Apparently the email service tied to this blog has been down for quite a long time and I had no idea.  If you've sent me an email recently, please re-send using the Contact Me link above.  Sorry!

If you're reading this, it means I haven't totally boned the conversion over to BlogEngine from CommunityServer.  It's been a long time coming, but I finally had the time to convert everything to the new system and put it live today.

I would appreciate any and all feedback, especially for broken links or things that just aren't working the way they should be.  I'll be tweaking things a bit more, but it's now live!

The one thing you'll find missing is the Forums section from the old site.  It didn't get much use and I figured it was time to let it go.  I don't plan to have a replacement at the moment.

Enjoy the new site!

After finally finding a Community Server 2008.5 SP1 compatible theme I liked, I was able to upgrade my site to the latest Community Server version.  This theme is provided by Andrew Belon, who has several fantastic CS themes available on his site.  I’ve tweaked his basic Bliss theme (which he uses as his main theme) to my liking.

I’m a big fan of the new colors and layout, and I hope those reading this are as well.  I’ll continue to tweak over the coming days to make things a bit cleaner.

If you have any comments on the new site or you see anything out of place, please contact me and let me know…thanks!

It’s time to announce the winner of my contest to win a copy of our Coding4Fun book!  15 people entered the contest via my forum.  I assigned each of them a 0-based index in the order in which they submitted their entry.  The final list was:

• leif902 = 0
• jcauble = 1
• krakerjak = 2
• RoryBecker = 3
• amrkamel = 4
• anonymous = 5
• Arrowofdarkness = 6
• qiuliocc = 7
• hanan = 8
• Amira = 9
• helpware = 10
• michaelb = 11
• FunnyX = 12
• John Bisschop = 13
• juanformoso = 14
• bringo = 15

Now, I did say you had to sign up using a valid user account, but the anonymous person linked to their blog which had contact info, so I decided to allow their entry in the mix….

To pick the winner, I wrote up a single line snippet in the ever-popular Snippet Compiler, pressed F5, and the result was…

That’s number 11, which indexes to michaelb and his winning post!  Thanks to everyone that entered for their support and kind words!

I've done the unthinkable and have decided to try out Twitter.  You can "follow" me at http://www.twitter.com/BrianPeek .  Let the grand experiment begin...

After a moderate amount of pain, I have finally updated the site to Community Server 2007.1.  I think everything is working.  I'm likely wrong.  Therefore if anyone sees anything that is not working, broken layouts, broken links, etc. PLEASE contact me and let me know so that I may correct it.

One noteworthy item:  The new official URL for the blog is www.brianpeek.com/blog/ .  The main site will 301 redirect you here.  The old /blogs address should also 301 you here as well.  If you're seeing any weirdness there, again, please contact me.

Thanks!

If you visit my site, you're likely here because of an article I wrote on Microsoft's Coding4Fun site.  Or perhaps someone doesn't like you and punished you with a link to my blog.  Assuming the former, I am continuing to write articles on topics that are fun and/or interesting for me, but I wonder what the readers find fun and/or interesting.  So, with that in mind, do you have ideas for a future article?

If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear about them!  Please feel free to leave ideas as a comment on this article, a post in this general forum thread (easier for discussion), or contact me directly.  Coding4Fun is a Microsoft site that is geared toward development in .NET using the free Visual Studio Express products, so please keep that in mind when offering suggestions.

I look forward to hearing what you readers would like to learn about.

Thanks!

I've decided to try using Feedburner to handle the RSS goodness for this site.  While any existing links to the old RSS URL should 301 to the new address, you may wish to configure the new feed manually:  http://feeds.feedburner.com/BrianPeek .  Thanks!

I have decided to try a grand experiment.  I have turned on anonymous posting in the forums on this site.  It seems many aren't wild about creating an account to post for some reason, so let's see how this turns out.  SPAM filters and flood checks are enabled, so hopefully that will keep the bad people out.  If it turns into a "free cell phone" and "cheap v1agra" flood-fest, I'll turn it back off very quickly.

Anyway, feel free to try it out.  it's a much easier way to have an interactive discussion instead of blog comments...in my opinion at least.

I have been accepted as a new blogger by the good people over at CodeBetter.com.  If you've never been there, you're missing out on some great technical content.

My plan is to cross-post my technical content from this site to my new CodeBetter.com blog to reach a much wider and varied audience.  All non-professional/non-technical will remain here only.

This blog isn't going anywhere and will be the superset of all content between the sites.  The CodeBetter.com blog will be the subset that is technical.  You choose where and what you'd like to read.

Enjoy, and thanks to John Papa and the folks at CodeBetter!

Well, if you're reading this, it means that my upgrade to CS2.1 didn't go as horrifically bad as I had anticipated.  That said, if anyone notices any anomalies with the site (a shift+refresh should fix most of the graphical issues (I hope)), please contact me and let me know!  Comments on the new skin welcome as well.  Thanks go to my buddy Joey for the new graphics.  Check out his site for some excellent photography.