Blame Facebook

It's a lame excuse really, but I have been spending a ridiculous amount of time on Facebook lately - so I have been really struggling to find time to post stuff to this blog. I don't really have anything new to say about Facebook that hasn't been said by others who are much more articulate that me. Suffice to say that I have been having lots of fun connecting with friends that I haven't been in touch with for a number of years. Now that the initial rush of excitement is over I am hoping that I will have more time to write here.

Trying Windows Live Writer with Blogger

It didn't take long for me to get annoyed with the web-based authoring provided by Blogger (more on that in a future post). I looked around a bit for a simple desktop blogging application. Many of the more polished looking apps that can work with Blogger are not free, so my choice was limited. It's not that I am (overly) cheap, it's just that I am not a professional blogger so it doesn't really make sense for me to pay money to write my posts.

Since my primary home computer is a Windows PC (please no religious flame wars over that), I decided to give Windows Live Writer a try. The installation was quick and painless: I just needed to enter my blog URL and login information along the way. If you see this post, then I guess things went smoothly.

Blogger (Beta) and FeedBurner

So since I have a blog now, I thought that it would be a good idea to register the blog feed with FeedBurner. It's a pretty simple process - and the good folks over at FeedBurner even have some Blogger-specific instructions. Unfortunately, the instructions aren't as simple as they can be when it comes to the part entitled "Promoting your FeedBurner feed on your Blogger site" - which I only figured out after wrangling with Blogger's HTML template for a while.

You see, the instructions from FeedBurner tell you to "edit your blog's HTML template directly" in order to provide an easy way for people to subscribe to your feed. Unfortunately, this is a bit misleading. Maybe that is the way that you had to do it with previous versions of Blogger, but now you can just use the Page Elements feature instead:

1. go to your blog's Template tab
2. select the "Page Elements" section
3. select the "Add a page element" link (I created one in the blog sidebar),
4. give the section a Title, then paste the FeedBurner HTML snippet directly into the Content section.
   
5. Done!

That's progress.

Hopefully Late *is* Better than Never.

I have been reading and participating in blogs for a few years now, but seemed to never bring myself to actually start one of my own... so here I am, late to the party.

I guess a short introduction would be worthwhile. My name is Jeff Smith and I am a software developer in the Greater Vancouver area of British Columbia, Canada. I expect the content of this blog to run the gamut of topics including hockey, software, technology and miscellaneous personal ramblings.

I apologize in advance since the quality of the posting is going to be pretty erratic until I start to get the hang of it, so bear with me (notice how I am writing this as if someone is actually reading, I never really considered myself to be such an optimist!).

Now that the proverbial ice is broken, let's get going. It feels good to finally join the conversation.