Weblogs
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This is both my 500th post on Through the Interface and my 500th tweet as @keanw. All my blog posts now go out via Twitter, but this hasn't always been the case, so this is partly coincidence and partly planned (since I noticed a few weeks ago that I was getting close to this number for both blogging and micro-blogging sites). Thanks to all of you regular readers for your support, your feedback and the questions that have inspired me to write many of these 500 posts. Keep them coming! π And many thanks to my team, DevTech, for contributing…
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I'd like to extend a warm welcome to the Autodesk developer blogosphere to Doug Redmond, who has recently started a blog focused on programming and administering Autodesk Vault, It's All Just Ones and Zeros. Doug is a long-time contributor to Autodesk's development community, whether helping my team deal with complex API issues or presenting the Vault API at ADN events and at AU, he has a boundless passion for helping people customizing and developing with Autodesk Vault. If you're interested in working deeply with Vault technology β or are already doing so β then I'm sure that Doug's blog will…
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As Jeremy Tammik reported a few weeks ago, Autodesk Search Beta is now available. Here are the results of my quick "vanity search" on this siteβ¦ this isn't really egosurfing in its purist sense (although I admit I do Google my name pretty regularly β just to see who's quoting my blog :-), it's more about making sure that this blog is being indexed. Honest. Sure enough, a number of posts on this site came up in the results, which is encouraging. On a somewhat related note, I've been waiting for some time for our blogs to be indexed and…
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By popular request (well, in honesty I received one request via Twitter from @MattAnderson, but it seemed like such a good idea π I have added a ShareThis button to this blog's right-sash navigation. Clicking this should now allow you to share the current page (whether the site itself or an individual post β whichever is loaded in the browser) via a social networking/bookmarking site or with an email/SMS/AIM recipient. I have to admit to not being up-to-speed with the latest & greatest ways people share information on the web, so I've just accepted the default options (which will…
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Well, happy birthday to "Through the Interface", anyway. π 3 years, 394 posts and 2,559 comments later, TTIF is still going strong. In fact, it's now the 2nd most visited Autodesk blog, after Shaan's (some of our blogs with shorter posts publish their full content via RSS, so this doesn't necessarily completely reflect the relative readership, but hey). Here's a graph of the page hits over the last three yearsβ¦ I think the number on the Y-axis reflects the total page hits in a monthly window (at least that's what seems to make sense). [I'm not too worried about the…
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This post is a miscellaneous update on things I've put off announcing because of all the fun I've been having with AutoCAD 2010's Overrule API. First up is the AutoCAD Exchange, a new site devoted to people working with, you guessed it, AutoCAD. It's stocked with lots of useful and fun content, as well as providing social networking capabilities (be sure to add me as a contact via the Networking area of the site). Next is Without a Net, a blog hosted by an old friend of mine, Tom Stoeckel, along with esteemed colleagues Tom Bradley and Dan Scales. They…
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As of tomorrow, I will be transitioning away from posting to this site via TypePad in favour of micro-blogging via the increasingly-popular Twitter service. If you would like to follow me on Twitter, you can do so via http://twitter.com/keanw. Any lengthy monologues (and yes, I know I'm prone to these, from time to time π will either be condensed down to 140 characters or serialized over multiple tweets. The same holds for code samples: I expect this to force me to be more disciplined about keeping my code succinct (although on the downside I plan on completely eradicating comments and…
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Some of you might consider this to be slightly off topic (unless you make some bizarre connection with the fact that Carol Bartz is now CEO of Yahoo! :-). Actually there is a more direct connection, as the technology I'm introducing in this post - and have just had lots of fun playing around with - has some really interesting capabilities for people who would like to filter and customize the various RSS feeds to which they subscribe. Firstly I'd like to thank my friend and colleague Shaan Hurley for telling me about Yahoo! Pipes. This technology - which is…
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I need to vent. I've had an open ticket with Six Apart (the people providing TypePad, the service on which this blog is hosted) since January 2nd of this year. Kerry Brown had kindly pointed out a problem with Through the Interface's calendar navigation on December 26th, but as I was on vacation it took me a few days to get around to submitting the issue. The issue was related to an enhancement I made to this blog's navigation some time ago: somebody suggested showing more than a single month of posts, so I implemented an advanced template feature documented…
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A member of my team recently asked me to extend this blog's standard RSS feed to include more than 10 entries: he wanted a feed that contained all the entries ever posted to "Through the Interface". It turns out he uses Outlook 2007's RSS capability to download the full contents of items in an RSS feed, so he can then use his Outlook-integrated search capabilities to search his various email archives - as well as this blog's contents - whenever he's researching a technical query. He had a number of the earlier posts missing from Outlook and wanted the full…