Redesigning my Login / User Management system

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my redesign of a secure website: last week I realised I was in a bit of trouble. Some time ago I set up a system for external clients to be able to access parts of our internal network. This 'system' of course underwent some redesign in the process of finding out which features were necessary, and then and again something new came in our minds which had to be incorporated in it. All in all it looks we didn't quite think the design through from beginning to end upfront. Now I realise that the system I made (built on IIS 5.0 and using good old-fashioned ASP), was not really that flexible. Database calls were lying around deeply nested within HTML layout code; references to .css files were sometimes made several times. And I'm using multiple web pages in cases where one page, extended with some Session / QueryString variables will suffice. That way, you don't have to set up a new page or every other report some client wants. But just one page for one report or even a generic page for all required reports. It took me a while to realise (with some outside conviction as well) that I'd better start again from scratch. Lose all old stuff, start thinking it through thoroughly, draw a database plan by hand, etc. All-in-all: start from scratch. And that's what I'm doing right now... to be continued, probably.

Sikko2Go LINK

Thinking about software licensing for a small ISV and the issue of open source - note-to-self: read this interesting looking, but rather long article
via

Blog Woes

Every now an then I find myself thinking, whilst reading some blog entry or article: 'hey, I could have written this myself'. But as it turns out, I didn't. It got me thinking about the exact reason why... The point is, I'm trying to follow some .NET related blogs (like Carl Franklin's and
Rory Blyth. Their .NET Rocks show surely is fun to listen to. However, currently I have no active experience in the language. This makes me feel very restrained in talking about it. As I have no real knowledge about it, how on earth could I write interesting things for my readers? Maybe I could make something introductory, but then again, how could it be interesting to you. An you only need ten seconds on Google to promptly find many more interesting info than anything I'd cough up. In fact, writing this short bit give me thoughts on an article about the subject of not being settled and noteworthy in the field of blogging, and still being an active blogger. Sometimes I wonder just why someone gets noted and receive massive audiences; while other bloggers, whose stories may be just as interesting, have only 4 or 5 readers a day.

136 Feeds Subscriptions and still counting

Yesterday, I took a fresh look at the number of feeds I'm subscribed to, and you guessed it, the counter reaches 136. Already unsubscribed several feeds the last weeks. Among them some blogs which were not really in my field of business, which I subscribed to too hastily, or which were just overwhelming (some tech news feeds; I keep up with tech news without a problem without these feeds anyway; for me, they were just a recycling of news I've already seen on real website I visit, and so they just take up extra reading time). But still it seems I add more blogs than I lose. This is definitely not going in the right direction. There's just so much content that it's unable to keep up with (Btw, some people
are able to write so much interesting things that I wonder where they get the time?). For me it means some blogs I'd like to keep up with, sometimes remain unread for almost a week. This way some of their items are already old news; while I would prefer to be reading the news from them instead of somewhere else. That's exactly why they're on my Favorites list. Anyway, something has to be done. One way would be dumping all superfluous blogs in some 'When-You-Have-Time-Left' folder; the other of course would be unsubscribing. Hmm, let me just think about the options for some time. But in the meantime, please tell me how *you* handle Blog Overload?

Frequent Blog Updates

Wow... on Easter Monday after some blogreading, I managed to get all (about 70) blogs in my 'root' directory into the 'read' state. Blogs I read frequently or for which I haven't yet decided on the category they belong to, reside there. This morning - maybe 36 hours later - I find 40+ of them have new content available. Is this an after-Easter blog rush, or is it just that these blogs update frequently?

LINK

Reading Joatblog I almost fell off my chair laughin when I linked through to The lost Olive, an entry which on its' turn revealed this. I can only highly recommend you give it a read

Oops, I did it again...

... acting a bit too naive and unthinkingly it seems. I was investigating Bloglines' possibilities. And while I already found the very useful feature of 'sorting blogs alphabetically', I was a bit too rushed on this one: at the moment I'm using several subfolders for easier browsing of the feeds (which is a natural thing to do, I hear you say). However, now I opened some of the bigger folders, selected all feeds and happily sorted them thereafter. Going back to the blogs, only to find out the interface really did what I actually asked it to do: it had sorted *all* blogs alphabetically, putting all blogs into a long list in the root so to say. All subfolders were empty afterwards :) And as there's no undo option, it took half an hour to place all the feeds back to where they belong.
Is it me being stupid, or does Bloglines need a *little* bit more intuitivity.
[DISCLAIMER] This is certainly not a BL rant, for I do like their free service and all. Maybe it really *is* me after all...

How many bytes can one read in an hour?

I've just been backreading some old blog entries in a skip-uninteresting-parts way, while still reading most of the content. It was 67000 chars (or 13000 words) which I read in just under 2 hours. I can come up with these specific numbers thanks to the handy word-count feature in Word. This is available right from the Tools menu nowadays; leading to the suggestion that Microsoft surveys found out people like this feature and use it a lot. At least, as far as my knowledge goes, Microsoft investigates the usage of Office programs, in order to give often used functions a more prominent place in the program.
It seems I read about 10 chars / second, giving me a 0,01KB/sec reading speed. Is that fast?