Through the Interface

It’s All Just Ones and Zeros: new Autodesk Vault developer blog

I’d like to extend a warm welcome to the Autodesk developer blogosphere to Doug Redmond, who has recently started a blog focused on programming and administering Autodesk Vault, It’s All Just Ones and Zeros.

Doug is a long-time contributor to Autodesk’s development community, whether helping my team deal with complex API issues or presenting the Vault API at ADN events and at AU, he has a boundless passion for helping people customizing and developing with Autodesk Vault.

If you’re interested in working deeply with Vault technology – or are already doing so – then I’m sure that Doug’s blog will prove an invaluable resource for you.

Autodesk Search Beta

As Jeremy Tammik reported a few weeks ago, Autodesk Search Beta is now available.

Here are the results of my quick “vanity search” on this site… this isn’t really egosurfing in its purist sense (although I admit I do Google my name pretty regularly – just to see who’s quoting my blog :-), it’s more about making sure that this blog is being indexed. Honest.

Sure enough, a number of posts on this site came up in the results, which is encouraging.

On a somewhat related note, I’ve been waiting for some time for our blogs to be indexed and available “in-product”, such as via AutoCAD’s built-in search feature.

Interestingly, it does appear that this blog has now been indexed via the in-product search, as I see the most recent post in the list. That’s cool.

I’m not sure why it says “Did you mean MEAN?” when provided my name, though. I’ve been trying much harder, lately! ;-)

ShareThis button added to Through the Interface

By popular request (well, in honesty I received one request via Twitter from @MattAnderson, but it seemed like such a good idea :-) I have added a ShareThis button to this blog’s right-sash navigation.

 

Clicking this should now allow you to share the current page (whether the site itself or an individual post – whichever is loaded in the browser) via a social networking/bookmarking site or with an email/SMS/AIM recipient.

I have to admit to not being up-to-speed with the latest & greatest ways people share information on the web, so I’ve just accepted the default options (which will hopefully change as the ShareThis team adjusts to people’s whims :-).

There are four pages of sites available – most of which I hadn’t even heard mention – so I dare say this will address most sharing needs.

Thanks for the great suggestion, Matt! :-)

Happy birthday to me… happy birthday to me…

Well, happy birthday to “Through the Interface”, anyway. :-)

3 years, 394 posts and 2,559 comments later, TTIF is still going strong. In fact, it’s now the 2nd most visited Autodesk blog, after Shaan’s (some of our blogs with shorter posts publish their full content via RSS, so this doesn’t necessarily completely reflect the relative readership, but hey).

Here’s a graph of the page hits over the last three years… I think the number on the Y-axis reflects the total page hits in a monthly window (at least that’s what seems to make sense). [I’m not too worried about the way the graph tails off to the right – that just seems to be the way our analysis tool works.]

I’ve personally gained a great deal from my blogging experience over the last three years – your questions and the need to post regularly have driven my personal learning and have led me to having a lot of fun. Long may it continue! :-)

Thanks for all your support, keep your ideas and suggestions flowing, and please keep on helping us to make our products the best development platforms we can.

AutoCAD Exchange, new blogs, webcast recordings posted

This post is a miscellaneous update on things I’ve put off announcing because of all the fun I’ve been having with AutoCAD 2010’s Overrule API.

First up is the AutoCAD Exchange, a new site devoted to people working with, you guessed it, AutoCAD. It’s stocked with lots of useful and fun content, as well as providing social networking capabilities (be sure to add me as a contact via the Networking area of the site).

Next is Without a Net, a blog hosted by an old friend of mine, Tom Stoeckel, along with esteemed colleagues Tom Bradley and Dan Scales. They will be posting regular, support-related content regarding AutoCAD to this very useful site.

And last but not least (on the site round-up section of this post) is What a Mesh, a blog hosted by Guillermo Melantoni, the AutoCAD Product Manager responsible for driving forward the 3D capabilities of AutoCAD. And he’s managing to post in both English and Spanish.

[A side note: I very much like the name of this blog, but being an erstwhile Laurel and Hardy fan I would probably have chosen “Another Fine Mesh”, instead. :-)]

Welcome to the blogosphere, Tom, Tom, Dan & Guillermo!

And finally, I just wanted to remind people about the free webcasts and their recordings, which are available via http://www.autodesk.com/apitraining, from the schedule page.

Some items to point out:

• You can now download the recording of Wayne Brill’s recent webcast, AutoCAD 2010 API for CUIX
• The recording of last week’s online Maya API training will hopefully be posted soon, as will the recordings of the equivalent MotionBuilder and 3ds Max trainings, once completed
• Another AutoCAD 2010 API webcast is scheduled for June 2, 2009 - “AutoCAD: Using Windows Presentation Foundation in your Applications”

Through the Interface moving from TypePad to Twitter

As of tomorrow, I will be transitioning away from posting to this site via TypePad in favour of micro-blogging via the increasingly-popular Twitter service. If you would like to follow me on Twitter, you can do so via http://twitter.com/keanw.

Any lengthy monologues (and yes, I know I’m prone to these, from time to time :-) will either be condensed down to 140 characters or serialized over multiple tweets. The same holds for code samples: I expect this to force me to be more disciplined about keeping my code succinct (although on the downside I plan on completely eradicating comments and error-checking from my code).

In case you’re interested by the motivation behind this shift, I was inspired by this recently-announced move by The Guardian newspaper.

Happy April Fools’ Day! :-)

Creating your own custom RSS feeds with Yahoo! Pipes

Some of you might consider this to be slightly off topic (unless you make some bizarre connection with the fact that Carol Bartz is now CEO of Yahoo! :-). Actually there is a more direct connection, as the technology I'm introducing in this post - and have just had lots of fun playing around with - has some really interesting capabilities for people who would like to filter and customize the various RSS feeds to which they subscribe.

Firstly I'd like to thank my friend and colleague Shaan Hurley for telling me about Yahoo! Pipes. This technology - which is currently in beta - allows you to bring in, manipulate and aggregate existing RSS feeds, as well as providing the capability for you to create your own feeds from all sorts of web-based content. Very interesting stuff.

Shaan's email came at just the right time for me, as I was struggling to aggregate our existing developer blogs (Through the Interface, The Building Coder and Mod the Machine) into a single feed for my team's SharePoint site (yes, believe it or not one of the things I do for fun is to work on my team's internal SharePoint site). It proved harder than expected using the out-of-the-box web-parts provided with SharePoint, so I jumped at the chance of hacking something together using Yahoo! Pipes which could then be consumed by the standard SharePoint RSS Viewer web-part.

Here's what I came up with:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/autodeskdeveloper/blogs

The RSS feed itself can be used from here:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=_pwmy5T93RGCMUcmrbQIDg&_render=rss

What does this pipe do? Well, it brings in the RSS feeds for each of the three blogs and performs some manipulation on them before aggregating them into a single feed, sorted by date and truncated to the 15 most recent posts. The RSS feeds for Jeremy's and my blogs don't publish the full contents of each post - we both decided against doing so, as our posts are often very long - while the feed for Brian's does. To make the various feeds consistent, I stripped off the "description" field from each item in Brian's feed by renaming it to "blank" (this could have been pretty much any name, I suspect). For each of the three feeds the Pipes implementation uses regular expressions to insert the blog name prior to the title for each post, making its source more readily identifiable.

Here's the map inside the Pipes editor (which is completely web-based and pretty simple to use, once you get the hang of it):

 

Hopefully you'll find some creative ways to make use of this technology: it seems to have some very interesting filtering capabilities, for instance, so you could quite easily set up your own feed to filter on certain keywords in my blog (although I'd much prefer you didn't filter too heavily, otherwise you'll risk missing some of the off-topic stuff such as this :-).

Navigation blues...

I need to vent. I've had an open ticket with Six Apart (the people providing TypePad, the service on which this blog is hosted) since January 2nd of this year. Kerry Brown had kindly pointed out a problem with Through the Interface's calendar navigation on December 26th, but as I was on vacation it took me a few days to get around to submitting the issue. The issue was related to an enhancement I made to this blog's navigation some time ago: somebody suggested showing more than a single month of posts, so I implemented an advanced template feature documented by Six Apart to provide a 3-month navigation view.

Well, around Christmas something broke... suddenly my monthly calendars were incorrect and it's only a little later that I realised exactly how: January's calendar was showing the posts for December, December was showing November's, etc. For a few days the calendars even showed the first few months this blog was published (June-August 2006), but then the problem reverted to being just that one month out of phase with reality.

Anyway, after several iterations with TypePad support, nothing has changed. Engineers are still looking at the problem, I'm periodically (but not at all frequently) being thanked for my continued patience and apologised to for my inconvenience. I'm not one to complain, as a rule, but I feel this blog's readership also deserves an apology for the problems with the navigation (thanks to all of you who took the time to report the problem to me - I sincerely apologise for the inconvenience, honestly! :-) and also the background as to why I've changed the blog's calendar navigation back to a single-month view which thankfully doesn't appear to exhibit the same behaviour.

As an alternative to the multiple-month view, it's also worth reminding people of the Post Index you'll previously have found in the right-hand navigation bar, between the RSS Feed and the Search box. As it looked a little grey over there (grey on grey is probably not the best way to draw attention to a really useful site feature), I've now promoted it to the left sash, where it's hopefully more prominent.

Offline reading of "Through the Interface"

A member of my team recently asked me to extend this blog's standard RSS feed to include more than 10 entries: he wanted a feed that contained all the entries ever posted to "Through the Interface". It turns out he uses Outlook 2007's RSS capability to download the full contents of items in an RSS feed, so he can then use his Outlook-integrated search capabilities to search his various email archives - as well as this blog's contents - whenever he's researching a technical query. He had a number of the earlier posts missing from Outlook and wanted the full collection.

I ended up creating a new RSS feed containing all posts specifically for this purpose. If you're new to "Through the Interface" and wish to keep an offline archive of the blog's contents, then this feed may prove useful to you.

On a related note, a very cool tool I use to archive this blog's content is HTTrack. This tool sucks down the content from a particular URL or set of URLs, follows the various links and remaps them to relative links on your local hard-drive. Very cool, indeed. In case you're wondering why I bother... I take the archive created by this tool and transfer it across to a colleague in Shanghai, who extracts it on an internal server for our China-based Engineering teams to access. TypePad blogs are apparently all blocked by the Great Firewall of China, and that's the way we've chosen to work around this problem, for now.

One final reminder, if you're interested in catching up on old posts... as mentioned previously, a master post index is now available in this blog's right-hand navigation sash. This proved immensely popular the day it was launched (that day had the highest ever number of page-hits on this blog, although a few days since have now approached it), but I suspect that people have generally now forgotten about it: it's a relatively inconspicuous grey-on-grey link, after all.

Announcing two new Autodesk developer blogs

Now for something I hinted at in this previous post...

I'm very happy to announce that Through the Interface has two new siblings:

Mod the Machine is a blog devoted to developers working with Autodesk Inventor and is written by Brian Ekins, Inventor API designer.

The Building Coder is a blog devoted to developers working with Autodesk Revit and is written by Jeremy Tammik from our European DevTech team.

For those of you working with one of these products, I strongly recommend subscribing to their respective RSS feeds (here for Mod the Machine, and here for The Building Coder). I'm very sure there's going to be some very interesting content posted over the coming weeks/months/years. :-)

Welcome to the blogosphere, Brian and Jeremy!