If you’ve ever used iRider the browser, it’s somewhat along those lines. Shows pictures of the current page for each tab you have open, in the sidebar that is. I’m digging this so far…..
Might I also say one of the few innovative features for Firefox, albeit the aforementioned (and little-known) iRider has had something similar for awhile.
Hi.
How you doing?
Me, fine…((smile)) ((wave)) So, I was full of hot air last month, wasn’t I? Needless to say my work is never done at the client, and after a hectic month of final, final, final design, things are finally settling…just in time for the holidays 😉
Anyway, thought I’d drop in my new ‘cool’ site, at least for us techies. We all know /. is the godfather of geek sites. I recently stumbled upon digg.com. Once again, user-posted articles (which can include blogs, etc.), except this is a user-moderated site. Looks like you give a ‘digg’ to each article you digg, and that helps it make the front-page. It’s an interesting (albeit not original) concept…I’ve only read it for a couple of days, and really like the variety and quality of articles…
I mean, c’mon, who hasn’t wanted to read the manual for Pong?
Wow, talk about a lapse…over a month has passed since my last post, and as you know, alot has happened in the world. Heck, just check out my last post, Katrina was about to hit New Orleans, Rita wasn’t even a depression yet, and then summer was still in full effect. Even the MN state fair wasn’t over yet.
Where to start? First, alot of wiffle since then…our season ended, my team ended up in the lower-half of the league, not in the playoffs. But I’ve done alot of spectating since then, our World Series is about halfway over, could be wrapped up tomorrow nite. Two weeks ago went to WiffleSlam, a tournament in Iowa, let’s just say it was a guy’s weekend, alot of debauchery and plenty of wiffles. My team was a little under the weather and tired out over the day, but the HRL was able to take 1st, 3rd and 5th place in the 8-team tourney, just a sweet weekend all over! Props to the Dutch-man, a fellow Hollander who planned the whole weekend, right down to a place for everyone to stay; not too shabby a fella, even being from Iowa.
But mainly I’ve been working my arse off at my new gig. I left BORN, not happy with the work I was doing, and am now contracting at a national insurance company. Things started out great, but have become bumpy, so we’ll see where it goes…all I’ll say for now….
So that’s about it; I’m tired from a weekend of being sick (literally) and pondering design questions for work…I’ll get back in the swing this weekend…
This has all the makings of a major humanitarian disaster…Hurricane Katrina is due to make landfall sometime before sunrise, in of all places New Orleans. But even right now it is starting to dump rain on New Orleans, that part of the storm that is the real issue. Of course it will be a killer hurricane, all storms of similar size have been. But New Orleans, being under sea-level, will more than likely not be able to avoid severe flooding. Its pump systems that keep it dry in normal times will not be able to keep up (more than likely). This could flood the whole city under 20-30 feet of water….
All you can do is watch and hope…
As I was toiling away on my wife’s website, I came across an extremely weird and frustrating bug/problem. She adamantly wanted to use Helvetica as the font for the text on her e-commerce site; being a non-designer myself, I had no objections, and I put it in the font-family list in the CSS, and then added more mainstream fonts as backups.
After doing so, we noticed all of a sudden that the site was acting strangely in Safari. Most of the pages displayed gibberish, actually what looked like a bunch of numbers and fractions, instead of the text copy. Not being a Mac fan or guru, I struggled to find any semblance of an answer, as I wasn’t sure if it was the browser, or Mac OS X, or what.
Finally I found this Usenet posting that finally described my symptoms in detail. Bullet point 1 was my issue. Looks like for some reason Helvetica Fractions font gets used instead of Helvetica by the OS/Mac browser. Whether it’s due to a font cache issue, or a corrupt font, I’m not sure. Regardless, it’s random (can happen to any Safari user) and I can’t afford to do much else other than make the site work out of the gates for all users (I can’t afford any display issues for any potential user).
So we ended up removing the use of Helvetica altogether; even one unhappy or confused/lost customer is too many. Arial was a nice compromise….but I share this to warn others considering that font, or those who use Safari and wonder what’s going on when some sites have garbled text.
A few people have asked me recently if there is a templating approach that works well for ASP.NET 1.x applications, since we have to wait until version 2.0 for MasterPages. Sure, I say, Master Pages.
Ha, and then I wait for the clarification they were talking about 1.x, and reply, so am I. The beauty of .NET is being able to create such powerful mechanisms or approaches before they are even a ‘standard’ tool used by a majority of developers. And that’s just what Paul Wilson did in this example of how to use Master Pages in ASP.NET 1.x. I believe this was Paul’s second go-round at Master Pages, improving upon his first version, which was based partially on the ASP.NET team’s reference implementation from awhile back. Back then Master Pages were mainly an experiment as far as I know, but now I can’t wait for them to become a standard tool everyone uses.
I’ve used Paul’s approach from this article at a few client now, and it’s worked extremely well. You won’t get quite the built-in designer (or WYSIWYG) support of 2.0’s version, but it’s more than adequate. Plus you’ll have a head-start on 2.0!
OK, my time off/away from the tech world is over, so non-techies, look away else be blinded by the light…
Contrary to prior promises, I still haven’t gotten organized enough to create articles here. I mean I have alot of ideas, but alot of my stuff fits more into an FAQ, not an article per topic. It’s the same approach I use in the newsgroups; I try to get people the info they need, I’m not going to re-explain how the wheel was created, I’ll help give some introduction, and then let another site do the talking. There’s no need for me to create yet another FAQ, to provide yet another site to monitor to look for perhaps your one question. And sometimes I’ll have plenty of original content of my own, related to some problem I had to solve today, etc.
Which is why this blog fits that so well; I’ll keep posting techie entries, under the appropriate category, and you can always use the search function of this site to see if I’ve ever talked about your question/quandry. Remember, my specialty is the .NET world, although as other topics come up (such as XML, etc.), don’t be surprised if I drop a link here and there.
And feel free to drop me questions; I’ll always try to answer what I can. I can’t be all your R&D, but I can help either answer or direct you to the answer.
OK, enough of the disclaimer/instructions, onto the goods! My first tidbit comes partly from work, but also a question posed by a direct email I received; it’s related to search-engine friendly URLs (aka search-engine safe URLs). URL rewriting with ASP.NET has always been possible, so with a little ingenuity, we can create an HttpModule that supports search-engine safe URLs. It filters/rewrites the URL not only on the inbound request, but within the outbound stream. This way you can still use your ‘normal’ URLs in your pages/code, and not have to recode all of your links…
The ONLY problem with this approach is that you are using an ASP.NET mechanism; unless the request actually makes it to the aspnet_wp process, none of this code can do its magic. Therefore, the request must be mapped to be handled by the aspnet_wp process (i.e. the file extension is handled by aspnet_wp), which is not necessarily ideal for all file types, or if you wish to really mask the URL by making it look like you’re running PHP, e.g., excluding .aspx from the URL.
Therefore, still the most complete (and easiest) method to accomplish this is via an ISAPI rewriter. These dlls are injected sooner into the request handling cycle of IIS, and can therefore influence all incoming requests. But of course they are usually written in C++, making them harder to create/maintain yourself.
Cripes, can we frickin’ use research money for bigger issues? Instead we have yet another ground-breaking study which pointed out the apparent gender bias of users related to website design, what each sex likes and doesn’t like asthetically when they view a certain website. That’s it’s not all about the substance, but the style of a site..
Well, well, females liked more color and fonts, males liked straightforward designs, and the person who builds a site, their gender influenced the look and feel of their site…yawn….I need that research job. Tomorrow, we’ll evaluate which sex is for or against the vase cupholder in the Beetle…
Just give the damn money to another company doing worthwhile work, like fighting famine, or finding a cure for diseases…
I only took a month or 2 off from the technical stuff, to recharge the brain. I’m slowly integrating my technical content from the old site, and also adding new stuff. So don’t fret, there will be more, albeit more of the blog, less articles…
blog of hair 