It’s been a long time since I posted on my blog, I don’t know why because I have a lot of news to share with you but I didn’t have the time to blog about them.
Anyways, I’m back and I’ll try to make use of what’s left from my summer vacation :)

First off, I have a new design for my website, although the old one was designed by me, this awesome new look is design by a friend called Hadeer Younis (follow her on Twitter @ElleEstCrimi),  apparently she’s more experienced with CSS and HTML than me and far more creative than me when it comes to web design.

How did it start? well, going back in my Twitter Timeline, it somehow started when she wrote this Tweet, she was talking about my friend’s website, at that time our websites had similar colors (but both are changed now) so I replied with this Tweet, and then she offered to redesign my website because she found some glitches in my design (with the tabs), so I agreed to give her a chance to try to make my website less irritating cause it was too green, so she told me she’ll start right after the exams :)
Weird story, right ? :D

Anyways, I wasn’t sure how serious she was about it until she sent me an e-mail on the 16th of July reminding me of her offer, and by the 18th she starting showing me images of design samples, they kept getting better and better until she showed me one that had this lovely Photoshop Brush you see in the Header now, it took some time until she HTMLized the designs specially because she started getting busy with other stuff, but finally on the 6th of August she was finally done and I had already started implementing some of the HTML she sent me before.

And since that time I had been working on implementing the design on ASP.NET and binding everything with my SQL Database, I also implemented Akismet’s anti-spam filter into my comments using it’s API because I started getting some spam comments in my blog (about 1 per day), and I worked on adding a few features and caching some of the content like the Latest Tweets you see in the sidebar and Dandy ID part you see in the footer which cause the page generation time to drop from 4 seconds to about 80 Milliseconds !!!
BTW if you want to see the old design for any reason, I’m now keeping it at www.hassanselim.me/old1/ ;-)

Bored? ok here’s some interesting stuff, other than my renewing my website, at the beginning of my summer vacation I started working on an app that Backs Up your Tweets to a local database file, this idea came to my mind when people started temporarily losing their old tweets back then, and I found services like BackupMyTweets.com inconvenient and a bit worrying, I wanted to be able to have my data with me on my computer.
It doesn’t sound very useful, but I have a feeling some people might make other apps that makes good use of the local database file, and BTW, see that boring Tweetful story I wrote? I was able to quickly retrieve the link of these relatively very old tweets using that database :)
I still didn’t finish the app, I suddenly stopped working on it since I started my boring Training at Intel Egypt (don’t get me started about it) but I’ll probably finish it soon and make a blog post about it.

Still bored ? come one ! give me a break :D
ok, here is more interesting news, I was contacted by lecturer from GUC telling me about this awesome community called the “GUC Open Source Community” or just “gosc” where me and other students make like a research and learn about certain development technologies and maybe blog about what we learned and if we did well it double as a 1 month internship, also these students would assist in teaching a course in the GUC called “Human Computer Interaction” by being mentors in the technology they researched, COOL right ?
I was contacted to be the Silverlight/WPF guy because I was the only GUCian my friends knew who tried developing Silverlight apps before (and I thank my friend Salem Sayed for recommending me :)), but sadly I wasn’t able to participate because they started the 20th of July while my annoying Intel Training finished on the 5th August :@
However, I can still contribute to the gosc with any relevant information and I might still be able to be a the Silverlight/WPF mentor if they’re gonna teach it in that Human Computer Interaction course, so I decided to re-visit my Silverlight Gallery App to improve it and clean the code so I can refresh my memory and learn more stuff about Silverlight, and I’ll probably make a blog post it when I’m done with it.

Whoa ! That’s was one long Blog Post !
Anyways, I’m happy with the new design and I’ll try to blog more often and make more use of what’s left from the summer vacation.
One last thing, I’m thinking about making tutorials on YouTube about C#, XNA, Silverlight and others development stuff, if you have any suggestions please send them to feedback *at* hassanselim *dot* me !