How to Redesign a Blog

For several years, I ran (and, more often, neglected) a blog over on Google Blogger. I have no particular complaints about their service, but it simply wasn’t a great fit for me, so I switched over to a new setup. A couple of the software development blogs that I follow have gone into some detail on how they redesigned their own sites (examples are Troy Hunt and Dan Luu), and it’s made for some interesting reading, so here are my own notes on the process I used.

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Regex Cheat Sheet

Regexes (regular expressions) are an extremely useful tool, but I find myself getting tripped up by differences in their APIs and capabilities in different languages. Here’s a regex Rosetta Stone, covering how to use regexes in various programming language.

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Automated Image Editing for the Artistically Unskilled

GIMP is perhaps the poster child for bad open source usability. This may not be entirely fair; the UI is better than it used to be, and GIMP now has excellent docs, so a minute with Google will teach you how to do anything that the UI fails to make clear.

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Open Source License Compliance

Complying with license agreements for closed source software libraries is pretty straightforward. You pay your money, and sometimes it's a lot of money, and sometimes you have to go through the odious “talk with the salesperson before you even find out how much money it is.” Eventually, in spite of these obstacles, you get your requested number of licenses, and as long as you don't exceed that count, and as long as you don't do something stupid like post the licensed source code to your company web site, you're fine. The vendor doesn't usually care about how you attribute their work or whether you statically or dynamically link their code or how you patch it to meet your needs (if they provide source) or what other libraries you're using.

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Standard C++

I have vague recollections of trying to track down a copy of the C++ standard several years ago. I went to the ISO’s web site, went into sticker shock at the several hundred dollars they wanted for a CD or PDF, and soon forgot about it.

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