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The Glass is Too Big

J Wynia - Web Consultant, Writer and Geek

Archiving My Twitter HistoryNovember 5

I've been using Twitter off and on since late 2006 and have racked up almost 2000 entries in that time. Earlier this year, when Twitter hit stretches where the service was out for entire days at a time, I started using Friendfeed to do the actual posting and pushed those posts over to Twitter.

Part of what sent me over to Friendfeed was a sinking feeling that most of those early posts would go down with the ship and I wanted to get some redundancy in where that ephemera was showing up online. Most of those posts were throwaway (see Sturgeon's Law) but I also know how much I enjoy going through slices of complete ordinariness after my memory of the events has faded. So, I want to keep a copy of all of this stuff and figure out later what's interesting.

At any rate, given Twitter's problems, I tried to get those old posts out whenever things would work for a patch. Unfortunately, even when things were working, if you went back through the pages of the archive, you'd get about 10 pages in and hit a wall. Given that my Twitter history is about 100 pages long, that left the vast majorit

ORDER BY BiggestProblem DESCOctober 21

I caught a little snippet on NPR this weekend that fits in well with what I've been hearing a lot of on the radio, TV, newspapers and the like. They were interviewing someone who was making drastic changes to their life and spending due to a loss of one of the family incomes.

I had a lot of reactions that made me wonder how they afforded their previous lifestyle if the loss of a part-time job led to things like moving into the cellar to avoid heating the rest of the house. Lots of these stories on TV and radio and in magazines make me wonder how many of these are stories that happen every day, bad economy or not, but we now have crowds of journalists digging to find them because it makes for a good story now.

Digressions aside, one of their cost-cutting measures stuck out at me: dramatically altering what they wear to get down to only one load of laundry a week. What I heard sounded like there was a lot of effort for this and hit me funny because we got a new washer and dryer a couple of weeks ago and an image of those yellow EnergyGuide cards from both popped into my head.

The washing machine's card estimated that our ANNUAL energy cost for both electricity and gas (for our hot water) was . . . $11. That's right. Less than a buck a month to wash all of our clothes.

I'm not going to pretend that I understand their situation, but, if we needed to find an extra $1000 or even $2000 a month to scrape by in tough times, it's pretty clear that OUR la

Ideas for Content Management in ASP.NET MVCOctober 5

I've been working on quite a few projects where I'm either already directly developing within the ASP.NET MVC Framework or where the framework is prominently featured in my design/architecture documents.

Because the framework is so new, there are still a few kinks and the patterns for how to do some common things haven't yet sorted themselves out. One of those areas is how to handle content in web applications.

All of these projects are web applications that *do* stuff. Most of these apps are filled with pages to edit things, retrieve data, manage queues, etc. In other words, the custom business logic that's unique to my clients' and my businesses. However, every single one also needs a batch of "pages" that *are* just basic content, with a few variables (like who's logged in) sprinkled through them.

The pattern that appears to be recommended by the ASP.NET team (via what is in the project template for the "home" and "about us" pages) basically requires a new view and a new action in a controller for each page, which, for those playing along at home, also requires rebuilding the app and redeploying.

Experience has taught me that solutions like that inevitably lead to pain. Once deployed, people always want to add pages, change them and o

Sit on Your Butt and Watch Movies DayOctober 1

photo credit: Usonian

A few years back (I can't really remember exactly when), my lovely wife looked at the calendar, and, seeing my birthday a week ahead, asked me what I wanted to do for the day. That wasn't the first year she'd asked that question. However, it was the first where I came up with anything other than a shrug an "I don't know".

When she asked that time, I stopped and gave it some thought. A few moments later, an answer tumbled out of my mouth, "What I really want to do is spend the day sitting on my butt and watching movies, with the laptop in front of me".

Once said, I realized that it was really exactly what I did want to spend my birthday doing. Holidays all celebrate something. Birthdays are celebrations of specific individuals and the things they enjoy. For lots of people, that celebration involves large groups of people, noise, loud music and a great deal more activity than I have ever really enjoyed.

I do, however, really enjoy chilling out and watching movies in my home theater,

Web Application Design and Prototyping ToolsSeptember 20

photo credit: j wynia

I carry a variety of notetaking devices. They all have their benefits and I tend to oscillate between pen/paper and electronic devices. However, the notebook nearly always tends to hang out around me and I dump ideas onto the pages as the day goes on.

Those notebooks have been filling up with ideas for projects. Combine that with some client projects and my shift in schedule (which hasn't freed up as much time as I'd hoped), and I find myself at the beginning of several projects at once.

This raises a few needs that have been hanging out there. Designing and starting a web application project involves a few things for which I've never been happy using the existing tools.

First, there's actual layout design. While Photoshop works fine for doing the "sketches", the people who are in a role to review those design ideas tend to get overly focused on things