It’s been quite a while since my last post. I must confess that I’ve neglected my blog a bit. I’ve been mainly occupied in two things: my new job at Microsoft and playing Playstation 3 (and some Xbox 360). As usual, I’ve also read several books, keep current on my favorite TV Series and watched a few movies, which I recently updated on my sidebar.

I was hoping to write this post under my new website design, but I haven’t made much progress with my WordPress theme. Things are looking better though, since I just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.5 (after having a few unpleasant surprises with WordPress 2.0.x). The upgrade went pretty smoothly, and the new features should help me write a couple of posts I’ve planned faster. My theme is now “widgetized” which should make the migration to the new design easier.

Regarding my job at Microsoft, it’s actually going pretty well. I still have a lot to learn, but it’s been a very interesting experience so far. Microsoft has a comprehensive training plan for new hires, which includes several online and classroom courses, such as MS101 and NEO –not the one from the Matrix–, but the New Employee Orientation. I also attended a Biztalk class in Washington DC (pictures in a future post), and an event for technical people held in Seattle called TechReady. I’m currently preparing myself to present a Biztalk certification exam.

I’ve also been playing several games on my PS3, such as Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Resistance: Fall of Man, Stardust HD and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Overall I am quite pleased with the console, although a bit disappointed after finding out that most games are not 1080p as Sony wants people to believe, but 720p, which is comparable to many Xbox 360 games. After upgrading my TV to a 40 inch Full HD LCD I’m quite pleased with my current setup.

That’s it for a brief update on my doings, I’ll start posting a bit more often from now on, and hope to finalize my new design sometime…

Being the administrator and active user of my highschool’s alumni website, masalumni.org I have noticed that the most active post in the forums is regarding book recommendations for the literature class. As anyone who has been paying attention to my sidebar knows, one of my hobbies is reading books (just finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ). Given this background, I decided to create a specific site to list all the books that have been mentioned in this forum (restricted registration required).

Here’s the link, for those of you who can wait to finish reading:
http://mas.gbtopia.com/books

Books site screenshot

I used the same WordPress plugin that powers my sidebar, called Amazon Media Manager. I had to make several changes to add support for ratings, comments and dynamically retrieving book descriptions. The result is an AJAX application that displays a list of books, allows users to rate them and add their own comments. Users can also filter the list to display only the recommendations made by a particular user. I had to brush up a bit on my PHP skill. It was rather easy, and was ready in about five days during my free time.

Update (2007-08-25): Now you can sort the books by different criteria. Added screenshot.

One thing I really like about WordPress is plugin support. With Pebble I had to write my own plugins, which was entertaining but time consuming. With WordPress I can just tweak existing plugins to do exactly what I want.

I’ve always wanted to keep track of all the movies I watch and books that I read, and now thanks to the AMM plugin I can do in an easy way. Plus, if you actually click and buy something by following my Amazon links, I will get a few cents (not that it has happened yet, you can still be the first!). I modified the plugin a bit by adding support for a status (using the label field), adding half star ratings, and setting up a couple of unused fields to allow for additional links. Finally, I made the date field editable so I can add entries with a date of my choice. I would also like an “end date” field, but that requires a new field in the database table.

I also incorporated into the sidebar my latest del.icio.us bookmarks, just to add some dynamic content to my blog to entertain my readership since I don’t post everyday.

Finally, I am using a heat map plugin to display a category cloud, or a bunch of tags with varying sizes.

P.S. If you’re reading this from the RSS feed you’re missing all of the sidebar fun. Come visit sometime!

Here’s the second part of my blogging history:

• Pebble 2.0M1 (March 2005). This version of Pebble requires a JSP 1.3 and Servlet 2.4 compliant application server. In order to upgrade, I sent a request to my host to move my account to a server with Resin 3.x. The move was done in a couple of days. The old version of Pebble didn’t work with Resin 3, and I didn’t bother to find out why. I started the migration to Pebble 2.0 right away, and the template was much better, now using a CSS layout. I also noticed that the templates had been simplified, although this wasn’t as good as it seemed cause further modification of the layout requires delving into files in the WEB-INF/jsp directory. After working on the template for about five days, it was ready, and I upgraded. Some bugs in the JSTL libraries of my host’s Resin installation prevented it from working right away. The stack trace was so large that the JSP support in my account was disabled. I also found a couple of major bugs in this release of Pebble: Edit and delete posts didn’t work, and the RSS feeds were not working. On the bright side, this version added support for tags, which I have found to be a good fit to my blogging style.
  Since my host practically banned Pebble from my site (although there might still be hope), and based on the bugs I found I started looking for alternatives.
• WordPress 2.0.2 (later March 2005). My host has three supported blogs installed via the Fantastico icon in cpanel: Nucleus, pMachine (Free) and WordPress. My brother has been working with Nucleus and had to modify some source files in order to get the look that he was after. I decided to try out WordPress, and even though I don’t like PHP too much I liked the templates and the great number of plugins available. I created a new template based on the default and moved things around a bit to match my site’s style. The only thing that I’m lacking is the navigation links in my top bar, since I have yet to investigate if it can be incorporated easily into that spot. Overall I’m liking WordPress although I’ve found it a bit slow.

That’s the end to my blogging history. You will notice a trend in my blogging attempts, I usually get as far as setting up the blog and customizing it to the look & feel of my site, but I do not add many entries. I’ll try to post more often from now on. If you are reading, you can encourage my efforts by commenting.