Blogging

New Blog Site

Josh Evitt — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 16:39:00 GMT

If you are still subscribed to this blog, then please subscribe to my new blog at http://blog.joshevitt.com/Rss.aspx. For historical purposes, all posts currently on this site will remain here for the foreseeable future, but all new posts will be posted to http://blog.joshevitt.com. Thanks!

Podcasts

Josh Evitt — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 20:40:00 GMT

In the past, I've said that I didn't "get" podcasts. Mostly, I said this because most of the podcasts at the time were poorly edited, so you'd have vastly different audio levels, even within the same podcast. Other times, the podcasts just weren't very interesting, and in some cases seemed to exist solely to give the author the chance to tell inside jokes and pat themselves on the back.

However, over the past few months I've found several podcasts that I really enjoy and are very well done, and I thought I'd highlight those:

Programming
Polymorphic Podcast (.NET)
Hanselminutes (.NET and General Tech)
Ruby on Rails Podcast
CocoaRadio (Mac/Cocoa)
Code Sermon (General)

Business
StartupNation
Venture Voice

Tech
This Week in Tech

Outsourcing

Josh Evitt — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 12:41:00 GMT

I've recently published an article about my experiences with IT outsourcing, titled Outsourcing - A Year in Review.

Failure

Josh Evitt — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 13:32:00 GMT

Wil Shipley recently wrote a post titled Failure is Success. In this post he states that failure is something to be strived for and that nature is full of examples where failure is critical to success. An example he gives that resonated with me is that when weight-training it's critical to push the muscles to failure; otherwise, they won't grow stronger. For some reason, probably because I'm currently on a weight-training program, that statement really hit home. I have no problem pushing my muscles to their failure limit or pushing myself to my physical limits. As the saying goes, "No pain, No gain!" However, when it comes to pushing myself to my intellectual limits, I all too often stop short, presumably because of a fear of failure. Realizing that failure can lead to growth, even in intellectual pursuits, is a powerful concept. Perhaps the next time I reach my intellectual failure point, instead of stopping short I'll accept the fact that it's highly probably I'll fail and realize that that's ok and continue on.

Links - 09/26/05

Josh Evitt — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 20:21:00 GMT

Here's a collection of links that I've found interesting lately:

Coding
Paul Scrivens argues his point that you should handcode your Web pages.

Consulting
Garret Dimon provides some advice on becoming a freelance Web developer.

Marketing
Malcolm Gladwell on Why Focus Groups Suck.

Self Improvement
The Lazy Way to Finding Your Calling
How to Go from Introvert to Extravert

Switching
Switching back to Windows from Apple. - I personally just bought a Mac Mini and am enjoying it. I see a use for both OS's.

Working
The Art of Work
Building a Smarter To-Do List (via Michael Hyatt)

BigCos get Bigger

Josh Evitt — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 22:18:00 GMT

Two significant acquisitions today:

Ebay buys Skype for $2.6 Billion in cash and stock, with additional chances for compensation based on performance.

Oracle buys Siebel for $5.85 Billion.

Admittedly, I've never used Skype and know very little about the company, but $2.6 Billion+ for the company seems like an extremely high valuation. Ebay's made some smart acquisitions in the past, so it'll be interesting how they roll this out in their marketplace.

FeedDemon Acquired?

Josh Evitt — Mon, 16 May 2005 21:21:00 GMT

Earlier today, Nick Bradbury (creator of HomeSite, TopStyle and (my favorite RSS reader) FeedDemon) alluded to an announcement coming tomorrow morning. Looks like Steve Rubel got the scoop this evening...NewsGator is going to be acquiring Bradbury Software from Nick and Nick will be joining NewsGator.

If the news is true, I'm happy that Nick was able to capitalize on his hard work over the past few years. I'm been extremely happy with FeedDemon for over a year. However, I'm also a little disappointed, as I'm a big fan of the little guy and Nick showed how it's possible for even a single-person software shop to be successful. I'll be interested in watching how NewsGator uses FeedDemon, and I'm also wondering what they'll be doing with TopStyle as it doesn't seem to fit with their current business model. Hopefully, it will be a match that helps further boost RSS and blogging and will enable Nick to do bigger and better things with FeedDemon. Congrats Nick!

Wordpress, Google Juice and funding open source development

Josh Evitt — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 13:45:00 GMT

Recently, it came out that Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of Wordpress, was selling advertising on the Wordpress Web site using Wordpress's high Google page rank. Read the article to find out how this was being achieved. Essentially, he was hosting pages that contained high-dollar Google keywords. It appears as though most of the community did not know about this, and an outcry resulted. Matt has responded to this and has removed the pages from the Wordpress site. This is an interesting issue, and I'll be interested to see how this affects Wordpress usage in the future, if it affects it at all.

Doogie Howser - World's First Blogger?

Josh Evitt — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 13:27:00 GMT

Jason Kottke recently discovered that perhaps Doogie Howser was the world's first blogger. In response, one of his readers wonders whether Captain Kirk was the world's first podcaster for his captain's log. However, since Star Trek is set in the future, then wouldn't they have been aware of the podcasting that is going on today and wouldn't today's podcasting have come first?

TheGuitarBlog.com

Josh Evitt — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 11:22:00 GMT

One of my passions besides technology is the guitar. I've played guitar off and on for the past 15 years (even taking 2 years of classical guitar lessons in college), but have recently started playing quite a bit again. To coincide with playing again, I've started a blog for guitar-related news and information: www.theguitarblog.com. There isn't much content there right now, but I'll be adding content over the next few weeks. I'd love to hear other guitar players' thoughts on the site, such as what type of info you'd like to see, etc. So, if you play guitar, then let me know what you think.

As far as site technology goes, I decided to try Wordpress for the site. Although I love .NET and won't be abandoning it any time soon, I was intrigued by the recent 1.5 release and wanted to check it out. I also wanted a reason to play around with MySQL, which Wordpress uses for the back-end database. I found installing Wordpress to be extremely simple; the 5-minute install lived up to its name. Additionally, Wordpress provides a pretty robust administration console that is easy to use. If you're looking for an easy-to-use blogging system and you don't have access to SQL Server or .NET, then I would recommend looking into Wordpress.