2004 is here. Neues Spiel, neues Glück. Although I’ve tried to avoid meta-blogging, I’ll make an exception this time. For whatever reason my blogging went quiet towards the end of last year. Work and home life kept me nicely busy.

Actually, as you can see from a few recent posts here, what online time I’ve had has been taken up with SDN, the SAP Developer Network, a new venture from SAP and others to build an online community along the lines of MSDN or O’ReillyNet. Forums, developer areas, articles, that sort of thing. It’s certainly a great step in the right direction, but IMO has still some way to go from the usability point of view. You know the sort of thing – use of frames, unwieldy URLs, web-based forums that are difficult to navigate efficiently (as most web-based forums are) – a mailing list or NNTP gateway wouldn’t go amiss here – and so on.

It’s a particular shame about the forums; there are interesting conversations going on there, but it’s so hard to get around the messages (“click”, “click”, “click”, “click”, “errr”, “click”, “damn, now where am I?”) I simply can’t be bothered to fight to get to the right posts. I guess I’m not just ‘modern’ enough. I’d already made my concerns known to the powers that be, so at least I have a moral right to go on about it here now ;-)

I’ve started to automatically pull in my SDN weblog posts into the /tech/sap category as there’s a nice RSS feed provided for each weblogger there.

I’ve also written two or three articles so far, the most recent of which:

Set Your WAS 6.10 System To Work – Transport Tracking with RSS

shows you how to use the evaluationWAS 6.10 system and build a BSP application to provide an RSS feed of your CTS transports so you can track system developments and customisations in the comfort of your own RSS reader. (As you can see, if you’re fortunate enough not to have to use Internet Explorer – or other browsers on MS-Windows platforms – you’ll see that the conversion of the article into HTML has a few problemettes. I’m reliably informed that the formatting problems will be addressed soon.)

Anyway, my battery’s low, so I’ll stop here. It’s frightening really, once I get round to opening a new blog post in the editor, words just splurge out. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad.