It seems one of the biggest voids in Windows Live Writer has finally been filled - Search & Replace has arrived! Waldek Mastykarz recently left me a comment to let me know that he was tired of waiting for the WLW team to add Search & Replace, so he took it upon himself to build a Search & Replace plugin, complete with... Regular Expressions! Sometimes I just miss the Replace functionality which in my opinion is a must-have of each content editor - even the Notepad proves it. If I’m not wrong the Live Writer...

Windows Live Writer has been out of beta for a while now with all of the normal buzz and blogging that we’ve come to expect from the community of users following this sweet little application. However, I’ve not seen read anything about one of nicest new features - the markup generated by WLW is now XHTML compliant! Enabling XHTML compliance As far as I can tell, WLW won’t just magically start building XHTML markup... you need to tell it to do so. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to do. Open the Weblog Settings dialog via Weblog -> Edit...

After reading Jeff's post about advertising on your blog and why it's so deliciously evil I thought I'd look into a few of the ad services he mentioned. Hey, I'll take a few extra bucks if you want to shill your stuff on my blog... and then I'll knock your product anyhow. I'm a huge fan of spite! But I digress. I was checking out some of Text Link Ads' free tools and I came across the Blog Juice Calculator. As best I can tell this is nothing more than a tool, and I use that term loosely, to judge the...

A recent post by security analyst David Kierznowske reports that 49 out of 50 WordPress blogs that he checked out were running an exploitable version of the WordPress blogging engine. According to the post, David looked at blogs running on versions as far back as WordPress v1.2 (with v2.2 being the most recent release, as of this writing). So does this mean that WordPress is buggy software that is to be avoided? No, not at all. It just means that those users need to do a better job of dealing with the bugs. The sky is blue and software has bugs...

As I usually do prior to a new release, I am going to eat my own dog food - but don't worry, it's not that tainted pet food that's all the rage right now. I just finished upgrading this blog to Subtext v1.9.5 (pre-release). So please click around and look for any odd behavior. A few changes In the comments section of each post you'll notice that I now have Identicons enabled. This release also brings the ability to distinguish between an regular commenter and the blog author. So any comments that I've left should look a little different than the typical comment....

In his Working for The Man piece Jeremy Allison lays out six lessons he's learned over the course of his career in software; six lessons he'd like to go back and tell himself at the beginning of his career. Whether you're a code-slinger just starting out or a seasoned veteran with wisdom and design patterns coming out your ears, this is a great read. So go read it now... I'll wait. This is me, waiting... See I told it was good, didn't I? Even though I've only been in the software business for half a decade I've already learned many of...