If you’re using weblogs internally in your company, and you’re willing to talk about it, can you send me a note?  Thanks!

In case anyone missed this from the NewsGator updates feed:

Through our arrangement with O’Reilly & Associates, we are pleased to bring you Chapter 2: Content Syndication Architecture, from the new book, Content Syndication with RSS, by Ben Hammersley.

From the chapter introduction:

In this chapter, we’ll look at how RSS feeds are structured: both the feed itself and the way RSS fits into the whole web publishing picture.

Read the full text online!

[NewsGator News and Updates]

Well this is pissing me off…newsgator.com has had some major issues since sometime last night:

Server Application Unavailable
The web application you are attempting to access on this web server is currently unavailable.  Please hit the “Refresh” button in your web browser to retry your request.

Administrator Note: An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the system event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur.

I tell you, I’ve been with my current hosting provider for some time, but ever since they were acquired by a certain other company, things have gone downhill in the reliability department. I’m not going to name them here (yet), as I’m hoping they get this fixed in a hurry and don’t want to piss them off. :-)

Anyone have recommendations for a high quality .NET hosting provider? I’ve heard good things about maximumasp.net, but I’m worried about their 2Mb/sec bandwidth throttle – we have times that go way over that. I’ve also heard good things about rackspace.com, but only on the Linux side. Anyone?

Update: it’s back up now, but I’d still like to hear some recommendations from you…

As many of you know from some previous posts, racing cars is my hobby. This last weekend, a new track (Arizona Motorsports Park) opened near Phoenix, so I went down for the inaugural event.

Friday was a test day, so everyone could learn the track. I like the track a lot – despite having no elevation changes (not a lot of hills out there, I guess), it’s a very technical track. The day was going quite well until just after lunch, when a car spun right in front of me, at just that distance where there’s pretty much nothing you can do. We hit nose-to-nose, and I ended up with a bent nose pan and a broken radiator. After miraculous repairs by my crew, I made it back out for the final session of the day. But all was not well…my lap times were 3 to 4 seconds slower than earlier, which let me tell you, is SO frustrating. Luckily, it ended up being a partially broken accelerator pedal, which wouldn’t allow the throttle to open completely. Much easier to fix than the loose nut behind the wheel! :-)

Saturday was the regional race, and I qualified 3rd of 18 cars. And I actually ended up winning the race – woo-hoo! It was my first win in the AZ region – there are a lot of great drivers down there, so I was pretty excited about it.

Sunday was the national race, and somehow all the stars lined up and I qualified on the pole. Out of 21 cars, I believe. It wasn’t meant to be, though…I overslowed a bit going into the first turn, and 3 cars got by on the short straightaway following it. To save you the painful play-by-play, I ended up finishing 5th. A bit disappointing after qualifying on the pole, but not too bad of a finish. And it was a great time!

This weekend was fun…I had been spending a lot of long days finishing NewsGator, and it was good to get back out and do the things that I like to do. Don’t get me wrong, I like writing software – I love my job – but it’s more a means to an end rather than the end itself. If Ferrari offered me even 10% of Michael Schumacher’s salary to drive for them, I’d go in a heartbeat! Even 1%. 0.5%. Ok, ok, I’d pay them. :-)

Wow…I found this post from Technorati while trolling for posts about NewsGator (which I do a couple of times a week). Martin Sutherland writes this about NewsGator:

Even if you don’t use Outlook, it might even be enough to make you switch. (I had been using Mozilla mail until January, and NewsGator was good enough to make me suffer through the hell of converting my email from Mozilla to Outlook so I could use it. Now that’s impressive.)

Now, I can’t help but re-publish a quote like that. :-) But right before that, he says:

But I’m not using it any more.

Basically, he said he’s spending way too much time reading blogs, and not enough time on everything else. It’s kind of funny, because I’ve gotten a number of comments via email from people saying the only thing they don’t like about NewsGator is that it makes it too easy to read lots of news sources, so they read more of them (good) and spend more time with them (not so good).

I’ve noticed this a bit myself; since I’ve used an aggregator that works the way I do, I read more weblogs and other news sources. And as weblogs gain in popularity, I’ll find more that I want to read. At some point, I’ll have to start cutting some of them out – there’s only so many hours in the day, after all. But that day will be an interesting one – if most interesting content is available via a syndicated feed, and everyone has an aggregator…

Well, this flies in the face of what Joel has been saying, but I have added a RSS feed for the NewsGator forums. The feed contains the 20 most recent posts.

I’m not sure this would work well for extremely high-traffic forums, but for the current volume in the NewsGator forums, I think it works pretty well.  At very least it’s handy for me, so I can easily be notified when there’s a new post there.

The forums are using the ASP.NET forums code; if anyone else is using this code, and wants to generate a RSS feed from them, let me know and I’ll be happy to send you the code.

Well, my 6-week (!) trial of the most excellent Virtual PC from Connectix has finally run out. This product has been instrumental in my everyday life since I first tried it, mostly for testing NewsGator on multiple OS’s, configurations, and Outlook versions. I’ve got 5 or 6 images that I use regularly, and 5 or 6 more that I test on before shipping a release.

It’s $229 to purchase, which I don’t have a problem with. My question is, is there anything cool in VMWare that I’m missing? VPC seems to be working fine, albeit hanging my machine every now and then. I could try out VMWare, but it’s going to be a huge investment in time to build the images I need. So basically, VMWare is going to have to do something much better or faster than VPC for it to be worth it to spend the time to switch.

What kills me is this thing is probably going to ship in MSDN in a few months, so I will have paid for it twice. But on the other hand, I can’t wait a couple of months. Heh.

Comments, anyone? Is VMWare cool enough to switch?