Today is our very special day for our Codeproject fans. Because our lovely tech site is 8th year old now. If you are one of CP fans, please say “Happy B’day” to CP.

Happy Birthday to you!

Many Many Happy Returns of the Day!!!!

Chris Maunder said

We’re 8! Or 56 in dog years. And about 157 in internet years.

8 years ago on this day Dave and I, in the basement of a restaurant at the corner of Dundas and Islington in Toronto, while shouting over the sound of the evenings veal being hammered, turned on our first server - a dual 350MHz beast - and launched The Code Project.

At the time my experience with web development was all PHP on Linux but between us we knew that a) ASP can’t be that hard, b) web development is about presenting content, not presenting the source code underneath, and c) I would be flying home to Australia in 3 days and 24hrs of flying and a good, thick book on ASP should do me fine to learn all I’d need to know.

In the first week we had 36 articles, in a month we had 148 articles and in a year we had 881 articles.

In the 8 years since we’ve gathered over 17,000 articles, had 4.7 million members register, have 3.3 million of them revisit us each month, and have learned and seen a lot. Some good, some sad, some mystifying, and some so absolutely ridiculous that we’ve vowed we will write a book.

I would like to say thanks to everyone who has contributed: from Uwe who gave us our first scripts, the authors like Marc and Nish who have contributed a ton of articles for the community, to the guys and girls on the boards answering the questions and, most importantly, to every single person who steers newbies in the right direction with kind words; who provides help on posting articles; who try their hardest to uphold this loose set of rules we run the site by and who emails myself or a staff member to raise the alarm if something breaks. And also to everyone who has submitted even a single article, answered even a single question, or has spread the word to their colleagues and friends and who in turn has helped bring together an amazing community.

Thank you.

And, even though I say this every year, we’re only just starting. Next year will be huge.

Cheers,
Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP

Thank you so much, Chirs. I’ve been there since last three years and I used to participate in the forum (esp: ASP.NET, Web development and C#) whenever I have some free times. I really have a great time with you all. Thank you so much for running such a great site.

This is the wrap-up of this blog for October, 2007 [ "October 12 to October 31 ( 20 days )"].

1. Host and Blogging Software

• My blog is shifted to Dreamhost on 11st October, 2007. Luckily, I got a lot of discounts from them because they were celebrating 10th Birthday at that time.
• I started using the standalone Wordpress from Wordpress.org. ( The one that I used earlier is Wordpress MU (Wordpress Multi-User). )

2. Plugins

• Wordpress.com Stats : This is a stats system that I’m using for more than 1 year. I still love this plugin so I use it here too. (But it doesn’t allow me to take my previous stats from my old blog. )
• Akismet : The greatest spam-fighter on the net.
• Feedburner FeedSmith : It will redirect your own site feed (i.e: http://michaelsync.net/feed/) to your feedburner’s feed (i.e: http://feeds.feedburner.com/michaelsync/).
• Google XML Sitemaps : It is just for Google Webmaster Tool.
• Subscribe to Comments : This is the best way to keep in touch with my readers.
• SyntaxHighlighter : This makes my sourcecode looks cool.

Which plugins are you using on your site?

3. Theme

Yeah. I’m using my modified version of “Unsleepable Widget-friendly” theme for now.

4. AdSense

This might be interesting topic for you all. I have started using the Adsense from the following service. I wanna share some of my experiences… I promise that I’m NOT going to use the most annoying ads in my blog. All ads will be placed on the sitebar or under the comment box . I hope that it would be okay for you. Frankly speaking, I’m not going to blog for money. I have no plan to make money with my blog.. Why ads here? Because as my blog is on self-host, there are some costs for it. I like to cover those things. And also, I would like to run some programming or blogging contests on my blog..

• Google AdSense : I think Google Ads is the best adsense service on the net. They pay for impression, clicks and actions.
• AuctionAds : This is also a nice ads service after Google Ads. I start using it last 10 or something.. I got 4703 impressions, 4 clicks and 1 referral. I got free $25 bucks for signing-up with them. I’m not very sure whether this promotion is still available or not. You may try here if you want.
• Chitika : I think that Chitika is “Pay-per-action” service that didn’t work well from me. So, I have removed it.
• BidVertiser : I signed-up on that site today. It allows you to sign-up as both advertiser and publisher.

If you are also using Ads on your blog, please share some information with me. Which Service are you using? How many impressions and clicks do you get for a day? How much have you earned? Thanks.

Stats

• PageViews : 17618 PageViews for 20 days ( it doesn’t include my own visits.)
• Technorati Rank : 32,510 ( My rank dropped too much this month. My rank was 25,703 on 1st October. )
• Google PageRank : 5 (I got it on 26th January this year. it has been nearly 1 year. I think the PR of my blog should has been dropped this time because this is fashion for now.. a lot of pro-bloggers are shouting about Google PR drops for their blogs.. )
• Technorati Authority: 182
• Bandwidth : 3.684 GB

Hello my readers,

I’m moving my blog from Wordpress.com to DreamHost. My blog was down started from last night until today evening due to the DNS redirecting problem in my new host.. now, that problem has been fixed and my blog is up now.. However, there might be some problems (such as slow response, bad or broken theme, wrong image paths) in my blog…

Sorry for inconvenience.. Please be patient for a while.. I’m working so hard to restore everything and adding some more customizations.. so, everything will be normal very soon….

Feel free to let me know if you have any suggestion or comment for my blog. Thanks..

Regards,
Michael Sync

More: http://www.ndp.org.sg

Even though this post is written as an explanation of why I’m mixing a lot of things in one blog, it will give some interesting points that helps you to decide whether you should blog the dedicated topics only or mixed things.

Introduction

I was having a conversation with one of my friends about our blogs, blogging and etc last night. He gave me one comment that I’m going too far from one topic to another in my blog. I should probably post the dedicated topic about something. It is not good if I’m posting a lot of different topics in one blog because it made my readers to confuse about what they should expect from my blog. For example, some people may like about programming things. Some may like about Jokes. So, those people who like about programming might not wants to see the jokes all the time because they are not coming to my blog for having fun. They wanna get something useful for their technical expertise. The same way might happen for those who likes about Jokes instead of technical things.

But there are some reasons why I do like that.

1. My blog is based on what is happening in my real life.

Does it sound funny? but it’s true. My blog is going as same as how my life’s moving. I don’t mean that those are completely the same but almost. For example, if I’m working for ASP.NET 1.1 then the most of posts that I wrote at that time may be about ASP.NET 1.1 only. If I’m working with SmartClient or .NET 2.0 then the most of topics that you read here may probably be about SmartClient or .NET 2.0.

There might be some cases that I may post about some topics that I currently interest (eg: SliverLight, Orcas, LINQ and etc) even I’m not working with those technologies.

Plus, I may express my feeling in my blog (eg: like that) too. ( It make me feel better. u know?)

And it is also possible that you can know whether I’m very busy or not by checking the upcoming posts of my blog.
2. My blog is a place where I keep all of my favorite things.

This is the another facts why I don’t launch the dedicated blog. My blog is not a blog about blogging (eg: problogger or john chow or lorelle or etc). My blog is not a blog about technical website (eg: CodeProject). My blog is just a place where I keep all of my favorite things in one place. My favorite things could be Jokes, some pieces of codes, opensouce tools, thoughts, blogging tips. It could be anything. I’m not sure whether you are gonna like them all as like me but I would say that those things are pretty cool. (at least for me. )

3. Time is not enough to manage the multiple blogs.

Time is an issue. Everybody has their own life to serve. So, we have to work for serving our life. Sometimes, I felt very tired when I come back to my home after work. At that day, I don’t even wanna boot my computer and I don’t want to think about technical things. so, it’s sad to say that I’m not able to come up with new post everyday.

While running within very short time, it’s not easy for me to launch the dedicated blogs (eg: blog for Joke, blog for Ajax, blog for blogging and etc)? My time will be over while trying to log-in in many blogs.

Conclusion

Yeah. Those are the reasons why I’m blogging the different topics in one blog. But I believe that it will be more convenience for readers to read the dedicated blog instead of aside blog like mine. Because things that they expect and things that is coming up will be the same. So my conclusion is that the dedicated blog are good for reader but not for blogger. What do you say??

Just a random thought for today. I started reading John Chow’s blog since last two months. I think that his blog is nice one. (Of course! His blog is #3 in top 26 blogs about blogging.) One thing that I noticed in his blog is that he is always asking to buy a beer for him in each and every posts (even in “About Me” page) if we like his post.

I do understand the way he do but I feel kinda strange about it. What about putting this link in sidebar or something? As I said before, it’s just a thought..