Blog posts for 2010

I added tags support for my blog posts via using the Django tagging library. As you can see each blog post now has any number of tags associated with them.

Overall Django tagging works a lot like Django comments in that you can attach tags to any model in your project.

To implement Django tagging inside my site, I did need to make a slight model change to have a tags field in my blog news item table. Apparently this field is only used for caching and so that it shows up in the Django administration. When you modify your model in Django administration a new text field appears labeled Tags that you can enter in space separated tags for your model.

I made each tag into a link which bring you to all posts on the site about the specified tag. Also you can find a Tags link on the right hand bar which displays the list of tags in use and how many posts each tag has.

The Django tagging framework has many other features which I didn't use, but from what I used it's a great and very easy to use library.

I've implemented comments on this site for all blog posts. I've been wanting to add comments for a long time, especially in case I have errors in any of my postings.

I decided to build off of Django's built in comment framework django.contrib.comments. I was very impressed on how easy it is to integrate and customize. The Django comment framework allows you to attach comments to any model you have. So I didn't need to do any additional database work.

I'm going to attempt to hold off on CAPTCHA for the moment to see how their honeypot feature works. But I expect that I'll have to implement a CAPTCHA system eventually. Basically the honeypot feature is an extra field in the form that's used as a trap. If any data is entered in that field, the comment will be considered spam. Spam robots will typically fill out all fields when attempting to make a form submission.

The sliding and collapsing effects are basically done with a single line of jQuery code.

$("#id-of-div").slideToggle();

You can also optionally pass in a duration or 'fast' and 'slow' keywords to the slideToggle function. Some other cool cross browser things you can do with jQuery are: adding animated effects, Making XML HTTP (AJAX) requests, DOM navigation, DOM manipulation, drag and drop, complex client side operations, and validation.

July 1st 2010 I was happy to receive an email from Microsoft notifying me that I won one of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional awards. Specifically I was awarded for Visual C++.

From the award website:

The Microsoft MVP Award recognizes exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who voluntarily share their high quality, real world expertise with others. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts representing technology's best and brightest who share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others. Worldwide, there are over 100 million participants in technical communities; of these participants, there are fewer than 4,000 active Microsoft MVPs.

The award is well known and recognized in the tech industry and I'm very honored to have received it.

The award comes with many perks but the recognition and other MVP contacts that you make are invaluable.

It seems that the primary reasons for winning the award was for contributions to stackoverflow (Q&A site for programmers), my blog website, MSDN related forums, and codeproject (Q&A)

In 2003 I purchased a book by O'Reilly on Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). It was a great book and I had high hopes for what I was learning, but it remains one of the only things I've learnt that I have not had the opportunity to use in a professional setting.

SVG has long been deserving widespread adoption on the web, but the one browser that really matters has not had support for it. Sure you could install 3rd party plug-ins, but native support is needed for widespread adoption. That one browser without support has been Internet Explorer 8 and below.

That is up until now. The MIX 10 conference was held from March 15-17, 2010 and the Internet Explorer team announced that they have support for SVG in version 9. Looks like they're about 10 years late, but better late than never.

Some milestones:

• SVG was initially released late 2001
• Firefox and Camino have had support since 2005.
  
• WebKit which Opera and Safari are based on has had support since 2006.
• Microsoft relases .Net framework 3.0 which has support for XAML

Does SVG pose a thread to Silverlight/XAML?

In 2006 Microsoft would probably of said yes. Today they would say no. I would also say no.

Silverlight and its XAML markup provide a full application description format.

SVG is more of a graphic file format and offers minimal programming support via a script tag typically using Javascript.

That being said, when possible I would prefer to use SVG.