Thursday, February 26, 2009

Lack of Blog Posts from the VFP community

It seems like most of the people whose VFP blogs I was following have drastically reduced their posting frequency.  About the only frequent posts that come in to Google Reader are SwFox announcements and posts from Rick Strahl and Andy Kramek.  It seems to me that people seem hesitant to post something unless its a grand and complete thought.  Rick and Andy's posts are absolutely phenomenal and I hope they don't ever change but I think they scare others away to say if you don't have a white-paper quality post - don't post it.  I know I've felt that way in the past where even though I may have a lot of interesting little topics, taking the time to polish them into a white-paper quality blog post scared me away.  

With that being said, I'm going to try to keep the frequency of my posts up and to try to keep the content lightweight where it doesn't take me more than a little bit to share either something I learned, something cool I found or something that I had forgotten about.  Hopefully the readers of this blog will benefit from that.  I'm willing to bet that the others in the community have gone through the same process where soon after they launch a blog they have all sorts of great ideas and then eventually the interest wanes and the blog goes without a post for months on end.  

I'm also curious as to the effect of Twitter on this process.  After being part of twitterville for the last few days, I'm seeing loads of traffic from the people I know in the VFP community including several of whom I used to really enjoy reading their blogs.  Since Twitter is pretty painless and you only have 140 characters to post with, it lends itself to ease of use and the social aspect of it is kind of addictive.  Are we all spending our time on Twitter instead of blogging?  Hard to say for sure.  Anyways, I've got a few ideas I'm working on that hopefully you will like. Stay tuned for the next post.  

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Welcome to Twitterville

Well I finally took the leap.  After attending the last foxpro conference, it seemed like I was one of the few in the room that wasn't twittering non-stop during every presentation.  So far it seems OK.  It definitely has a little bit of a distraction quality to it but it is nice to be able to interact more often with the friends in the community that you only saw once or twice a year at a conference.  So far I'd say that about 90% of my tweets were more social in nature but I'm hopefull to add a little bit more technical stuff to what I'm tweeting about.  I've used the web interface through chrome for most of my initial posts but now I've switched to using TweetDeck which definitely gives a richer user interface.  Anyways, that's about it for this post.  I'm going to do my best to keep my blog posts coming on a regular basis.  Wish me luck. 

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Hello World!

This is my first attempt at starting a new blog.  Hopefully from this simple beginning, I can get a good feel for the flexibility and ease of using the Google blogger software to build and maintain a blog.  Hopefully, this will be pretty easy!

Here is a sample image of the intro screen from Dars:


Checkout www.matriximaging.com for more information.  For our video demonstration, click here.


Here is an example of embedding a short video clip in the blog: