I typically don’t search Technorati for incoming links because a significant number of the links to my blog come from my inclusion on dasBlog’s default blogroll. For example, “Dutch Railways Suck” doesn’t appear to have anything to do with architecture, development or hockey, but they still link to me. However, in checking out Technorati today, I discovered several blogs were linking to me that were out of the ordinary to say the least. Turns out that this picture I took on my trip to Australia two years ago is the number one result when searching both Windows Live Image Search and Google Image Search.

I’m guessing that’s why this picture shows up on the blog of woman trying to reverse the trends of feminism, a guy who despises Sydney, a couple of french blogs that I can’t read and two german blogs – one I can’t read and one that I can.

I finally got around to signing up for a FeedBurner feed for DevHawk today. It’s available here. I’ve updated my site template, but existing readers are still getting the old feed. Scott has built support for FeedBurner into dasBlog, but it isn’t released yet. Feel free to switch over on your own if you want, but I’ll get the automatic redirection working soon enough.

Update: Apparently I didn’t look hard enough. FeedBurner support made it into the currently shipping version of dasBlog, so I’ve turned it on. Thanks to Tomas Restrepo for the heads up.

For those of you reading this via the syndication feed, I rolled out a new site design last night. I figured that after three years it was high time for a new site design. Not being much of a designer, I started with the Rounded design template from the ASP.NET Design Template Gallery. It’s much cleaner and more readable than my old deisgn, as I’ve removed all my blogrolls and fixed the width for 1024×768 screens.

As part of the switch, I moved from using a table-based layout to a CSS-based layout. I even wrote custom dasBlog macros that render my naviagation menu and date archive as unordered lists. The default dasBlog macros for those are rendered using tables. (Note, I didn’t rewrite the category list, so I’m not completely table free). If there’s interest from the dasBlog community, I’ll post the code.

I gotta say, I’m not sure I see what the big deal about CSS over tables is. I mean, I’m as impressed as the next guy with CSS Zen Garden, but honestly I don’t get it. Maybe it’s because I’m a developer, not a designer at heart. But CSS seems like hard-coded voodoo to me. This site has a simple fixed-width two-column layout, but it took a great deal of experimentation to get the floats coded correctly to render in both IE and FireFox. In fact, there’s a small issue with the new deisgn in IE that I didn’t bother to fix. But if I had just used tables, it would have taken five minutes.

Please let me know what you think of the new design.

FYI, I sat down for an ARCast with Ron Jacobs last month to talk about Developer 2.0. It’s not he full presentation I did at the p&p summit, but it covers much of the same ground. Catch the show over on Channel 9.

I was just talking to Michael Arrington about some Web 2.0 stuff when I realized I’ve been blogging for three years now. I started blogging three years and two weeks ago. Doesn’t seem that long ago I was sitting in a Phoenix hotel room putting the finishing touches on the blog engine that powered the first version of DevHawk. (I moved over to DasBlog just under a year later.) But in reality, there’s been two kids, a new house, four roles, five managers and a move to campus since I launched my DevHawk Blog. Quite a ride!