John Dyer

Apparently, my comment on TechCrunch was interesting enough for them to send me a copy of Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, so I thought I'd take a break from code samples and give it a brief review.

Overview

Carr's is thesis is very interesting. In the early 20th century, electricity went from being produced in-house by each company that needed it to being mass produced and made available on a power grid which companies could tap into. This revolution made changes in every facet of life from business to education to medicine to the architecture of living spaces. In the 21st century, Carr argues that a similar revolution is happening with computing and information technology. More...

For some testing, I needed a simple page where I could test out a gravatar. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything on gravatar's site where you can see if your gravatar is working or just get the URL to the image. So I put together a super-simple page using this JavaScript MD5 hash function.

• Gravatar tester

I'm working on a new theme that is closer to a lot of WordPress looks out there.

Right now, I've going with a zero-image look to see what I could accomplish without using images for curves. So far it's looking pretty boxy, but the colors aren't too bad. I decided to use curvyCorners instead of images to round things out. Since this is primarly a blog about coding, not design, I think it's appropriate that the design doesn't have a lot of imagery, and that the site uses code to accomplish its look.

BlogEngine.NET makes skinning the site super easy since it's basically just a MasterPage and a CSS file. I also made a small change to the tag cloud and created an alternate version of the recent comments control so it just has the author and post title.