In August last year – almost at the beginning of this blog I made a post about creating a “Cool Tools” page that will house links to all my favourite tools that I come across and use.

The original blog post suggested that I would be using a Wiki to manage the set of links. Even though I did develop that component in the end (which I may still find use for), my gut feeling said there was something smelly with managing these links in a wiki since I also use Delicious to store links conveniently with the Firefox Delicious Bookmarks extension – and having to then copy items across into a wiki seemed like too much of a pain and a bit of a double up (I’ve learnt that if something isn’t seamlessly easy, human nature is to put it off so much that you end up not doing it at all). 

However, at the same time I wanted to display the list of tools I bookmark in delicious on my website in a nice categorised, hierarchical view… so I got my thinking cap on of how I could have the best of both worlds. After googling around I found that there wasn’t much code out there that converts a set of delicious links with tags into a categorised hierarchy view of them all – so after some sketching I came up with a way to do it (i.e and algorithm to convert tags » hierarchy).

Long story short, my list of tools is finally up and fairly stable (I haven’t been adding huge amounts to the list for the past little while).

You can find it at:

• http://www.hamishgraham.net/page/My-Favourite-Tools.aspx

I am also using the same tool (by filtering on a different set of delicious tags) to provide a list of my Favourite Blogs and Favourite Articles.

Each set has their own feed that you can subscribe to if you are interested, or they have a “View by Date Added” button you can use to see what was added since your last visit.

All in all, doing this is part of my “manage information overload” flow (without just shutting it off completely) that I have been trying to fine tune over the last little while which I may blog about at some point – as well as a way to share with the world things I find that I think are good enough to share! 

I apologise for lack of updates - since my last post I have decided to move back to New Zealand, unfortunately having to leave my great job back in Brisbane, with a desire to persue an educational sabbatical in 2009 with the possibly of also looking into some contracting opportunities.

On my way back to New Zealand I also had a great 3 weeks visiting Japan and saw some amazing sites and met some great people.

Hopefully you should be able to expect some more updates from me now that I have some more time on my hands (although I have just been offered a contract that should last the next month or so!).

Still very keen to get my 'cool tools' page up once I have got myself sorted.

I am just going through some teething pains right now as I create my "Cool Tools" page.

This will essentially be a collection of links to various tools and utilities / tips and tricks that are totally useful during development. 

The "Cool Tools" page will be a wiki (for me), although read only for everyone else :) Feel free to contact me about any tools you think should be included however.

The wiki is implemented using SubSonic as the DAL, and will make use of wmd-editor for editing. 

I will AJAX'ify scrolling between versions of the pages and wherever else I see necessary (using built in VS2008 AJAX controls), and will borrow the Diff engine class from the open source ScrewTurn Wiki.

I could have just used ScrewTurn Wiki entirely, but I think too clunky for my little Cool Tools page that I want to have nicely integrated into BlogEngine.NET that this blog is built on. Cool little open source framework by the way!

Hello all - on purpose I am not going to write a big long fancy introductory entry because if I set myself too high expectations then I know that I will never blog.

Here I will post anything that I come across that I have learnt that I consider may be useful to anyone developing in the .NET world.

Enjoy! Feel free to contribute.