Hacking .NET

I don't consider myself a true-blue hacker in the sense that Paul Graham writes (Great Hackers). I don't think I qualify as a hacker, since I like working with C#. Don't get me wrong: languages such as Perl and Ruby are cool. I just don't have a lot of time on my hands to dink around with them. I know C#, so that's what I "hack" with.

I began working on a personal project to build a personal bookmark manager because I was a little ticked that the del.icio.us founder/programmer doesn't want to allow users to "privatize" links or link categories. So I built my own front end for delicious, which has now turned into a full grown project to utilize APIs for searching for additional bookmarks. I figure, why stop with delicious? Why not use the "semantic web" to search for a multitude of links that I may need? So my personal bookmark manager finds related links to Google, Technorati, and right now I'm researching how to stream HTML and transform it to XML for those sites that have great search tools but no API nor RSS.

I'm learning a lot. As it turns out, this research has brought me a great way to learn about applying XML/XSLT for a new module I'm building for a system at work. Instead of hitting the database for every update, I'm thinking of putting the changes in an XML file for that user, and when they are completely done, the update pushes the XML file to the database. It seems like it will be a LOT faster user experience.