When I created this website over six years ago, it was simply a place where I could publish my development projects and components. Over time I started adding photo galleries and posting some personal notes once in a while, but I thought that the whole blogging business was simply for people with too much free time. But things have changed since then. Ex-bloggers are using Facebook nowadays, and modern technical blogs are one of the most important sources of specialist knowledge for us programmers. So it's not a matter of having fans, regular readers, etc. It's rather a matter of feeding Google's spiders with information that someone, someday may find useful.
Writing has always been the most natural form of communication for me, especially about technical things. In the past I've been constantly publishing various open source components (I will return to this topic in a while), but this requires a lot of time. I found it easier to write short technical articles and I can't deny that they actually started forming a blog. So today I tagged all posts and placed a nice "tag cloud" in the sidebar to make the whole thing look a bit more like Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0 already? I'm always lagging behind ;>). And now that I'm slowly starting to work on Descend, you can expect more about 3D graphics and compiler programming in the nearest future. I think it's worth doing it even if it's just for the purpose of archiving and helping my thinking process by writing things down.
Another change that I finally made was adding previous/next links to images in the gallery. I should've done this a long time ago, and it was simply a matter of copying some code from forum module to the image module. All right, I should've upgraded this whole website a long time ago, but I made so many customizations, that manually patching the code here and there became easier than migrating the whole thing.
Talking about legacy code, now I return to the topic of open source components. Those for MFC haven't been updated for years and I'm no longer able to maintain them even if I wanted to. Besides, who uses MFC today? Obviously those who have to maintain legacy code, but no sane person would start a new project using it. So as part of the cleaning process, I moved all those components to a single place. The documentation is still available, obviously, but moved out of this website. I've been also thinking about deleting all the related forums, but I decided to leave them for now for archival purposes. And by the way, even more out of date versions of these articles are still available on CodeGuru.com, where I initially published them.
Finally, I renamed the "articles" section to "components", because that's what they actually are. In a sense my blog posts are more like articles. Anyway... I also have to publish new versions of the Qt articles components, because the code is finished for a long time and I just have to update the documentation and demo projects.
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