Kottu and .NET Bloggers
on a completely random note, I just saw the coolest Cow in the Kottu photostream. It’s an excellent shot by Saisiv, and props to him. Especially the kids running in the background.
Jinath has raised a fully valid point as to me deleting his blog from Kottu without warning. What happened with the .NET blogs is that they’re good, normal blogs – but very committed to the .NET niche. Which is great. The only thing is that Kottu would get like 5 reports of Visual Basic being released, or the new Microsoft Certification or whatever. They’re useful for that community, but not too interesting for the Sri Lankan community at large. I wouldn’t mind in small doses, but the .NET bloggers are extremely prolific. Which is good, I just don’t think that many people who read Kottu are developers.
The reason that people were deleted without telling them was because I was lazy and frustrated. One day I checked Kottu and there were like 15 posts on Visual Studio 2005. I’m pretty geeky, but that information isn’t relevant to me. Unless you write Microsoft Software you’re not going to use Visual Studio. It’s not exactly Sri Lanka specific either, so I didn’t think it belonged on Kottu. For a while I’d been filing the posts as ‘No’, which didn’t show up on the front page, but it was taking too much time. So, that day I just deleted a bunch of blogs from the Blogroll. The best compromise works on sites like Merill’s where I can just syndicate the feed for his ‘Sri Lanka’ category.
I’d like to implement a more democratic administration of Kottu (i.e. less work for me) but until then I guess I’ll make editorial decisions. I added something to the About page on ‘niche technical content’. Jinath say that “Apart from technical things we blog about sri lankan .NET user group things and .net events also”, but I still think that’s too niche. Geeks and developers are important, but that the average Kottu reader doesn’t need to know about ASP.NET 2.0 or VB .NET or the latest certifications. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I started off not really liking General Sarath Fonseka, him being part of the aggressive war effort. I didn’t support the war (largely cause I thought it would fail), and I thought Gotabhaya Rajapaksa and Fonseka were gleefully stomping everything. Fonseka even came out and said “I strongly believe that this country belongs to the Sinhalese but there are minority communities and we treat them like our people,” in 2008 (
General Sarath Fonseka was arrested on a bunch of trumped up charges, but mainly for daring to threaten Mahinda in a Presidential election. Despite his poor health, Fonseka was arrested in February 2010 and sentence to three years. Word on the street now, however, is that he’ll be released soon. Like any day now. President Mahinda Rajapaksa has told 
I’ve been testing a lot of apps. A very interesting one is iPlayboy, from Playboy magazine. It’s bad porn but a good magazine, especially since you can read issues from its cultural heyday – the Mad Men era of the 60s.
I’m going to get back to blogging. I buy a shitload of stuff on my iPad. Not that I like spending money, and the exchange rate terrifies me, but it’s just so easy, and so good. For example, I’ve been reading comics again. Spiderman, and 
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