As a professional technologist, I spend more time than the average person working with new technologies.  As a passionate technologist, I spend more personal time than the average technologist learning about new technologies.

One of the podcasts I listen to is Scott Hanselman’s “HanselMinutes“.  One fo the episodes I was recently listening to had a discussion between Scott, the host, and Rod Conery, the guest host, about Domain Driven Design (DDD).  Apparently, Rod does not know DDD, and is doing research in order to learn it.  In this podcast, both guests describe their openness to learning.  What I mean by that is that they are very open with the public, via their blogs and/or other mediums, to what they don’t know.  More importantly, they are very open about the way they go about learning new things and invite others to join them in their learning process so more can benefit from their experiences.  This was very inspiring to me.

I have had a great time blogging this year.  It started out this time last year as a New Year’s resolution.  I had started blogs several times in the past, only to have them fizzle and die.  I think I have been successful in my resolution as it is the end of the year and I am still blogging.  There were a few rough spots during the summer, but I bounced back and am now stronger than ever.

Now I am turning the corner.  I have decided to take on three blogs next year.  I will continue josephdecarlo.com with similar content, but will add two new blogs: one I will be launching today and one that I will save to talk about in a later post.  The new blog I will be launching today is my vision of open learning that Scott and Rod practice.

This will be a very technical blog.  On this blog, my technology articles are about technology subjects, but are not, themselves, technical in nature.  My new blog, located at http://www.technicalmatriculate.com will be completely technical in subjects and content.

My first topic I will be learning and, thus, covering with a series of posts, will be Microsoft’s Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).  This is a topic that I have needed to wrap my head around for a long time, but have never made the time for it.

Hopefully, contrary to the title of this article, my new blog will not feather my reader base, but provide more content rather than act as a substitution for this site.  So techheads, please join me, on my new site (Technical Matriculate), as I learn about WF.  And to everyone, techheads and otherwise normal people alike, please continue to visit this site.  I will continue to post new articles here regularly.

thanks for your support.

Joe.

I have had comments turned off on my blog since I lost the history of my comments during the move from wordpress.com to josephdecarlo.com.  I have had several people complain to me about it. 

I recently started blogging again and to mark the occasion, I gave my site a facelift.  In doing this, I turned comments back on.  Since then, I have had a consistent number of hits per day and ZERO comments.  I would normally assume that the articles that I have been posting are not comment worthy, however, I have been given responses to posts via email and twitter instead of comments.

It is satisfying knowing that my blog is read by forty to fifty people a day, however, I would be happy hearing from some of you.

So here is my plea:  If you read an article and like it, don’t like it, or just have something to say…comment on it.

At the beginning of this year, I made a resolution to blog regularly.  During that time, I have being discovering my public image.

Getting started, I really liked the way that Maigh’s Blog looks, so I decided to use Wordpress for my blog.  I originally started off with a Wordpress.com subdomain, but that was very short lived.  I am too much of a gadgeteer to withstand the inability to customize my blog.

Now I am self-hosting Wordpress and that has suited me for the last month or so, but I am in need of something richer.

Since I am a .Net developer by trade and know very little about PHP, I get frustrated with the things that I am unable to do with my blog…albeit from lack of trying, not from the shortcomings of PHP.

If you have been paying attention, my blog was down for the last 3 days.  I managed to completely botch my environment in way that caused me to have to completely rebuild it.  The entire experience made me realize that I do not want to be hosted with Wordpress or with anything else out there.  What I really want is a custom built site that I can freely update.

Microsoft just released Silverlight 2.0 to beta.  Though my experience with XAML must be measured in grams, it is a technology that greatly interests me. 

Now that I have remedied my Wordpress problems, I will be dedicating some evenings to creating my own blog hosting software using Silverlight 2.0.

During this development process, I will keep you posted on my progress and, hopefully, will be able to switch you to my new site in a few months.

This should be fun and will allow me to publish what I am learning about Silverlight.

And there you have it.

Joe.