This is cool. I just discovered that you can create polls with Google Docs. You basically create a spreadsheet to capture the data you want to examine and provide a link to a live form.  You can email this link or put it on a web site as I have done at the bottom of this post.  To make it work, you first need a Google Docs account.  Then, follow these simple steps.

 

1. Login to your Google Docs account.

2 Create a new Spreadsheet.

3. Select the Share tab.

4. When asked to give a name to your spreadsheet, give it a meaningful name, specific to your poll like "Favorite Browser".

5. In the Invite People area, there is a new option to "to fill out a form."  Select this radio button.

6. Press the "Start editing your form..." button.  This will launch a different window into which you specify the title, question, help text, etc.  Take special notice of the "Question Type." You have the options of selecting text, paragraph text, multiple choice, checkboxes or choose from a list.  The screen will change depending on the option you select.

7. When you are finished, press "Done."  If you are satisfied with the preview, press "Save"

8. Press the "Next, choose recipients >>" button.

Here, you can invite people, specify preferences, copy the link to the form, etc. 

9. Click on "Go to live form" to start entering data.

10. When you open your spreadsheet, you will see your data.

Take my poll on your Favorite Browser here.

In my post on Blogging Newsletters/Email said I would like to present "teasers" instead of the entire text of my posts in email/feeds so that readers would be encouraged to visit the site (something important for those monitizing their sites).  Feedburner uses a feature called Summary Burner to accomplish this.  To use Summary Burner.

 

1. Login to Feedburner and click on your feed.

2. Select the Optimize tab (see figure).

3. Select the Summary Burner for the View menu (see Figure)

 

  4. Specify a Maximum Length and Teaser text to be included in your emails (see Figure).

 

5. Save your changes. Now when users receive your feeds, your text will be truncated based on the maximum length specified. 

I've been wondering if there's any pattern to music I listen to while programming.  I'm considering if there's any connection between the musical genre and type of programming I'm doing. For instance, sometimes I'm developing something simple but tedious and just want to get it done fast. Other times I'm proofing designs, or implementing complex patterns. Then, there's designing/developing the user-interface which takes a sense of both creativity and structure.

Granted, I understand that musical taste is a major component here. Still, just as there are different types of programming, there are different types of music.  By the way, I should probably mention that in my development career, I have met numerous programmers who are also musicians ranging from amateur to professional. Any connection there?

Music I frequently code to:

Classic Rock: Most of it, particularly Led Zeppelin,  Uriah Heep, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, etc.  The key for me here is that I have to be familiar enough with the music so as not to be distracted by the lyrics. It seems I'm listening to classic rock when I'm coding something with which I'm familiar.

Various forms of New age: Enigma is a new age group that mixes in some old world elements like Gregorian chants.  This is great for coding and particularly when I'm coding a complex design. Check out the sustained electric guitar in "Hello and Welcome" off the A Posteriori album.

I'll listen to harsh fast paced dark electronica when I'm in the groove, so to speak. For some reason it seems to keep my coding pace up. Similarly, certain forms of dark hard-edged rock (maybe even gothic) like Flyleaf.  There are other groups, but if I mention them my friends will tell me I'm going to burn in hell. 

I'll often code to classical of course, Mozart's Requiem and Vivaldi's Four Seasons being my favorite.

I'll also listen to hymns and praise music. I particularly enjoy the reworking of hymn melodies by groups like Indelible Grace.

I can code to very specific forms of Jazz like Pat Metheny for instance.

Music I cannot code to (nor listen to for that matter):

I've heard programmers say that they like the upbeat rhythms of of dance electronica.   This doesn't seem to work for me - it's too repetitive. I end up with code like

while (true)

    do something;

Pop - I can't stand this junk with its overly simplistic melodies and cliche lyrics.  If anything, this drives me insane and makes me totally unproductive.

Most Contemporary Christian Music for the same reasons I can't listen to pop.

Rap, too repetitive and since many rap lyrics are angry, I'm thinking it would be a bad combination when I'm having a bad code day...or maybe not.

 

What music do you listen to when coding?

Providing a way to subscribe to a blog via email is important. Many, and perhaps most people don't understand RSS, atom, XML nor would they know how to set up a reader.  Heck, I hardly understand this stuff.  These folks have no way of knowing about any new posts unless they frequent the blog.

I have been contemplating rolling an email subscription module for dasBlog (and other blogging engines). Then I started investigating further.   There are several such services available all of which have their pros/cons.  Some are: AWeber, Zookoda and FeedBlitz.

First, I didn't look into AWeber after seeing that the starting price was $19.95/mo. I'm looking for a free option so it wasn't worth my time to dig deeper.

FeedBlitz seems to be the front runner in terms of reliability (see this review). it has a free version that places ads in the resulting emails. The relatively inexpensive paid version will remove the ads and I believe will provide some additional functionality.  It seems feature rich, and the account setup was easy.  Once setup, you have tons of options for managing newsletters (specifying RSS feeds for bloggers, scheduling distribution, look and feel, etc). I have not looked into monetizing the emails but FeedBlitz appears to support it. There are two ways to incorporate it into your blog. One is to use the supplied Form based html code. The other is a link that will take the user to a FeedBlitz hosted subscription form. Obviously, the form based code will not work with dasBlog :(. Overall, I really like this service. 

Zookoda was very user-friendly and has a fairly nice feature set. After setup, it takes a day or so to receive a Sender account with which you can start sending emails. Basically, you setup your mailing lists, emails and broadcasts and specify how they are to be distributed. I particularly like that mailing list management  aspect of this service.  Also, incorporating it into your blog uses javascript and so you can have the email entry right in your site if you use a blogging engine like dasBlog. There are problems with this service however. Based on the review above, its not very reliable in that many subscribers never receive the broadcasts. Furthermore, the company is owned by PayPerPost. There appears to be some controversy around this company regarding their advertising model. I prefer to stay away from controversy.

Currently, I'm using FeedBurner which also provides an email broadcast service. It is more than sufficient.  Like FeedBlitz, it uses a form based script so incorporating the form into a dasBlog site is not doable. However, it also provides a subscription link that will take the user to a different screen.  One thing I'm not sure about (I'll have to look into this) is whether FeedBurner will allow you to put a character limit on each post that get sent out in email (both FeedBlitz and Zookoda do). This is important if you are trying to drive traffic to your site if you are monetzing with ads and such.

I may provide FeedBlitz as another option for my site.  Comments on other options/suggestions are welcome.

----

UPDATE Apr 28,2008: Looks like FeedBurner does not allow for a character limit on the emails sent.  So subscribers will get the full post in thier emails.

I'm always looking for great tools (particularly free/open source tools). Here's one called PDFCreator that allows you to create PDFs from any document that can print to a Windows printer.  Furthermore, it is free because it's an Open Source tool.  It's extremely simple to install and use. After running the installation program, PDFCreator shows up a a printer in your list of printers (see figure).

Here are a list of features directly from the PDFCreator website.

• Create PDFs from any program that is able to print
• Security: Encrypt PDFs and protect them from being opened, printed etc.
• Send generated files via eMail
• Create more than just PDFs: PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, PCX, PS, EPS
• AutoSave files to folders and filenames based on Tags like Username, Computername, Date, Time etc.
• Merge multiple files into one PDF
• Easy Install: Just say what you want and everything is installed
• Terminal Server: PDFCreator also runs on Terminal Servers without problems
• And the best: PDFCreator is free, even for commercial use! It is Open Source and released under the Terms of the GNU General Public License.

I've been asked how I created the headline animator that that I use as my email signature,  like the one shown below:

Xavier Pacheco

It simply, really. Its a feature of www.feedburner.com.  Once you have an account set up you simply navigate to the Publicize tab for your feed and then configure your animator under the Headline Animator section as shown below:

From there you can configure your animator as you like given the various settings.  Have fun!

According to Steve McConnell, Gold-plating "comes from developers who want to explore a technically challenging new area..."  Jeff Atwood, in his blog, says that "In the purest sense, all refactoring is gold-plating. That is, it consumes extra project time and results in no material benefit for the users. But without periodic and aggressive refactoring, we can't produce sane, maintainable code."

While I agree with Jeff's conclusion, I would not go as far as he does in equating refactoring with gold-plating. Having maintainable code does have a direct benefit to the customer or client (the person paying for the development).  Ultimately, it's a cost/benefit matter. When the cost outweighs the benefit, then it's not worth refactoring.  Plus, at some point (I hesitate at saying this), the code just works and no further development/refactoring is needed regardless of the code being ugly. Furthermore, when it comes to gold-plating, there is an ill-motive even though it may be subtle. 

I should probably note that when I use the term "developer" I may be referring to a development consulting organization, an independent consultant or a developer (at any level) within a development team.  In all cases, this is a person who can influence the tools and technologies employed in a development effort.

That said, I find that an extensive amount of gold-plating occurs at a much earlier phase of development (such as the proposal phase) which is why I prefer the term "Technology gold-plating" over "Developer gold-plating".  This goes right in line with McConnell's definition.  

I divide Technology Gold-Plating into two categories.

1. New Technologies (Bleeding Edge)
2. Preferred Technologies

New Technology Gold-plating

New technology gold-plating is exactly what the name implies. The developer wants an opportunity to delve into the latest technology.  This is extremely dangerous for the client who may be investing his/her money to the effort.  In essence what is going on here is development research and education at the client's expense.  It works like this. The vendor comes out with a new bleeding edge technology. The vendor pushes it on its partners (who want to play with it). The partners push it on to their clients. Their clients get blood splattered all over them - not good and frankly, quite messy.

Preferred Technology Gold-plating

Preferred technology gold-plating is the use of technologies with which the developer is most familiar or favors for whatever reason. For instance, a developer may use a pre-designed architectural model from the latest popular book on software architecture. Or he may use some pre-fabricated framework.  I am by no means saying these are bad. They are excellent if they actually meet the client's technology and business needs.  Yet, it happens too frequently that a company ends up with an over-architected monolith of a system when all they needed was an html page and a few lines of java script.

So, how does one prevent this from happening to their project?  Stay tuned, I'll be covering this and more in future posts.

If you intend to use the Product Cloud widget from the Amazon Associates program - CAUTION!  I used it on my page here, then later realized that it included to REALLY offensive material.  Please forgive me if you saw that and were offended. I have removed that widget. I'm surprised that Amazon actually allowed for that. Yikes!

This is cool.  I posted this blog using email and a handy service namedBlogMailr. It's a free service(provided your blog is not for commercial purposes).  Neat!