Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for April, 2005
VS .NET source control options
I’ve always been a bit surprised at the lack of source control options from Microsoft. The rudimentary Visual SourceSafe (VSS)offering is okay for small teams and small projects that are housed under one roof, but expand beyond any those parameters and troubles arise. Microsoft doesn’t even use it for its in-house projects.
I’ve worked with disconnected dispersed teams for the past few years and VSS just doesn’t fill the need. One product I have used extensively with recent projects is from an IBM company - Rational’s ClearCase. Their Visual Studio .NET integration is powerful and working across a network is possible. Another good product I’ve used in the past is SourceGear Vault.
I’ve read many overviews of the upcoming Team System in the next version of Visual Studio .NET to go along with .NET Framework 2.0, and it seems a bit promising so maybe Microsoft has learned a thing or two.
See Your Web Site on a Mac
My good friend Felix in Germany runs a great web site with a fantastic service for developers wanting to see their web sites on a Macintosh using either Safari, IE 5 or Mozilla (Mac Screenshot Service).
I myself do not need that service - working on the OS X platform - but I have picked up some very useful CSS, JavaScript and PHP techniques from his work.
Fundisom.com includes:
- CSS Tricks - layout and hover techniques
- PHP Scripts - a vast number of useful functions and ready-to-go scripts covering a broad array of tasks. I particularly like the MySQL to Excel and Crop Image tips. Felix also includes some excellent methods for working recursively in directories.
- A PHP mirror function that allows for server to server copying without an FTP service. I used this one myself as I recently needed something of this sort and moved a site with success using his code.
Along with the Mac screenshot service, one can use a Google position tracker, browse a nice online RSS newsreader, and play with colors using a really cool colorpicker showing all possible hues and shades of every color you input using hexidecimal code.
Last but not least - there are …
SitePoint Releases Search Engine Marketing Kit
Last spring, I was contacted by SitePoint about the possibility of writing a new book on SEO, similar to their existing Web Design Business Kit. I submitted a proposal, and was extremely pleased to be chosen by SitePoint as the author.
Subsequent discussions led to an expansion of the book’s scope to cover pay-per-click, and to move it beyond a “business kit” to create something that anyone could use to learn more about search engine marketing. The result is the SitePoint Search Engine Marketing Kit, which represents over 6 months’ work.
I’ve been a big fan of SitePoint for years. When I was doing web development all the time, SitePoint.com was actually set as my browser’s home page. Naturally, I was very excited to work with the SitePoint team. Simon, Georgina, Matt, Kevin, and others were a big help.
At any rate, I do believe that the SEM world has long needed something like this, a comprehensive review of the state of the art. Will it age well? Time will tell, but we’ve already begun discussions about doing annual updates just to be safe.
You can check out a sample from the first chapter in today’s lead article on SitePoint,
Postfix Performance Tuning Techniques
I was digging around the Postfix site the other day and found this handy tip sheet for tuning up Postfix for performance.
I particularly like the techniques for dealing with SMTP connections that generate constant errors, limiting the number of connections a single SMTP client may make and also the add-in tools for simulating mail loads for performance testing.
O’Reilly Launches CodeZoo
O’Reilly has just launched CodeZoo, a new site to catalogue, distribute, rate, and offer tips for free software components. The site has been launched with a catalogue of free Java components, but O’Reilly is seeking feedback about what other languages/platforms should be featured.
Visitors to the site can submit tips and reviews of any of the components listed, or suggest components to be reviewed by O’Reilly staff for inclusion in the directory. The site provides Atom feeds for each of the components in its catalogue so that you can keep up with tips and new releases posted by the community.
I’ll be interested to see how this site evolves. At the moment, it’s a bit underwhelming, but if O’Reilly manages to attract a decent community by setting high editorial standards and offering more ways to keep up-to-date on the latest free software components, it could be a winner.
Working with the page title in ASP.NET
Recently, I’ve had a chance to work with ASP.NET 2.0 a bit, but I still don’t have a business reason to really dive in. One thing I have noticed with the next version is more access to page elements. One particular feature is access to a page’s title, so it can easily be changed in code. I’ve often wanted to do this and I usually utilize pass-thru code to accomplish something dynamic.
Thankfully, it can be accomplished in the current version of ASP.NET. It is easy enough by setting the page title tag as a server control (i.e. with a
runat=”server”) and utilize the following in your codebehind or on the page:
Protected pageTitle As System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlGenericControl
Private Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, _
ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
pageTitle.InnerText = “Title”
End Sub
This is VB.NET but it is easily translated to C#.
Making a Flash vKitty
Although I’m reticent about sites built entirely from Flash, I have to admit this a brilliant gimmick, and one that really couldn’t be achieved as successfully any other way.
Late last year Whiskas, the venerable cat food brand, called in Tequila Interactive and R Blank Interactive Design to redesign their site. The results are pretty impressive — a virtual cat that wanders, preens, toys and behaves in a generally cute manner as you browse the site.
R and Eliot Mebane have written an excellent article for the Macromedia ‘Edge Newsletter‘ explaining the process of making the cat in detail.
The exec summary:
1) They shot two days of footage of a real cat interacting with ‘green screen’ environment. They even built a green set to the proportions of the website layout for the cat to climb around on.
2) Adobe After Effects to extract the green elements, leaving the cat on a transparent background.
3) Since the Flash video format (.FLV) doesn’t support alpha-tranparency, vector alpha masks had to be produced to be applied in Flash to mimic transparency. Impressively, After Effects’ autotrace feature produces quality vector masks and even has a SWF export feature. Nice.
4) WildForm’s Flix was used …
Time To Adapt?
I was in Seattle last week for Jill Whalen’s “High Rankings Seminar,” which was a fantastic experience. I lived in Seattle for seven years back in the ’90s, and got to experience the early days of the Internet from a vantage point very close to the University of Washington.
One of the cool things that the UW does is broadcast lectures and presentations on their own “UWTV” cable channel, which I hadn’t seen since 1997 but was the first thing I looked for on TV when I got into my hotel room. Yep, it’s still going, and as luck would have it I was able to catch most of a presentation by the UW’s Daniel Weld on adaptive user interfaces.
Okay, that’s a bit geeky, I admit, and you may be having a hard time seeing the connection to search engine marketing.
Well, one of the really interesting things Weld talked about was others’ work on using relational Markov models to predict user behavior on web sites. This isn’t really brand new (citations go back to 1999, I believe) but it was the first time I’d seen anyone connect the dots.
What’s interesting to me about this work is that I’ve …
Cross-browser event handling
One of the most important aspects of modern unobtrusive DHTML is dealing with events. An event occurs whenever the user interacts with the page in some way - by clicking a link, moving their mouse or typing on the keyboard for example. JavaScript programmers write code to respond to those events, and attach them to specific parts of the page using event handlers.
Sadly, while the modern set of browsers all provide excellent support for most parts of the W3C’s DOM specification, event handling is the one place where significant differences between Internet Explorer and Mozilla/Safari/Opera still exists. Microsoft are not entirely to blame for this: at the time IE 5 was released, the W3C specification for DOM events had not yet been finalised. Hopefully, IE 7 will support the specification in full in addition to maintaining backwards compatibility with previous versions of IE.
In the meantime, workarounds are needed. Thankfully, there’s plenty of documentation to fill the gap. Todd Ditchendorf recently published two articles on this subject: Equalizing JavaScript Event References across IE and EOMB (Every Other Modern Browser) Part 1: DOM Level 0 Event Handlers and Part 2: Programatically registering Event Handlers. Meanwhile, Scott Andrew’s tried and …
Digging Deeper into QMail
I have included QMail in several posts in Open Sourcery over the last year. Frequently the discussion jumps to why QMail, unlike other peers, does not build in refinements and instead leaves the administrator to patch and patch to get to the same level as Postfix, Sendmail and others.
Being a longtime Sendmail user who started into QMail in late 2003 and 2004 for a few clients - I also went through a learning curve adjusting to building and tweaking it to meet requirements (and still am to some extent!).
I have learned to like QMail quite a bit - especially the use of tcpserver to selectively allow, ban with rejection messages or simply drop connections to the server outright. I also like the ease of using POP before SMTP and the ability to control how long IP addresses are cached for SMTP relaying.
A peer of mine, Oban Lambie, president of Brown Rice Internet and a seasoned system administrator who came from a sendmail background, looks at the manual patching differently than I tend to.
“Like most good things in life when the entry level bar is raised it almost always seems that the payoff is well worth it if you …
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