Jacksonville Code Camp Recap (Part Deux)

Jacksonville Code Camp Recap (Part Deux) - More Tools and Blogging

I've already posted my recap from last weekend's Code Camp and there are already a few things I wish I could have included in my talks.

First, the blogging talk...
John-Daniel Trask posted his list of his Top 10 ways to build your blog traffic... all very good points. A few were some I hammered home during my talk at last weekend's code camp, specifically:

Be a thought-leader
Participate in the online community
Make commenting easy
Solve a problem
Post often
Pimp it!

JD also mentioned Akismet, a anti-spam solution for blog comments. Looking forward to looking into this more when I get a bit of free time. Anti-spam issues have been a big topic recently in the SubText developer mailing list... and it shows on Phil's blog (who also dragged Michael Campbell into it... who's got one of the coolest solutions for combating comment spam: ReverseDOS) with his recent posts here and here. For now, I'm looking forward to SubText 1.9 which should hit the presses any day now. Biggest improvements I'm looking forward to: comment moderation (FINALLY!) and upgrading to ASP.NET 2.0 (a full refactoring is coming in SubText 2.0... SubText 1.9 is mainly just a bug fix and port to ASP.NET 2.0).

Second, the tools talk...
If you liked my tools talk and want more, there are two places you've got to go. First, and most importantly, go check out Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developer & Power Users Tool List for Windows (v2006). I got most of my tools off Scott's list and he just posted his 2006 update yesterday... of course, that couldn't come BEFORE my talk! A few additions stand out (and one very big update):

PowerShell - I've GOT to carve some time out to learn more about it. Everyone that's sipped the kool-aid has walked away with a red-stained upper lip. As Scott says, a steep learning curve, which with my recent lack of available time, has kept me away. Bit I've got his Podcasts (part 1 & part 2) & part 3 of the dev productivity tools screencast on it so I'm just waiting for my next flight to dial in (the only way I can listen to a Podcast).
Clean Sources - By Omar Shahine... how did I miss this! It simply adds an item to your Windows Explorer shell menu that when selected it will recursively delete the contents of the \bin, \obj, and setup folders... great for sharing projects or just cleaning up the house!
FinePrint - A virtual print driver... lets you save print jobs, combine pages into 2/4 up combos (great for proofing articles/chapters).
Windows Live Writer - Offline blog posting tool... more on this in my next post (I'm a convert!).
Console - here's the update... I was using v1.5, but 2.0 now has tabs and hotkeys!!! I said a TABBED command prompt! that's the coolest thing since... well... NotePadd++ added tabs to Notepad (well, and a whole lot more too).
PureText - No more Paste As Special... just copy, double click the PT in the system tray, and you've got pure text without all the garbage on your clipboard.
Web Application Project for VS2005 - Like the old way of ASP.NET projects more than the new way? Me too.

If you liked some of the tools I was showing and want to see more, I did a little screencast demonstrating some of my favorite tools that I didn't cover in my talk last weekend for a JAXDUG meeting in July... you can get the screencast here.

posted on Wednesday, August 30, 2006 9:38 PM

Feedback

# re: Jacksonville Code Camp Recap (Part Deux) - More Tools and Blogging 8/30/2006 9:58 PM John-Daniel Trask

Thanks for the comment regarding my post Andrew, always appreciated :)

If you're going to look at Akismet check out this page:

http://akismet.com/development/

Akismet is developed by the guys behind WordPress however that page provides links to a .net wrapper (both 1.1 & 2.0) if you're interested in implementing it yourself. It looks unbelievably simple to integrate. I've worked with several anti-spam solutions and this service seems to have the highest success rate in my experience.

Thanks again,

- JD

Post Feedback

Title:
Name:
Email:	(email will not be displayed)
Url:
Comments:
Please add 6 and 5 and type the answer here: Remember Me?

All Comments Are Filtered & Moderated
Unfortunately comment spammers are just too effecient and are constantly dirtying up blogs with irrelevant and unwanted comments trying to improve their standing on search engines. All comments on this blog are moderated. I do not censor comments, but I don't approve comments with vulger language or those soliciting products. Most of the time comments are approved within a few hours of being submitted with the only exception when I'm traveling.

Why are you asking for my email address?
The only reason I'm asking for your email address, which isn't required to submit a comment, is to provide a gravatar if you've created an account for yourself and associated your email address with a small image. If you have a gravatar created for the email address you submit, it will appear next to your comment. Otherwise nothing will appear.

What is a gravatar?
A gravatar is a "globally recognized avatar." You can get more information about gravatars, as well as create your own for free, at www.gravatar.com. You can also view my gravatar here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Site design by Heather Solomon.