I’ve been quiet for a few weeks now, mostly due to the fact that its been my summer holiday and the weather has been absolutely perfect with around 30 degrees and sun, sun, sun! This week has started out rather wet however, so I figured I’d spend it finishing up some of my personal projects before returning to work next week.

So, if you’re reading this in a feed reader, then head over to the blog and check out its brand new design! It seems to work fine in FireFox 3 and IE7 - I’ve not tested it in IE6 though. But why would you be using that? :p

In addition to redesigning the site, I’ve finally left my custom blog engine behind and moved over to BlogEngine.NET. Hopefully there should be no disruption for my subscribers – the url to the feed stays the same, and I’ve successfully moved all my old blog posts (including comments) across. Should you find something that isn’t quite right however, then do let me know.

Anyway's, hope you’re all having a great summer (or winter, if you’re down under)!

Micro-blogging service Twitter seems to be all the rage these days, and I’ve finally begun using the account I created a while back. If you don’t know what Twitter is, then have a look at this short video:

What they don’t mention in the video however, is the @replies feature, which is an important part of Twitter:

“Twitter was conceived as a sort of “presence” service. I’m doing this. I’m watching that. I’m at home, work, I’m sleeping, I’m sick/tired/well/happy/bored/confused/apathetic. I don’t think that it’s difficult to argue, however, that Twitter became a lot more than that, and that the real attraction of Twitter is the conversation (or, at least, the pseudo-conversation).”

So anyways, if you’re on Twitter then look me up; my handle is fredrik_k :)

So there's this meme going around where you make a nice color-coded presentation of what you're interrested in (within the context of being a developer). Paul Stovell started it last week, and since then several bloggers I follow have been caught up in it, including Gøran Hansen and Jonas Follesø.

I started out with the original "I don't care", "non-core" and "core" groups that Paul originally used, but since I generally fint it hard to "not care" about anything related to developing, it was really difficult to find anything to write in the outer circle :p Thus, I decided to follow Mitch Denny's example and use 'negative', 'neutral' and 'positive' circles. As he says, "The core stuff is what you are most interested in, and which you interest is possibly growing. The middle is what is still interesting but your interest has stabilised, and the outer is the stuff that you are getting less and less interested in."

So without further ado, here's my current circle of interest:

I surprised myself a bit when thinking about where to put things - you may for example find it odd that a web developer like myself haven't been caught up in the Silverlight hype (yet!). And on that note, I think it'd be a fun twist to ask Silverlight and XNA guru Einar Ingebrigtsen to show us his circle of interest :)

I've spent most of the weekend working on a redesign of my blog, so if you're only reading my feed through an aggregator then go and have a look! I've been much more conscious about the html and css code this time around, pushing myself to refining and relearning the best practices. I spent a lot of time browsing 45 Excellent Blog Designs to get ideas for this refresh, and must say I'm fairly satisfied with the end result!

I've gone for a fresher, more modern look, where the front page is no longer a long never-ending list of posts, but has more of a newspaper style to it. Overall readability (especially on code snippets) should be better now too, with larger and more consistent typography. 

Although the focus this time around was mostly on layout, I've had time to improve some old and add a few new features aswell. Still, I've got some ideas for more features and improvements I'd like to add to my blog engine, so hopefully I'll get some time to work on that this autumn.

Another change I decided to do, is to move my blog back from the subdomain and to the root of my domain, which should hopefully clear up all the Ajax toolkit problems I've been having around here. You won't have to change your feed subscription however, as FeedBurner abstracts away the actual location anyways :)

Daniel Moth blogged about a site that tests your typing speed - give it a go, it only takes three minutes :)

I scored 97.4 words per minute, with an accuracy of 94.2% - but the test was a bit dodgy when the text began to scroll, and I had to stop typing to scroll it back into view, which threw me off a few times.

After deploying some changes to my blogging engine, I managed to mess up the carefully balanced deployment of ASP.NET Ajax that I have had to hack together on this domain (sub domains and remote hosting, argh!), which is causing some of my scripts to fail.

So until I can get it fixed the contact me page is not working, and there is no feedback given when a comment is posted on any of the posts..