I was lucky enough to be asked by Richard McManus of Read/WriteWeb to write up a review of Goowy as a guest post for his blog.

Richard seems very interested in Flash and how it can advance the web. Hopefully he’ll invite me back to write more on the Flash Platform because I think his blog is a great resource for all things Web 2.0 and it would be good exposure for the cool things people in our community are doing with Flash. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you think about my review. If you like it, let Richard know.

I have been in the process of checking out News Alloy and when I subscribed to my feed, I noticed that it looked horrible. The HTML was being stripped out and it just looked like a big glob of text.

I have discovered that it’s because I’m not running the newest version of BlogCFC. I’ll be fixing that tonight so anyone who’s using a newsreader to subscribe to the feed, hopefully it’ll look the way its supposed to now.

I finally bit the bullet and created a FeedBurner account to track my RSS feeds. There are two parts to this. First, I’ve tried to specialize my feeds. If you’re interested in everything I blog about, you can subscribe to the full feed, http://feeds.feedburner.com/ryanstewart. If you’re just interested in the technology, which is what is aggregated on MXNA and consists of most of what I talk about, you can subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/digitalbackcountry. If you’re interested in only the outdoor posts, subscribe to the Outdoors category. Finally, if you just want the personal posts (few and far between), subscribe to the Personal category.

Hopefully this will allow people to only subscribe to what they want to. This will always be primarily a technology blog, but with the move to Seattle I’m planning on doing a lot of blogging about my hiking, backpacking and mountaineering trips. I don’t want those to clutter the feeds of people who just want the technology stuff.

I just finished upgrading to BlogCFC 4.0 which includes trackbacks!

I used WinMerge, which I found out about from Rob Brooks-Bilson and it was a huge help during the upgrade process.

This is a great, great BlogCFC release, and I can’t wait to see what Ray has in mind next.

Note: So after experimenting with it a little bit, I really like all the new features. Shout out to Rob (at least it looks like Rob put it in) for the website link on the comments. That’s something I have wanted to take the time to add for a while.

This release is so good, I may even be able to convince Terry to switch.

After taking a look at Jakob Nielsen’s Weblog Usability: Top Ten Design Mistakes I decided to make a few changes to the blog.

First, the links at the top now actually do something. Right now they’re just text, but I’m planning on changing them to sIFR in the near future.

Second, I’ve added a picture to the left bar. It seems a little strange to have it there, and there aren’t many other weblogs with pictures like that, so I may take it away or move it to the bottom, but for now there it is.

Lastly, I’m going to start making use of the “titles” attribute for my links, so that if you hover over the link, you can see a little bit more information about it before you click.

I think I follow most of his other rules.

Separately, I’ve added two more photos to the site. One is from a trip a while ago to Mount Rainier and the other is from our recent trip to Kauai.

I had hoped to get some of the links that you see below the picture working over the weekend but between a project at work and football, my weekend was taken away. I’m planning to use sIFR so that I can make use of the Microsoft fonts in an accessible way, but with deadlines coming up, my free time seems to be non-existant.

Luckily, there’s always time for alternative happy hour.

I moved into the second phase of the redesign by adding new stylesheets which all contain different pictures. So if you’re visiting you should be able to refresh the page and see a new picture. I haven’t gotten around to changing the colors of each stylesheet, but hopefully I’ll get around to that tomorrow. All of the pictures were taken by either myself or Ciara.

I’m working with a new site design, so please be patient while I work the bugs out.

I’m switching because I want the design to be a bit cleaner, but also because I registered http://www.ryanstewart.net today and I’m thinking about using that as the main site address and have digitalbackcountry.com just be a pointer.

I’ll experiment with things and see what I feel like. Hopefully most of you are using RSS feeds anyway, so you won’t even see the changes.

I saw this on Slashdot, so probably everyone has read it, but ADTmag released their 2005 Salary survey and it looks like it’s a good time to be in IT. It also looks like being a web developer is a plus.

I like the ADT survey because it breaks it down into more specific categories and you can see results by experience, operating systems and programming languages. Helpful info.