I had the good fortune to spend the last few days in Las Vegas at Tier 1 Research's Hosting Transformation Summit. I've collected up my thoughts on Day One of the conference here, Day Two follows next week. Read on to see what I learned...

Hey, programmers! Interested in a little diversion? Go take a look at the text for Larry Wall's 10th State of the Onion presentation, in which he talks about all manner of topics, and if you're incredibly lucky, he might mention a thing or two about the current state of Perl. It's good coffee break reading.

DemoCamp 9 takes place on Monday, September 25th. If you're in the Toronto area and want to see what the local high-scene is like, come on down! More details in the full article.

Rolf Anweiler of Brand Republic says that newsletters are the most widely distributed and most established form of email marketing and an indispensable part of the communications strategy for many companies. He says that the six important factors for implementing a successful email newsletter are:

• PLACE How the newsletter is integrated into a website
• PROCESS How easy is it to subscribe
• PERMISSION Are data protection regulations being adhered to and how is permission gained from the subscriber?
• PERIODICITY Is the timing and frequency of the newsletter right?
• PERSONALISATION Is it tailored to the interests of the reader?
• PRESENTATION How good is the newsletter design and layout?

If you've been trying to get your paws on the Ruby library for the Kiko API without success, I've got good news for you:

• The links on the Kiko API page are getting fixed
• In the meantime, here's a link to my mirror of the Ruby library for the Kiko API

If you're curious about the Kiko API and have got Ruby installed, you can give it a shot in interactive mode using irb -- the tutorial page will show you how. In the very near future, I'm going to post more extensive tutorials.

This one amused me: Mike "Mike-O-Matic" Arace's comic, titled If Programming Languages Were People.

A lot of people don't make use of the RSS feeds offered by blogs and news sites. It's a bit of a hard concept for a non-technical person to grasp, and I'd been giving some thought to sitting down and writing the definitive explanatory article. It looks as though I've been beaten to the punch by a blogger named Stephanie in her blog, Back in Skinny Jeans:

The diagram above comes from her article, titled How to Explain RSS the Oprah Way. I'm going to show it around and see if it helps people "get" RSS.