ..."
Me: "apache ..."
Them: "bless-you!"
Me: *sigh*...
You can see where this is going. While the above example might be slightly exaggerated, the point is still valid. At the same time I was a little tired at the length of the original URI had chosen.
For some reason I felt the need to put the 'rant' subdomain in to give people an idea of what the content was going to be like. Hence, rant.blackapache.net was born (the origin of blackapache as a name is related to the combination of my favourite song and my wife's favourite song).
It served it purpose rather well and over time it's managed to get linked here and there and thankfully has around 100 readers on a regular basis! I have learned a great deal from both researching my posts and from reading the comments that others have left. It has been a great experience.
My plan now is to take it up a notch. Write more often, try and get more technical, cover a wider range of things, etc. But I didn't want the same URL. I wanted something fresh, shorter and a bit more indicative of what it is that this site is about.
So last night I bought a new domain and migrated all of the content over. Everyone please welcome buffered.io. Those geeks out there will hopefully appreciate the meaning and agree that it's not a bad indication of what goes on here.
In the grand scheme of things the new URI doesn't really mean much other than the links will be a little shorter and both the site and the emails hanging off it will be a little easier to say 
I'll be keeping the blackapache.net domain and all of the old content will redirect to the new URI and point to the appropriate articles. Hopefully after a period of time the respective links will be updated in the search engines and people will fix up their bookmarks.
Those of you who subscribe via RSS shouldn't have to do anything. The feeds were running through Feedburner which has been updated to reflect the new address. Having said that, if anyone has any issues then please let me know as soon as possible.
As always your feedback, both good and bad, is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Assembly Signing Article Translated into Italian
You may remember a little while ago I wrote a post on signing assemblies that you don't have the source code to. It got a bit of attention and was reproduced in full on dzone's dotnet site. That was pretty exciting.
This, however, I find more exciting. This article has now been translated into Italian! This is the first time an article of mine has been reproduced in another language, which I think is just fantastic.
My colleague, Cosimo has been hard at work making the Italian version for the last couple of weeks. From what I can see it looks like he's done a marvellous job.
So for those of you who are looking for the Italian version of this article, you can find it over here on Cosimo's blog: .NET-FU : come trasformare in SIGNED un assembly UNSIGNED (senza ricorrere al DELAY SIGNING). Thanks very much Cosimo!
If there's anyone else out there who is interested in translating articles into your home language then please feel free to contact me.
Enjoy!
The Sales Pipeline
Here's a brief list of what's coming down the pipe on this blog in the coming weeks. I thought I'd post this info as I've had a few people ask what's up next and I'm tired of telling the same story over and over So here it is!
Stop Cutting your Feeds Short
Despite the fact the Internet is accessible from nearly everywhere, there are still times when you are forced to work in a disconnected environment. There are also times where you want to work in a disconnected environment (probably to avoid distractions from IM, Twitter, etc).
So why is it that we still don't seem to do a good job of catering for these cases? Offline capabilities are currently few and far between. Sure, it can be hard to add offline functionality to an application, depending on what the application does, but sometimes there's really no excuse.
Things that Suck about Blogs
Why is it that people are still doing stupid things on their blogs? Blogging isn't exactly a "new" thing any more. The things that you can do wrong to annoy your readers have been blogged over and over again, yet still the mistakes are being made.
I feel the need to rant
Delicious Feeds
I've just played with a few settings in my Feeburner account for the main article feed from this blog. One of the things that I've added is a daily list of links that I've added to del.icio.us which I think are interesting. Most of those links are tech related, but every now and then I throw something in that I find amusing and want to be able to find again.
I added this to the feed in case you guys might find it interesting. Let me know if it's annoying/crap/etc. If it drives you batty, I'll turn it off!
Cheers!
Content Duplication
While browsing an unusually large collection of RSS articles this morning I stumbled across this little doozy from the HowToGeek. Being a fan of keyboard shortcuts universally I immediately thought it was cool and tried it out in my copy of Office '07. It worked. Sweet!
Read the Rest of this Article
Some of you noticed that I'd "messed" up the RSS feed for the site yesterday afternoon while mucking around with settings. In fact, I hadn't messed things up at all. I'm currently torn between giving full content over RSS and wanting to get exact stats on how many people are reading the things that I write.
If I provide the full article through RSS, then the site doesn't get hit and I don't know if the article is being read. If I don't provide the full article, the readers get annoyed because they don't want to have to go to the site to read it. While I understand the desire to stay in the RSS reader rather than browse to the site, I also see the value in having meaningful statistics.
I've decided to compromise. I've allowed the full article in the RSS feeds, but have decided to add summaries of the pages to the main site in the case where the articles are quite long. So longer posts are cut short with a 'Read the rest of this article' link, and the rest are left alone.
What do you guys think? I've just checked the feed, and it appears to be working as it should, so let me know if you have any issues.
Lacking Focus? Give DarkRoom a Spin!
My eternal quest for maximising productivity has recently lead me in the direction of an interesting new application called DarkRoom. Some of you may have heard of this before, and will consider it 'old news', but I'm sure there are some readers out there who wouldn't have heard of it and I feel it's worth pointing out.
In short, DarkRoom is designed to do one thing; and that's minimise distractions. It's a simple text-editor which takes up your entire screen, covering everything incuding the toolbar and system tray, and leaves you with nothing but a blinking cursor. When you first fire it up you'll find that it closely resembles Keanu Reeves' computer screen at the start of The Matrix, and you might find yourself waiting for the message: Wake up Neo. When you see the colour-scheme you'll know exactly what I mean (check out the screenshot).
New Theme – What do you think?
I was getting bored with the existing theme, so I decided to have a look at some others. I actually don't mind this one, but the missus thinks it's terrible
In case you didn't notice, it's called "Rockin' Suckerfish". I'll be changing the picture at the top when I can be arsed 
Thoughts? Come on Dan, you know you want to
