Over the last few months I've had a bunch of problems with my web host (UltimaHosts.Net) so I decided to drop them in favor of free web hosting at my new work (more on this in a future post).

I didn't want to mess with installing Community Server (a bit overkill for what I do), so I figured I would try a new blog engine as well. My new blog engine is BlogEngine.Net. It seems to be a decent, light-weight blog engine with enough features to keep me happy, but without all the extra features that I didn't use and that just made it difficult to manage. I'm sure I'll be changing things around in the next few weeks such as figuring out how to get my color scheme, fav icon, logos, etc.

Sorry I haven't been posting recently. I've been very busy with work and school and any down time I've had I've been trying to spend with my family and friends or just relaxing .

I recently finished my second quarter of my user-centered design certificate program and will be starting my last quarter next week. Hopefully I will be able to get back to blogging regularly once I get my certificate.

Scott Hanselman put out an interesting post today about measuring blog traffic. This has been a topic that has interested me for awhile. FeedBurner provides a lot of great information that I couldn't have gotten otherwise, but there are some critical pieces of information missing (or perhaps I just haven't completely figured out how to read the stats yet).

It is a well known fact in retail that it costs more to get new customers than keeping the ones you have. However, it is also known that no matter what you do, you will lose customers. People move, die, find something else, etc. A key indicator about the health of the business is the rate at which you are losing customers. A dramatic change in that can be a major indication that something is going either right or wrong in your business.

I am not in retail, but it seems the same holds true for blogs as well. Although I may not pay for marketing, it does take work to try to attract subscribers. I read blogs about blogging, I try to write interesting articles, I try to participate in community forums, etc. I haven't been hugely successful with my blog, and likely never will be, but it does take a lot of effort to try to increase my subscriber count anyway. It would be great if FeedBurner was able to provide me with information about how many new subscribers I have vs how many subscribers I lose.

So, here is my proposal for what kind of information I would like to see for my subscriber stats:

1. A subscriber is a person who has subscribed to a blog feed and continues to get updates. The updates could be every 5 minutes or every other week.
2. A new subscriber is (obviously) one that has never requested the feed before.
3. A lost subscriber is one that has not requested an update in over 2 weeks (or some configurable amount).
4. A regained subscriber is one that requests your feed after not having received updates in over 2 weeks (or some configurable amount).
5. Each of these stats should be displayed prominently with drill-downs to help see what is going on.

Of course, I suspect I'm being a bit naive in what kind of information can be provided. Scott mentions a couple things that would prevent FeedBurner from being able to record this information, such as NewsGator retrieving the feed once and then delivering it to all subscribers (I don't think FeedBurner can know who the subscribers are in this situation).

I've finally gotten around to creating my own website. I've owned this domain for almost a year but haven't found the time to create my website. If you're wondering where the name Redwerb came from, it's my last name spelled backwards (my wife Christine came up with it). If you are wondering about the logo, it's what I imagine a red werb looks like.

Over my Christmas break I've done a bit of research and finally decided on using Community Server by Telligent for my website. I'm not sure what I want to do with my website in the future and this product seems to be able to scale if I ever want to do something interesting.

One of my concerns about moving my blog was actually transferring my posts. I ended up creating a tool that used the Blogger API to get the posts and then used the Community Server web services to move them to my new blog. It took awhile to build, but it seems to have worked (better than moving them each by hand). Unfortunately I lost all the comments and I'm pretty sure there are links that point back to posts in my old blog as well as a couple of pictures that are hosted by Blogger.

Anyway, I'm glad you made it to my new website. Feel free to leave a comment to let me know what you think. You can also use the Contact link in the menu in the column on the right.

Regular readers of my blog have probably noticed that my blogging schedule has been a bit erratic lately (not that I've ever stuck to a strict schedule :). Unfortunately I haven't had much free time lately.

I've started taking classes to obtain a certificate in usability from the University of Washington.  At work I recently gave a presentation at a user conference and I'm rewriting the UI framework that our company uses. And my family has taken up some time as well with football, birthdays, etc.

However, I do plan to keep my blog going and will try to fit some short posts into my schedule on occasion. Who knows, maybe someday my writing will improve enough where I have Jeff Atwood's (from Coding Horror) problems.

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On another note, what types of articles would you like to see?

My most popular post is Data Binding Classes, Interfaces, and Attributes in Windows Forms 2.0. This post is even more popular than my main page. Perhaps I should write more articles focused on the .Net UI. This is my area of expertise. Perhaps I could write articles on design-time support for Visual Studio? I am certainly aware that this is an area that needs more documentation.

Of course I am also starting to focus more on usability at my work and I'm taking the certificate program. Perhaps I should write more articles that discuss this topic?

What about other topics? Business of software? Cool technology? Developer productivity? Others? I would love to hear from you and get your opinion!

I would especially like to hear from you if you read my blog in an RSS reader. I do not believe that the analytical software that I use (Google Analytics and StatCounter) tracks RSS feeds. So I have no idea if anybody is reading my blog through an RSS reader. Just a "Hi, I read your blog through an RSS feed" would do fine :).

The last Windows Live Writer blog post was dated November 21 10:41 AM. That is until yesterday, May 30 2:59 PM, when they announced a new beta was being released (Windows Live Writer Beta 2 Now Available). I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, I just found out about it, but I am looking forward to it.

The big question is why did it take over 6 months to update their blog much less to just release another beta? Is this project just one guy working on it in his (or her) spare time? Or is this a serious project that Microsoft is committed to? It would be nice to know the answer to this question so I can properly set my expectations.

One of the new features that I'm looking forward to is the support for Blogger labels. Currently I have to edit my blog post in Blogger after I've posted it using Live Writer in order to apply the labels. This is problematic for a number of reasons. One, it's a pain. Two, I often forget. And three, it messes with my web tracking.

I will definitely be posting a review after I've had a chance to play with it. Stay tuned :).

The last time I posted browser stats (back in January, Browser Wars), Firefox was in the lead by a fairly healthy margin (Firefox had 57% followed by IE at 37%). New stats shows that IE has regained the lead (please remember that this is a developer blog so these numbers are not representative of the Internet as a whole).

1. Internet Explorer - 53.49%

2. Firefox - 40.37%

3. Opera - 3.54%

4. Safari - 1.35%

5. Mozilla - 0.62%

6. Mozilla Compatible Agent - 0.31%

7. Camino - 0.21%

8. Netscape - 0.10%

I didn't like how narrow the article column was in the last style (especially for some of the source code). Let me know what you think of the new style. 

After the surge in visitors I got from being featured on both the Firebird and IBExpert websites this week, I thought the browser metrics were pretty interesting. Apparently, the folks that use Firebird seem to have a preference for Firefox. Perhaps it's the name similarity? :)

 

1. Firefox - 57.14%

2. Internet Explorer - 37.03%

3. Opera - 4.37%

4. Mozilla - 0.58%

5. Safari - 0.29%

6. Mozilla Compatible Agent - 0.29%

7. Konqueror - 0.29%

I was unhappy with the blog editor in Blogger so I've been searching for a desktop blog editor that I can use instead. After spending way too long searching for one, I decided to try out Windows Live Writer (by Microsoft). The software is still in beta, but it looks promising.

One of the things I wanted to try out is uploading photos with my post. Here's a picture of my family at a recent Luau we had in our backyard (the picture is actually taken in front of a wall hanging in our basement). Unfortunately this feature did not work for me. When I tried to publish the post, Live Writer said Blogger did not support image upload. I ended up using Picasa to upload the file which meant I had to create a post and then delete it :(.

Being new to blogging, I'm not sure what features to really look for, but Live Writer seems to have all the features I can think of, including several different views such as normal, web layout, web preview (includes template), and HTML code (it seems to create reasonable HTML) and a spell checker (very handy to avoid embarrassing myself to badly). It's also built to be extensible, and with Microsoft backing it, it's likely to have a lot of good extensions soon. The fact that it's free is compelling as well (hopefully it will stay that way).

If you are interested in a good review of this software, check out Writer is Microsoft's first Live killer app on ZD Net.