Ben Griswold on September 30th, 2006

Yesterday, I felt dumb. I tried using trackbacks for the first time and it took me way too long to figure them out. Stupid! Stupid. Stupid? Most likely, but maybe not. First. What is a trackback? Per Wikipedia: TrackBack is a mechanism for communication between blogs: if a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, [...]

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Ben Griswold on September 28th, 2006

Do you need to document your SQL Server database? Data Dictionary Creator from Jon Galloway may be able to help you out with this tedious task. I had the app downloaded and working in about 15 minutes. Quick Start: 1. Download the application and run the DataDictionaryCreator executable. 2. Point to the database of your [...]

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Ben Griswold on September 28th, 2006

UPDATE: I disabled threaded comments on 3/17/2009 when I updated my theme.  I can still recommend the nest comments plugin (below) as I used it for years, but I no longer have anything to show for it.  To be honest, I am very surprised that threaded (or nested) comments don’t come out-of-the-box with a fresh [...]

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Ben Griswold on September 26th, 2006

Earlier this month, I answered the question, What is Social Bookmarking? At the time, JohnnyCoder.com provided hand-coded links to only two sites: Del.icio.us and Digg. Since then, I discovered Cal Evan’s WP-Notable Plugin and, as you can see, the number of links to social bookmarking and networking sites has increase a bit. WP-Notable is configurable [...]

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Ben Griswold on September 25th, 2006

I know what you are thinking. Why would any self-respecting blogger want to restrict access to site? Well, as it works out, there are two logical, completely reasonable, ummm, reasons. You are a private blogger writing about sensitive topics which may cause problems in your professional and/or personal life. In this case, it would make [...]

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Ben Griswold on September 21st, 2006

A handful of the 40 coders in my development group are recent college graduates. They have less than two years of professional coding experience under their belts and for this reason alone I consider them juniors. They are all very talented and some day they are going to be absolutely amazing at what they do, [...]

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Ben Griswold on September 20th, 2006

Unquestionably, effective communication is a key ingredient to delivering a successful project. I could rant on and on about avoidable day-to-day issues which exist only because of miscommunication, under-communication or (gasp!) over-communication, but I will save this for another day. Instead, today’s lesson hones in on the primary vehicle for poor communication — email. I [...]

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Ben Griswold on September 18th, 2006

If you are familiar with financial securities, you know they are uniquely identified by their Ticker (i.e. MSFT) and/or their CUSIP. You probably also know that there are dozens of vendors which provide financial data. Let’s say you needed to provide a security’s price from the most reliable source using the most reliable identifier. How [...]

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