It’s time for my weekly wrap up of DZone articles.

1 Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech” (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)

I’m sad to say that even though the first post is not strictly developer, it deserves attention. A quite disturbing. The describes the escalation of death threats against “About Creating Passionate Users“ blogger Kathy Sierra This type of behavior is completely repulsive. I was unable to read all of the comments, there are a lot. I would appreciate anyone volunteering to summarize them here in a comment.

2 Form field hints with CSS and JavaScript

This article will appeal to web developers. It describes a very simple but elegant method of displaying hints on a per form field basis using a little CSS and JavaScript. It makes for a professional web 2.0 effect.

3 7 Signs Your Project Will Never Make it to Production

Following last weeks seeming theme of helpful hints for freelancing and overall project maintainance, Ben Moore of Rail Spikes offers up some advice on spotting projects doomed from the start.

4 Instant SQL Formatter

A cool little tool that reformats obfuscated SQL code to a more human readable format. Simple but extremely useful tool.

5 In software no good deed goes unpunished

I found this article rather amusing, more than likely being a Bob myself.

Until next week-

3Monkeys

Well,it’s the end of the week, and my bracket is busted beyond believe. So without further delay I offer the Weekly Wrap-up.

Top 10 Best / Worst Cities For Software Developer Pay - An interesting article that uses the cost-of-living index in conjunction with average developer salaries to determine the best and worst cities for software development pay scales. Though the article does not offer much in the form of narrative, the numbers are rather interesting. Not surprising, Texas seems to be the clear winner here.

Top ten things ten years of professional software development has taught me - Some good observations by Andres Taylor. Jeff Atwood actually picked this one up as well at Coding Horror along with several others. Interesting follow on reading.

Enough of the list though –

google-code-prettify: javascript code highlighting - Posted by our own Matt Schmidt, it was a timely post as I’ve been evaluating code highlighters for the DZone blogs.The jury is still out to wheather or not we will use this one, but it did provide a frame of reference.

There seemed to be a lot of career advice this week –

A Comprehensive Guide to Starting your Freelance Career - A length article that goes through most of the aspects of Freelancing, including branding, finding work, quotes and estimates, billing and invoicing, getting paid, client problems, scoping and deliverables among others.

The Interview Experience at Top IT Companies - Alex Ionescu describes his interview experiences at Google, Apple and Microsoft. Though the experiences will not apply to other applicants, it is interesting to see the processes of each of these companies.

That’s all for this week.

Stacy

I guess some might think I’ve fallen off the face of the earth. Actually, I took some much needed vacation last week and am in California on day-job business this week. The trip to California has been very interesting, I’ve been on site at AMD, Virage Logic, and Cadence. I met with Mrinal Desai of CrossLoop for drinks and a dinner on the side. I met Mrinal through that other social networking site that starts with a “d”. It is always interesting to meet someone in person that you have meet through an online networking site. One thing that we both agreed on is that there needs to be more interaction of members of such sites. He was quite impressed that I had made a number of personal contacts through such sites.

During our conversation he mentioned he was good friends of the CEO at jobster.com. I immediately thought of jobs.dzone.com, and thought that there might be an opportunity for Rick to improve, or at least add to, the DZone service. I whipped out the cell and gave Rick a quick call and asked him to check it out. I will need to follow up and get the two in touch when I get back to Texas, but the interesting thing was the whole six-degrees-of-separation effect. Rick knows me, I know Mrinal, and Mrinal knows the CEO of Jobster.

Last night I went out to dinner with a few coworkers and some members of the IEEE 1481 working group. While there, someone that knew my boss walked up and started talking to him. I got lost in conversation with other members of the party, and someone else walked up. In a few minutes the second person says to my boss, “One of our previous employees went to work for you, a guy named Stacy Doss.” My boss points over to me and says “That Stacy Doss?”. Turned out it was one of my prior coworkers. He hadn’t recognized me because I had bleached my hair since I had last seen him. So, another case of six-degrees-of-separation, that actually turned in to a loop.

A bit of strange occurrences, over a few days. I have a second IEEE 1481 meeting tomorrow. It is a lot of hard, tedious work, but yet it is fun and I get to extol the virtures of ODF.

I’ll be starting my “Picks of the week” article series next weekend. In the series, I will pick about a half dozen stories from DZone and discuss them in a blog post. If you have suggestions for which DZone post to highlight, please feel free to email me at stacy (at) dzone dot com.

I’ve been busy updating both the CSS and php templates for the DZone blogs this past week, and released version 1.1. Some minor and some significant changes were made and are bulleted below. There are still some obvious deficiencies and some new and cool features on the way in version 1.2.

Version 1.1 Modifications and Enhancements

• True blog author displayed rather than DZone staff where appropriate, as well as re -stylized look.
• Comment section restyled
• Added proper blog list to sidebar (ENH)
• Updated the logo
• Added RSS feed to individual blogs
• Replaced annoying chevron in title to colon
• Added separators to root (header) blog list.
• Added “The Latest at DZone” RSS feed to sidebar.
• Added “Recently on DZone Blogs” to individual side bars
• Added aggregated post to root blog

As always, comments are welcome and encouraged.

Suggestions

• Add snippets to header
• Enlarge font on root page
• Order blogs

Stacy a.k.a. 3Monkeys

As you may have noticed, DZone’s blogs have underwent a major transformation. There are still several bugs to work out, however. I will use this post to collect ideas and prioritize them. Please commentwith your suggestions.

To do:

• Change Name: Title tagline look
• Add seperators on main blog
• Add list of all blogs in right sidebar
• Update logo
• Fix main page to show recent articles from selected blogs/tags/categories?
• Write voting plugin
• Fix tag cloud colors
• Fix link color in sidebar
• Avatar images
• Rework Comments
• Add RSS Feed
• Change title (remove >>)

DZone has recently acquired http://bigbold.com/snippets and has launched snippets.dzone.com. Snippets is a web repository of programming code snippets. It uses a similar tagging system as DZone and was developed in Ruby on Rails. The team is working on a site redesign to more closely match the traditional DZone look and feel. Feel free to take it for a test drive in the mean time.

Peter Cooper posted on the sell at Ruby Inside:

I wasn’t really in the market to sell Code Snippets, but while talking on the phone with a friend, he mentioned he might be interested. I gave it some thought and thought his offer was pretty good. Before saying ‘yes’, I decided to do some research with a few other contacts to see if I could get a better offer. Quick as a flash, Rick Ross at DZone got me on the phone and agreed a sale within minutes. It is easy to see how well it integrates with their stuff, so I think we’re both happy!

All in all, the sell brings in over 3000 snippets, and 5000 registered users.