MyVerbalOutlet

I attended our local DotNet users group meeting last night. The users group had set our own little Microsoft Launch Event for Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008. We had speakers give a presentation on each product and they were all pretty good. Because of the time constraint I didn’t learn anything new about Visual Studio 2008 but I feel like I got at least a basic introduction to both of the other products.

At the end of the meeting everyone got a set of disks with Visual Studio 2008 Standard and at least evaluation copies of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. After they handed those out they held the drawing for the regular user group give aways. Before last night the most I had ever gotten was a yellow water bottle. When they did the drawing my name came up first and I got first pick. I chose Vista Ultimate with Service Pack 1. I am looking to build a new PC this year and I wasn’t sure if I would install XP or Vista. Now that I have a free Vista Ultimate I will going with Vista.

One of the things that has always frustrated me about blogging is coming up with a good visual design for the blog. Coming up with visual design that I like and has visual appeal has been difficult for me. However I had a bit of inspiration today and I did a little bit of design work in a graphics program that allowed me to express my initial vision fairly well. Now I just need to come up with the time and motivation to turn the graphic into a WordPress theme.

Well I decided to check out WordPress again.  I was using Mephisto  but it is really difficult to deal with and as a project it seems to be in a comma.  I had problems with Mephisto’s xmlrpc support and I even went to the effort of diving in and fixing some of the issues but no one seemed to care.  The patch I sent in wasn’t applied because someone else was going to rewrite the xmlrpc support for the next version.  So instead of applying a working patch to the current development version which is the version many people are running they decided to do nothing.  Needless to say I was a little peeved since if I updated my Mephisto install I would have to reapply my patch.  The pace of development on Mephisto was extremely slow.  The last stable release won’t run on Rails 2.  Mephisto is really geared to be used in a multi author environment and I only need a good single author solution.

So I am trying WordPress again.  WordPress 2.5 has a revamped admin section that is very Web 2.0 in design and is much easier to navigate.  I am giving WordPress another chance to win me over.