I want to wish everyone a safe holiday as we reflect on the sacrifices of the men and women that gave all so that we could have our freedoms.

I just hit a very significant milestone with the Akismet Wordpress plugin I posted about a while back. My Akismet plugin has successfully blocked 100,002 pieces of spam from reaching the readers of this blog.

I switched to Wordpress as the software that powers this blog on August 16, 2006. Through today that is 279 days running on this new software. This means that Aksimet as stopped an average of 358.43 pieces of comment/trackback spam from hitting my readers.

I will continue to do whatever I can to make sure that readers of this blog get presented with useful information. I appreciate having a tool like Akismet available which makes a portion of that much easier.

I’ve been using Castle’s MonoRail for new websites that I’ve developed for the last couple years or so. I absolutely love the separation of concerns and the testability that this MVC framework brings to me. It’s been amazing to watch this project grow under Hammett’s leadership over this time. It seems that every time that I start to think about doing something, the framework already supports it. However, not everyone sees the advantages…

When I talk to traditional ASP.NET developers about MonoRail, the first thing I usually hear is something along the lines of: “WHAT?!?! You dont have WebControls? You mean I have to handcode the HTML for a DataGrid?”

Until recently, I had no way of really countering that. Some people think that being able to put together things in a drag-drop manner is much more important than the loose coupling that an MVC type of framework gives. Unfortunately, when that is the case, it’s very difficult to get the other side to see the error of their ways. :)

Until now… Recently, MonoRail has introduced the concept of ViewComponents, which are reusable pieces of functionality that you can introduce into your application. Some of my favorite are the DiggStylePagination component, which makes it absolutely dead simple to put paging on any sort of data table.

I also recently discovered a very nice set of use controls written in Javascript which allow you to build interactive web apps. The Yahoo! User Interface Library is an incredible suite of FREE controls.

The beauty of a control library like this is that as you become more and more familiar with it, you’re not locking yourself into a specific framework. The YUI Library will work with static HTML files, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET and (you guessed it) MonoRail. Why wouldn’t you give this library a look?

…removes any roadblocks that are mentioned by the team. This is done so that the team has an optimal working environment to get their tasks done.

A perfect demonstration of this occurred yesterday when one of our scrum teams jokingly listed a lack of cookies as an impediment. The team’s scrum master baked cookies for the team last night and brought them in for the scrum meeting this morning. Epic!

Way to go, Brenda!

It has not been very long since I originally made the switch to wordpress software for this blog, moving away from MovableType. One of the major reasons that I switched was that the extensibility and plugins available for wordpress seemed much greater than what was offered for MovableType.

I think the single best plugin available for wordpress installations is the Akismet plugin, which basically pings the akismet web servers for any trackback or comment and attempts to determine whether or not the comment/trackback is spam. If it is absolutely spam, I never even see the particular comment. If it is questionable, it puts into a moderation queue, at which time, I can help the Akismet servers learn about spam.

If I mark a comment as spam, it notifies the Akismet servers with the comment at which time it gets entered into a database there and will hopefully prevent similar comments to other weblogs using this technology. Truly, a Software as a Service application.

How effective is this? Since I installed the plugin, Akismet has caught almost 86,000 pieces of comment/trackback spam. In the time that it took to write this post, Akismet caught 11 more items that will never be seen by my readers.

You can find the plugin at akismet.com. Installation is a snap, only four steps. Get it now.

It has been quite some time since I last posted to this blog, and I figured that I owed my readers an explanation of where I’ve been.

I recently started up some college courses. Some things have transpired over the past several weeks that made me realize that there are certain things that you just cant learn on the job… the consequences of a bad business decision can really be dire.

I chose to go with distance education. Distance learning is a way to gain education wherein the teacher and the student are separated by distance and are connected via technological means, including email and telephone.

The main component of classes at the University of Phoenix are the forums. Each student has two primary forums, the main forum and their individual forum. If you think about forums in the sense of a traditional college, you can envision the main forum as the classroom and the individual forum as the professor’s office. Anything posted to the main forum is visible by the entire class; anything posted to the individual forum is visible only to you and your professor. You use the individual forum to post your assignments as well as receiving feedback from your professor about your assignments. You can also use the individual forum to ask your professor questions or have any discussion with your professor that you do not want to have in front of the entire class.

Unlike the synchronous communication that occurs in a typical classroom setting where communication between participants happens at the same time, a distance education program utilizes primarily asynchronous communication. This communication happens through threaded discussions in the forums. Professors encourage these discussions by posting discussion questions which you respond to. This gets the entire class involved and helps you to hear other people’s opinions.

The asynchronous nature of distance learning is not for everyone. People in today’s society are very accustomed to instant gratification and expect answers to their questions right away. It also does take a tremendous amount of dedication to log in and read the discussions and take the time to respond to them. That said, distance learning can be very useful if you are looking for ways to go to school on your own schedule. This is the primary reason I chose distance education and University of Phoenix.

I want to let everyone know that I will try to post more often, but also do hope that everyone understands if things are a little quieter for a while.