Anand asks me in a comment whether
I'm going to support TrackBack. It's a very relevant question, as I'm currently neck-deep
in a rewrite of the BlogX code to add a whole bunch of features that it currently
lacks. In fact, I'm very lucky that my wife is also currently neck-deep in grading
for the summer class she teaches, or else my disappearing into my study for long stretches
of time during a weekend of beautiful weather would cause some marital friction...
This all started, of course, by pulling on a single loose thread on the sweater: in
the immortal words of our current president, I "misunderestimated" how much interest
my blog might pull in, so each day I've been watching a bit alarmedly as the amount
of my bandwidth being eaten up by the blog has grown and grown. I finally turned on
gzip compression in IIS (I believe), which should help, but what I really wanted to
do was implement ETags and Last-Modified on my RSS feed so I can cut down on the huge
amount of bandwidth that SharpReader is
sucking up. (They're, like, 50% of the hits. Good for Luke...
I use it too!) So I figured, "Hey, it's .NET and I work on .NET. How hard could it
be?" Classic last words for a developer.
The first problem was that, as much as I like C#, I just think a whole lot better
in VB because I don't have to translate as I work (and I like the VB IDE experience
better, but I may be sliiighly biased). So first I translated most of BlogX (everything
except the HTML control for WinBlogX) into VB using an automated translator. And then
I spent a bunch of time cleaning up all the problems and stylistic disagreements that
that caused. And then I spent a bunch of time cleaning up the code base so that it
worked "the way I like it." (This is no knock on Chris,
I'm just one of those anal developers who just aren't happy if they haven't rewritten
most of any codebase they take on.) And then I finally got around
to trying to add new features. Which of course made me realize I didn't understand
how the whole thing worked, which entailed more research and rewriting, blah, blah,
blah, blah.
Suffice it to say, I've devoted way more time to this than I had ever planned and
still haven't gotten a fully functional blog working. But I'm getting close! And soon
this blog will have all kinds of whizzy-bang features. And I'll have learned a whole
lot of things about web programming that I never knew, which was really kind of the
original point anyway.
And then Dare will release
a new version of BlogX with
all the features I added and many more to boot, and I'll wonder, "Was it really worth
it?"