Time for a new design? I think so!

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Probably some people already saw my new blog design go live yesterday.

Less than a year ago I upgraded from Wordpress 2.2.1 to 2.6. Now I just wanted a new design. And for the sake of doing some HTML and CSS I made my own design. I must say I really like it myself.

The Past – Dreamplace by Sabiostar

The Present – Blue Mozaik by Mark Monster

What are the most awesome features?

Yes most of the things are just visible, that’s why it’s called a design. But I must say I really like the 3D-Tag cloud, originally made by Peter Gerritsen. But a few enhancements. Like getting the tags as an initParam and limiting the amount of tags shown. Besides that I also track the clicks in the tag cloud inside Google Analytics as events.

Further on I made use of jquery to add some nice small features where I need to manipulate the HTML-Dom. For example the comment-form shows your Gravatar while you’re just typing your response. The Gravatar API is very easy, just make sure you MD5-Hash the e-mail address and and add this to a specific url for basic support of Gravatar. For full API please visit their site.

 

 

 

 

If you find some things that can be done better, please let me know. I already fixed a small bug in the comment form this morning. And of course please let me know all the positive things you have to say about my blog.

I made it very clear that I’m blogging about .NET and Silverlight most of the time. This even though my blog is still kept alive by Wordpress, built in php.

Aspect Oriented Programming article

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In June this year an article from my hand about Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) was published in the Dutch .NET Magazine. It's about partly about AOP in general and partly about the usage of PostSharp. You can download the article here. You can read about my other articles here and here. Let me know what you thing about the article.

Upgrade failure from WordPress 2.2.1 to 2.6

Tweet I thought why not upgrade the WordPress since I was a lot of versions behind. I first looked at the different steps that are required to upgrade to the new version. Just four steps:

1. Delete your old WP files, saving ones you've modified.
2. Upload the new files.
3. Point your browser to /wp-admin/upgrade.php.
4. You wanted more, perhaps? That's it!

Yes just four steps. You didn't even need to make a backup first it seams. I'm glad I did make a backup, specially of the database. So which are the troubles I had to overcome. The white page I just went to the blog's homepage, but saw nothing, yes just nothing. The management interface did work though. So when I went to the Design section I found out the theme doesn't work anymore. Not only this, it was also removed from the blog. Very strange, so I selected the WordPress default theme to have at least something online. The categories I though a not supported theme, that can happen. But when looking at the default page I saw a list of empty categories, yes empty categories only the amount of posts in each category was shown. This did make me feel a little bit angry, where are categories gone to? After some Googling I found out people who have the same people including this by hand solution. Beside the missing of the category names also the hierarchy is lost. I didn't fix the hierarchy because my new theme doesn't support hierarchical categories. The theme transition Because the failure of my old theme I got looking into a new one. So goodbye Connections Reloaded. Welcome Dreamplace.

Dependency Injection: Why depend?

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Last month an article from my hand was published in the dutch .NET Magazine.

September 2007: The article I wrote about Dependency Injection is published in .NET Magazine #18. It's partly about the Dependency Injection concept and how to make use of Dependency Injection using Windsor. The article is in dutch. Download the article.

I'd like to know what everyone thinks about this article. Can you post any comments about it?

Something more about articles from my hand can be read here.

Windsor IoC Container in a Lunch Break

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Jeremy Jarrell started a series about tools that are found in the agile developers' toolbox. His first article is about the Inversion of Control Container Windsor. A very nice article about how to start using Windsor.

Soon an article about the same topic from my hand will be published in the dutch .NET Magazine. I think it will be the september edition.

There are some more resources you want to read to get to know Windsor a little bit better. Martin Fowler has written a nice general article about Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection. Alex Henderson from BitterCoder published a lot of Windsor Container tutorials . You can pick one from below:

• Part 1 - Simple Configuration
• Part 2 - More Configuration (Arrays)
• Part 3 - Still More Configuration (Dictionaries)
• Part 4 - Switching Configurations
• Part 5 - Configuration Parameters
• Part 6 - Switching Between Lifestyles
• Part 7 - Switching Implementations
• Part 8 - Referencing Implementations By Key
• Part 9 - Constructor Injection
• Part 10 - Setter Injection
• Part 11 - Factories
• Part 12 - Decorators
• Part 13 - Injecting Service Arrays
• Part 14 - Startable Facility