You may have seen that I use Lijit to power the on-site search for my blog. Since Lijit by default uses a Google custom search to power this (nothing really wrong with that) I became quite unhappy with the results (Google for some reason doesn’t like to index articles but rather indexes categories ). Since I didn’t find my own stuff through Google, getting the same bad results through Lijit was quite annoying.

So I tweeted this one day:

Well, took about 45 minutes to receive this:

And this very nice Email alongside:

Well, that was 2 days ago. Search results that I get when using the on-site search are back to what I expect them to be and I’m once again able to find my own stuff.

Thanks Lijit. Great service!

Well, I already told you about the Castle blog aggregator as a source for keeping up to date with the Castle project. Turns out the idea was taken even further and the feed has now been integrated into the www.castleproject.org under Community/Blogs.

What I never anticipated was that I’d one day get this email by Mauricio Scheffer:

Hi Daniel, would you be interested in being included in the Castle blog aggregator?
Your posts tagged as "Castle" would be automatically included.

Cheers,
Mauricio

My immediate answer was Yes! I’m very happy to be able to contribute to castle in any way possible, and seeing people consider my posts interesting is very rewarding to me. Thanks Mauricio!

So, apparently Google has decided to finally get rid of Feedburner and moved their services over to new servers. 
That means new feed URLs for everyone, also for me.

The new Feed URL is: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Tigraine

I changed the little subscribe button to the right, and Google has also put redirects on the old URL pointing to the new one. So, existing subscribers shouldn’t see any change.

Since I already moved (not the smartest thing), if you can read this in your reader, everything is fine.

After some thought I finally dragged myself to make a decision on the del.icio.us links in my RSS feed:

I finally decided to remove the links from the feed, most of my del.icio.us links aren’t just that relevant to my blog posts that I really need to share them with you.
If you still want to recieve my del.icio.us links you can simply subscribe to my del.icio.us feed or add me to your network in del.icio.us.
Another way to stay informed on my del.icio.us (and all my other activities, wether you like it or not *gg*) would be to simply follow me on friendfeed (although I still haven’t really grasped the concept of the site).

Hope the feed just got more enjoyable for you

Cheers!

After doing yesterday’s post on CruiseControl.NET it bit me that I really really needed a new theme for my blog. Posting sourcecode on a constrained surface doesn’t really work, and after seeing the XML posted yesterday I decided I need to do something about it.

So I went to themes.wordpress.net and found the theme you are currently looking at. It’s nothing really special, but I like the clean look and it has no fixed width. The theme came with no widget support so I followed this handy guide and hacked them into the theme myself. It really isn’t that hard after all, although I found this php-html mix quite disturbing.

After being done with the new design, I decided that source is horribly unreadable, and I’m not really happy with my previous solution of doing screenshots (not indexable, not copyable). So I found this really cool JavaScript library by Alex Gorbatchev called SyntaxHighlighter that highlights <pre> tags and adds some very nice formatting to your code.
Here’s an example:

static class Program
      {
          /// <summary>
          /// The main entry point for the application.
          /// </summary>
          [STAThread]
          static void Main()
          {
              Application.EnableVisualStyles();
              Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
              Application.Run(new Form1());
          }
      }

And while being at it I also updated to the most current version of WordPress. So if you encounter any oddities (especially with the feed), please tell me about it so I can fix it.

Oh and by the way, while being at it I installed iWPhone so that any user who visits http://tigraine.at with an iPhone or iPod touch will get a stripped down site without too much clutter that’s been optimized for the iPhone resolution. Images get removed from the front-page but everything still looks cool.

One thing that was on my checklist for some months now was getting my RSS Syndication right.

I was thinking about using Feedburner before, but stuck to the Wordpress default Syndication, believing that the Wordpress built-in Feed could do just as good.

I was obviously wrong and finally corrected this mistake today and did set up my new FeedBurner feed!

By clicking on the new Link in the sidebar you will find the new Feed that will not only syndicate this Blog and it’s posts, but also my del.icio.us Links.

For all people who where using my old RSS Feed please update your subscription to the new URL.

As some of you may have noticed, I recently started to use this blog to share some of my views on C# programming topics and wrote those posts in English.

I chose English instead of German because obviously everything I am reading on those topics is kept in English (just browse my Blogroll and you’ll see what I mean).
Now that I recently realized that buying my technical books from Amazon.com saves me quite a penny over doing so at Amazon.de, I am literally breathing articles in English.
I also had to realize that while being (somehow) perfectly fluent in English while talking and reading, my written skills seem to have deteriorated.
This is something I really hope to be able to improve through this blog and work.

So, apparently this will be the first change: All future posts will be written in (more or less good) English.

I am currently trying to clean up the site, meaning that I will re-think Categories and Tags to fit.

I am also planning to focus a bit more on software development and .NET programming. So expect more on-topic and less off-topic posts in the future.

This is just one of many changes I currently plan to execute over the next weeks.

Nun, auch wenn ich mit dem neuen Template für die Seite nicht weiterkomme, ein neues Plugin habe ich dann aber doch noch installieren können.

Jeder Post kriegt nun Tags und diese werden auch in einer Tag-Cloud organisiert.
Anhand der Tags werden auch zu jedem Post ähnliche Artikel angeboten.

Der Wordpress Plugin der das ganze ermöglicht heißt Simple-Tags.

Ha! Es geht doch weiter.

Auch wenn meine Photoshop Künste wohl absolut das letzte sind so hab ich heute wiedermal einiges an Zeit in dem Programm verbracht um ein neues Design für diese Seite hier zu schaffen.

Klar, ich hab schon Stunden um Stunden mit php und Artikeln über Wordpress Plugins etc verbracht, aber außer einiger Hello World Seiten ist bisher noch nicht dabei herausgekommen.

Natürlich gibts aber auch schon was zu gucken:

Hilfe.. das geht schief, da bin ich mir ganz sicher.

Unsicher hingegen bin ich mir ob ich wirklich solch ein fast schon Standard Web 2.0 Blog haben will oder eher etwas ausgefalleneres?
Ausgefallener andererseits geht einfach nicht weil ich der wohl mieseste Designer der Welt bin und weder Gefühl noch Geschmack besitze.

Nun, wer sich mit Wordpress auskennt, wird wohl schon gemerkt haben, dass ich mir bisher noch nicht wirklich viel angetan habe, sondern einfach ein Standard Kubrick Theme mit einem anderen Header-Bild hergenommen habe.

Nun, ich gelobe Besserung
Während des heutigen Raids bin ich nämlich über das Revolution Theme gestolpert und ich muss mir sagen, dass es mir extrem gut gefällt.

Leider kostet Revolution 60$, und entspricht auch nicht zu 100% dem was ich mir von meinem Blog erwarte. Also bleibt nur selbst was ähnliches coden

Sollte es jemals fertig werden, erfährt ihr es wohl als erste