Habitually Good

I always feel a little guilty when I make so much use of free software that someone has spent time developing and maintaining. And I have decided that I will start giving back (however much I can, to these developers). I may not be able to donate a whole lot to begin with (but I feel that every little bit helps).

So, I started off by donating to the author of a WordPress plug-in I have been using for some time. This plug-in generates sitemaps for my WordPress installation (which I submit to various search engines. This plug-in is called

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress by Arne Brachhold

Now, I am not going to disclose the amount I donated (because I am still feeling guilty that I donated so little). But, hopefully, over time, I will make up for it. In fact, I am going to try and remember to donate every so often to all the plug-ins I use on my blogs.

Incidentally, the reason I donated is because I saw a nice little message (very ingenious Arne) on the plug-in settings page which asked me if I enjoyed the plug-in and if I did, would I see it my way to maybe donate a dollar (I donated more than that).

I would love to show that message, but it no longer appears in my settings.

Of course, as should be mandatory, I appeal to all of you to donate to those who have made your life easy.

Recently, I have been vexed by a peculiar problem in my Google Analytics account. All my URLs get suffixed by “index.php”. And although the statistics that are being reported just fine, it gets pretty irritating to see non-existent URLs in the reports. And for me, this type of thing keeps pecking away at my piece of mind. To see what I mean, take a look at this screen capture from my Google Analytics Panel:

So, why does this happen? Well, turns out it was some change I made to my Google Analytics settings (I guess I misunderstood the purpose of this setting). Well, here’s how I reverted this back:

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With all the rain coming down these days, I got a chance to snap some pics of a bird (an eagle of some sort, I think). Last time I was at home and it was raining, I was able to snap some peacocks.

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Over the years of hosting this blog I have changed several hosting providers. I had actually started this on Blogger a long time ago and then I decided to host it myself using WordPress.

I played around with DasBlog as a blogging engine (not too successful I got at that). After moving to WordPress, I shifted a couple of providers before settling on my current provider (BlueHost). I recently renewed my hosting contract with BlueHost. I would have liked to change my provider because the amount of money I had to pay for renewing was a lot more than what I had originally paid. But there was one thing that kept me from moving – the inertia of backing up everything, and then uploading it at the new hosting provider.

The backup itself is not troublesome. What is painstaking is downloading the wp-content folder which contains all the images (or other files) that I have embedded in my posts over the years. And with every passing post, this folder becomes heavier and heavier. So, I decided that I had to rid myself of this artificial dependence that I have developed on my hosting provider. (I do backup my blog database regularly, but the content folder only gets backed up once a month).

The answer in one word for all my problems: Amazon S3.

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My world shattered today (not really, but it came close to). You see, I am a C# developer. I don’t like VB too much at all (though when I have to I can code in it). So, it was to my horror when I found out that there was this one thing that I could do in Vb.Net but had no way of doing in C#. This involves Extension Methods of course (as the title says).

I was trying to create an extension method for the enum type. Just like you can convert an enum variable to it’s string representation by calling the inbuilt ToString() method, I wanted to add a method which would set an enum variable’s value from a given string. I was going to call this method FromString(). Here’s where it started going downhill.

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