Minor Changes to Blog

I made some changes to this blog over the last few days that I thought I should just make you aware of in case they cause problems.

Firstly, I added "Continue reading this post here" links to each non-trivial post on the home page. I did this to make it more likely that the search engines would index the actual post pages (which wouldn't simply be considered to be duplicates of the home page) and to reduce the overall size of the home page.

Secondly, I re-directed the Atom and RSS feeds through FeedBurner so I can assess how many subscribers the blog has (Blogger seems to provide no intrinsic support for this).

Finally, I abandoned my use of Word 2007 as my Blogger client as was unhappy with the HTML it was producing. I've re-written the HTML for all the previous posts (whilst, hopefully, not changing any of the actual content) and will now seek out an alternate client.

I don't suppose these changes will cause anyone any problems. But I thought I should mention it anyway.

Welcome

Conventional wisdom suggests that the first post of any new blog (such as this one) should be in the form of an introduction. I'm sure you don't really care if I'm married (I am) or if I own a cat (I don't) so I'll dispense with an introduction of myself and plough on with an introduction of the blog itself. (If you really want to know something about me, you can view my profile on LinkedIn.)

There are several reasons why I've never blogged before. The primary reason is that I don't really have as much free time as many bloggers seem to have, so I can't really see myself keeping up the steady flow of posts which might be expected. Also, as my knowledge-base is quite varied I've always found it difficult to target the blog at any specific topic - I might have something worth saying on ASP.NET one minute and BizTalk Server the next. There are, however, several occasions where I've discovered some non-obvious piece of information and have felt the desire to share it with the world - but have not had a medium by which to do that. Another such occasion arose recently so I decided to take the plunge and set-up a blog.

By way of a theme, I realised that many of the topics which I'd like to discuss are about the internal mechanics of some piece of software or other: the sort of thing that isn't fully documented (if it's documented at all) and which can only be discovered by trial and error or (preferably) by firing up Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector. I've therefore decided to name the blog Under the Covers.

I've got topics lined-up on the unusual behaviour of the Data property of BizTalk's IBaseMessagePart class, a bug in System.Data.DataSet.WriteXml and how to 'undrop' a table in SQL Server 2005.