I Miss Windows Live Writer…

It was a total pain in the ass for me to find a decent piece of desktop publishing software for the Mac. I’m using the free trial version of ecto now - the interface is clunky, awkward, and doesn’t display the nested structure of my WordPress blog categories like how Windows Live Writer does. I haven’t played around with ecto much, but so far I haven’t found any previewing tools or any of the niceties that I enjoy when I use Windows Live Writer.

Prior to installing ecto I tried a Java-based Bleezer desktop blogging application for OS X; it crashed due to a handful of JVM errors before I got a chance to use it. I promptly tried to use my delete key to remove it from the desktop only to discover that I actually have to drag and drop it into the trash.

Entourage Works, Minus SharePoint

Was able to connect to my gmail account with no problems, but when I tried to see if I could sync to my work’s SharePoint server using Entourage 2008, the same way I would with Outlook 2007, I discovered that Office 2008 simply doesn’t have any SharePoint support.

Oh well.

Safari Works, Minus Web-Based SharePoint

So I couldn’t sync Entourage with SharePoint. No problem - my client has a web-accessible version of SharePoint which I access from my Vista and XP machines regularly, using both Firefox and Internet Explorer 6/7.

When I supplied my credentials using Safari the unthinkable happened - nothing. I tried changing the slash from a forward to a backslash and nothing - it didn’t go through, even with the correct credentials.

What’s the deal here? Why wouldn’t Safari be able to connect to a simple web-based version of SharePoint? All SharePoint uses is just standard HTML/AJAX when I use Firefox to browse it; why wouldn’t Safari work?

EyeTV is Fun

EyeTV works just as well as Windows Media Center’s live TV functionality does; the owner of this laptop had already set up the channel scanning and programming prior to my adoption of the computer so it really didn’t require any effort on my end to get it working.

How My Counterpart is Doing

The hardcore Mac owner whom I switched computers with is just now trying out my XPS; apparently my computer:

• Boots too slowly and
• The screen isn’t bright enough to be read outside at dusk.

Fair enough. More to come later.

I was contacted by a very polite employee from Packt Publishing who asked me if I’d be willing to review one of their brand new ASP.NET books, ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials. I’m not going to add any referral links for this product as it would be a conflict of interest; the only compensation I have received for writing this review is a copy of the book itself.

Overview

ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials by Joydip Kanjilal shows you how to get the most out of the latest data presentation controls, including the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) controls added in the .NET 3.5. Joydip goes into an incredible amount of detail for each family of controls and provides extensive examples in C#.

What I Really Liked About This Book

Great Data Paging Example and Explanation

ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials has an entire chapter dedicated to the different kinds of data source controls such as the ObjectDataSource, SqlDataSource, AccessDataSource, and XmlDataSource. I’m familiar with all of these controls and reading about them in themselves is not particularly interesting.

What is interesting, however, is that Joydip covers data paging for beginners with an example that contains both the full C# code and the sample SQL command necessary to implement paging. I am familiar with how to do this kind of paging already but Joydip has provided a really, really concise, clear example of ASP.NET/SQL Server 2005 data paging and I think that would be really helpful for beginning .NET developers.

You can find the example on pages 27 through 30.

Explores All ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Fully

I could go on and list all of the controls that are covered extensively in ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials but I’d just be repeating the entire table of contents. While the book doesn’t show you how to "hack" or get these controls to do crazy things, Joydip does a great job covering many of the features for each type of data presentation control, including:

• Styling;
• Handling Events & Data Binding;
• Additional Data Interaction Capabilities (Appending, Deleting Rows;)
• Paging & Sorting;
• and all sorts of control-specific styling examples.

Joydip goes into a lot of detail on each control and explores most of their significant properties; he demonstrates the adaptability and flexibility of all of the data presentation controls in a way that beginning developers can learn from. But don’t get me wrong, even more experienced developers could benefit from using ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials as a reference.

Introduces and Expands on the LINQ Controls Masterfully

The reason why this book excited me so much was the presence of detailed examples on how to use the new LINQ Data Presentation controls in ASP.NET 3.5, which is something that I haven’t had a chance to try myself yet. Joydip does an exceptional job with his examples in this section as he expands on how the new LINQ data presentation controls can be utilized in Visual Studio 2008 and some of their features.

While this section isn’t nearly detailed as the other, it serves a great introduction to the LINQ controls and helped me understand why LINQ might be a more useful alternative than the traditional ASP.NET 2.0 Data Presentation Controls in some instances.

Things That Could Be Improved

More Exciting Examples, More "Hacks"

One of the things that I was looking for in ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials were some exciting examples on how to do exceptional things with the ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls, like how to integrate AJAX paging into a LINQ ListView or something cool like that which borrows from other aspects of the "presentation" discipline.

I know the point of the book was to simply cover all of the essential pieces of information regarding data presentation controls so I can’t say I’m too disappointed, but still it’s something that I would have liked to have read.

More Extensive LINQ Examples

The contents of the final chapter of ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials serve as a great introduction to the LINQ technology and its associated data presentation controls, but I was really hoping for Joydip to take it a step further and show us how to unlock the horsepower of LINQ.

Higher Quality on Some of the Images

Some of the images appeared to be really pixelated and warped; most of the images were fine but I got distracted at some points of the text by some of the fuzziness. This is just nitpicking on my part, but I just want to perform due diligence to my readers and Packt Publishing.

Places to Buy ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials

If you’re interested in checking out ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials you can buy it from the following online locations, none of these links are referral links:

Packt Publishing - ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials By Joydip Kanjilal

Amazon.com - ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials by Joydip Kanjilal

I’d start by building the end user experience first then shape all of my programmatic logic around creating that experience. I sat down and spent some time reading through Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Design: CSS, Themes, and Master Pages (referral link), which was given to me at Christmas but I had yet to actually sit down and digest. I used this text to help guide me through my weekend CSS/graphic design adventure.

Paint.NET - a Poor Man’s PhotoShop

The first order of business, according to Jacob Sanford, the author, is to design yourself a logo around which you style the rest of the site.

I’m a pretty terrible graphic artist, so I decided to just try and do something simple. I normally use The GIMP since I can’t afford PhotoShop (I wouldn’t even know how to use it if I could,) but I had recently been referred to Paint.NET by a classmate of mine who happens to "get" this whole "art" thing.

Paint.NET turned out to be a better choice than the GIMP for the following reasons:

• It consumes less system resources than the GIMP;
• It has a simpler, less "crowded" interface;
• It’s also free; and
• It has a much smoother "drawing canvas," if you will, for people like me who want to draw rather than edit.

Using Paint.NET I threw together a basic logo and banner that I was comfortable with, then I moved onto the next part of the process: putting together a CSS layout.

BluePrint - a Full CSS Framework

CSS is not my forte; I can handle most CSS jobs thrown my way but I am by no means an expert. BluePrint was designed with people like me in mind; people who may not be brilliant at creating original CSS designs but are clever enough to adapt existing designs in order to suit their needs.

BluePrint offers a solid foundation for doing grid-based design and has a smart system for managing columns, nested columns, rows, all without relying on tables at all. It also has built-in adapters for supporting Internet Explorer-related CSS quirks and a printable version of all of its layouts. I tinkered around with BluePrint and came up with an elegant 2-column design for my new project within a matter of minutes.

It’s a great framework and I highly recommend it for any CSS-challenged developers out there who just want to build a solid, robust layout without all of the headache that can go into building CSS from scratch.

ASP.NET 2.0 CSS Friendly Control Adapters

In chapter 5 of Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Design: CSS, Themes, and Master Pages (referral link) Sanford describes how to use "CSS Friendly Control Adapters" to manipulate the output of complex ASP.NET controls like the GridView, TreeView, Login, Menu, and so on.

When I first started using BluePrint the output from one of my TreeView controls was really wacky, simply because it was trying to output a big mess of nested tables instead of nested list elements. I downloaded and installed the ASP.NET 2.0 CSS Friendly Control Adapters, as recommended by Sanford, and edited my TreeView control’s output so that it would produce more CSS-Friendly output.

I highly recommend getting this adapter toolkit, and having Sanford’s book to help guide you through the process of modifying the adapters is also very helpful.

In early December I picked up my new Dell XPS M1330 laptop which I ordered without any Microsoft Office products preloaded on it. I decided that for a month or so I would try life without Microsoft Office and see if Google Docs could really fill in the void. After all, Michael Arrington said he couldn’t live without Google Docs, so perhaps I should try living with it?

The results weren’t as skewed as I thought they were going to be; I assumed that Google Docs would be an abysmal failure, but that’s not true for all of the applications that I used it for.

Google Docs Works Great for Note-Taking, Providing Ubiquitous Access to Small Documents

I take a lot of notes when I’m in class, doing research, on the phone with a potential client/employer; I just need a simple application that will let me jot down a few notes, save it, and let me recall it later. While the interface still isn’t as good as Microsoft Office’s (Google Doc’s spell checking blows,) the service works fine for recording simple notes and saving them.

Here are some of the advantages for using Google Docs for this Note-Taking application:

• Organizes documents chronologically, and in general, makes organizing files and finding them later infinitely better than MS Office and my local filesystem. This is probably my favorite feature of Google Docs.
• Makes all of your documents ubiquitous; I personally own four computers and I use several computers in the labs here at Vanderbilt. The ability to access my notes from any given machine is very convenient and saves me a lot of time that I would normally spend emailing documents to myself, downloading them, saving them, and opening them.
• Clean, simple interface.

Google Docs is great for what I call “vertical documents,” i.e. lists and other brief content that doesn’t consist of lengthy prose or contiguous blocks of text. It’s a good way to jot down a few links or bulleted lists. I’ve read a few converted Word documents to Google Docs, most of them consisted of full Wall Street Journal articles for my marketing class, and it can be a strain to read them in the Google Docs format.

Google Docs Sucks for Printing, Opening Existing Documents, Complex Spreadsheets, and Managing Large Files

The situation with Google Docs where I got burned the worst was when I was writing my final term paper at the end of the semester for an entrepreneurship class.

I had to scrawl out a 15 page term paper, double-spaced, with the default Word margins. The paper was due on at the beginning of class on Thursday. I sat down on Monday and wrote the first 12 pages of my paper; leaving the rest to do on Thursday morning. I uploaded my Word file to Google Docs and figured I’d be able to finish up my final three pages and print out the thing from one of Vanderbilt’s computer labs in the hours leading up to class.

I showed up at the computer lab and checked my paper length on Google Docs. It was only 8 pages long. Oh…. shit! Instead of easily wrapping up my paper I had to type in the typographic equivalent of a dead sprint in order to meet the page requirement. I printed out my paper and to my ever-lasting horror I discovered what had happened. I didn’t lose any pages or think I had written more than I actually did, Google Documents removed all of the margins from my document. Needless to say, I was a bit disgruntled, and since then I’ve never written anything of significance using Google Docs.

Here are some of the significant disadvantages of using Google Docs over Microsoft Office:

• Say “goodbye” to printing; Google Docs messes with the margins and doesn’t even compare with Word in terms of printing. What you see with Google Docs is not what you get when you print.
• Being unable to open existing Office documents that are shared with me via email for my classes and for my job is really, really irritating. In order to get it to work, I have to upload the existing document to Google Docs and convert it, so long as it’s not too large. The 500k limitation on Word files is ridiculous; a business plan explained in a Word document is always larger than 500k (for “for reals” companies, anyway.)
• Google Docs cannot handle complex Excel sheets; I have to use some rather complex Excel sheets for class and whenever I upload them to Google Docs I’m lucky if even ONE of the sheets gets converted correctly. Most of my spreadsheets have three or four different sheets included in them and Google Docs has, thus far, never converted all or even most of them.
• Obviously, Google Docs cannot handle large or complex files.

The Bottom Line: Google Docs is a Great Toy for Narrow Applications, But Fails to Compare to Office

The biggest disadvantage that Google Docs has is that it can’t work offline, but I know Google is in the process of correcting that. Regardless, an AJAX interface simply cannot accomplish the same degree of functionality, reliability, and performance that Microsoft Office has. In addition, Office documents are a ubiquitous format that everyone on Earth supports, which eliminates Google’s purported benefit of ubiquitous access through file type conformity, although Google Docs still has the benefit of ubiquitous data access (files don’t need to be replicated on everyone’s hard drive.)

Google Docs is great for taking little notes, but simply, you will not survive for long in an academic or professional environment without Microsoft Office.

Technorati Tags: Google Documents Microsoft Office Online Business SaaS

In this interview I ask HubPages’ CEO Paul Edmondson about the future of HubPages, about his experience with Microsoft, and what HubPages is “looking for” as far as monetizeable content is concerned. If you missed my initial Startup Spotlight on HubPages then you should give it a read.

1. How quickly is HubPages growing? What are your expectations for its future growth?

HubPages is growing very quickly, faster that our best expectations. We launched in August 2006, and we currently have over 100,000 registered users, and the site enjoys over 5 million visitors every month. More importantly, we’ve seen the number of really high-quality writers multiply rapidly. We’d be very happy if the trend we’ve seen so far continues along its current trajectory!

2. What did you learn from your experience at Microsoft? How has that experience been relevant to HubPages?

The skills you learn at Microsoft are very different from those you learn at a start-up. All three of us (Jay Reitz, Paul Deeds and I) worked at Mongo Music, a start-up that was acquired by Microsoft, and that provided an experience more similar to that which we’re having now. I will say, though, that at Microsoft, you learn how to build great products. And building great products, whether you’re one of the largest companies on the planet or a small start-up, is one of the fundamental keys to success.

3. One of the core aspects of your business model is sharing revenue with your contributors. What sort of Hubs are you looking for? Which ones are the most profitable for HubPages and its users?

The best Hubs are those that are perennially useful, or “evergreen” – they should be as useful, interesting and informative years from now as they are today. Hubs that provide uniquely detailed, in-depth information on a topic tend to draw in the healthiest traffic, and excellent traffic typically translates into healthy revenue for our authors (and us). That said, Hubs on certain topics, such as finance/money and business, will generate significantly more money on a per-visitor basis than other topics, such as entertainment and celebrities.

4. What’s been the greatest challenge, technical or otherwise, in the course of establishing and running HubPages?

The greatest challenge we’ve had has been in cultivating a thriving writers’ community, something that we’re proud to say we’ve done with great success. Not only do our users write great stuff, they read and comment on each other’s Hubs, provide essential feedback and help each other out. We have had to cope with spammers who come to exploit HubPages’s trust with search engines, but thankfully we’ve set up systems to clear that kind of content out, and our community has been critically important in flagging the type of content that does not meet our standards.

5. What was your inspiration for HubPages? What are your long-term goals for HubPages?

Our inspiration for HubPages was the realization that there was so much valuable content being created by people online, in specialized discussion forums, on blogs, in the comments of news sites, that was of exceptionally high quality…but that it wasn’t earning those people any money. HubPages would enable people to quickly and easily—without any knowledge of HTML—to assemble an attractive, useful web article, and allow them to share in that article’s intrinsic value. It’s a model that has really taken off with our enthusiastic user base. We have lots of users that are earning hundreds of dollars per month, and a few over a thousand—on what they’ve already written. As we’re all witnessing with the writers’ strike in Hollywood, there is a lot of long-term, residual value in creating high-quality content.

Long-term, our goal (and expectation) is for HubPages to be the main site on the Web for writers of all kinds to make money from their own content. To that end, we will continue to integrate new features and enhancements to the platform, while retaining its simplicity and ease of use.

When I logged into my WordPress Administration area for AjaxNinja today I saw an interesting entry on Matt Mullenweg’s (original WordPress founder) blog. His entry was called “Graffiti Disses WordPress,” and it linked to an entry on Charles Stricklin’s blog, which contained detailed criticism of Telligent’s advertising campaign for its new Graffiti CMS.

“What is Graffiti,” you ask? According to Graffiti CMS’ homepage:

Graffiti CMS was developed by Telligent, the folks who brought you Community Server (an industry leading solution for online communities and social networking). Graffiti CMS provides powerful content management in a simple, easy-to-understand format. Whether it’s your personal blog, the family Web site, or the primary Web presence for your small business, Graffiti CMS software is the solution for simple content management.

I’ve blogged about Telligent’s Community Server before; I was also partially responsible for getting DiscountASP.NET to stop advertising that they support CS 2007.

Here are the common complaints leveled against Telligent by Mr. Stricklin and Company:

• Telligent’s Graffiti advertising campaign smears WordPress as “not a true content management system.”
• The campaign claims that Graffiti is a superior product given that it’s built from Microsoft .NET technologies, whereas WordPress relies on “dangerous” technologies like PHP and MySQL.
• Overall, the campaign is audacious for boasting a product that actually costs money over a free one, like WordPress.

Why Telligent’s WordPress-smear campaign is brilliant

I originally began this post in response to the following comment on Charles Stricklin’s blog:

I’ve have only used WordPress for a few years, but have quite successfully bent it beyond all recognition to do all kinds of neat things. And best of all, I get to use it for free — I don’t have to pay anyone for all those cool features.

I have no problem with people selling whatever they need to sell — but frankly, if you don’t like WordPress, just don’t use it. Knocking a competitor (even if that competitor sells at $0) is just cheap, silly and generally in bad taste. You may have the best product in the world, but saying your competitor is crap just makes you look like a jerk. Graffitti’s probably alienating more customers with this ad than attracting them.

Not only is this a puerile marketing tactic, it’s also ineffective.

I went ahead and added the additional markup to draw your attention to the key parts of this comment.

The commenter’s judgement on Telligent’s campaign is 100% wrong for the following reasons:

• Telligent isn’t trying to market to “Joe Blogger;” it’s trying to market to corporations who actually need enterprise content management systems. I use WordPress myself on my blog and I love it.
• It’s not to get individual bloggers to notice the platform and go “oh yeah, I guess WordPress does suck!” It’s to pique the interest of corporate marketers who are uncomfortable with open source products.
• The fact that this pisses off individual bloggers, who in turn blog about the audaciousness of Telligent, makes the marketing campaign effective as it gets Graffiti’s name out there for free. One AdSense advertisement has caused thousands of people to read about Graffiti on a large number of WordPress blogs! Don’t you see how cost-effective that is?
• A corporate marketer isn’t going to read this post and go “wow, those WordPress kiddies are upset; I’d better stick with WordPress’ platform then, sure wouldn’t want to use a product that they don’t approve…” If anything, this pedantic, angry reaction makes the WordPress community look awful, which is the point of Telligent’s campaign. Why rely on a bunch of random anonymous individuals for support when you can rely on a branded organization that offers professional support?

I chuckled to myself a little bit when I read about all of these individual bloggers whining about “it’s not free;” they don’t get it. Telligent isn’t targeting individual bloggers like myself; they’re targeting organizations that value professional support and the reliability of the Microsoft development stack. Pissing off the open source community and launching a firestorm of buzz that underscores the value proposition of Graffiti is exactly the intent of the campaign and it looks like it’s working beautifully.

My hat’s off to Telligent. Well done!

If you’ve ever read the about page on AjaxNinja.com you’d know that I’m graduating from Vanderbilt University this semester and I’m looking to join a hot Silicon Valley startup in the Summer of 2008 upon my graduation in May. I’ve decided to go ahead and profile some interesting startups in Silicon Valley that don’t receive as much press as big-name outfits like Facebook.

The first startup that I am going to profile is HubPages, an online publishing community.

What does HubPages do?

HubPages is an online publishing community, which in itself doesn’t mean much. However, the copy from their about page provides a pretty good description of the service and business model:

HubPages is the leading online publishing ecosystem with easy-to-use publishing tools, a vibrant author community and underlying revenue-maximizing infrastructure. Hubbers (HubPages authors) earn money by publishing their Hubs (content-rich Internet pages) on topics they know and love, and earn recognition among fellow Hubbers through the community-wide HubScore ranking system.

I created a profile on HubPages the other day and even published a small “Hub” for AjaxNinja.

Easier than Blogging

My impression is that HubPages is a very user-friendly publishing mechanism, even simpler than most blogging platforms like WordPress, TypePad, or BlogEngine.NET. It offers an easy-to-use interface that allows you to effortlessly add and arrange visual elements around the page.

I built a rather extensive Hub about whether or not my computer science education was worth it today and as you can see it has a floating image off the right which HubPages was able to rip, download, and cache the image from CNN.com. I was also able to arrange the textual and graphical elements with ease and add a comments panel along with some ads to my Hub.

Creating my first Hub on HubPages was by far easier than creating my first blog entry on WordPress.com.

Instant Social Network & Community of Writers

One of the features that I like best about HubPages is the instant access to the community; you can post a general “request for a hub,” where you more or less pose a question and await for a community member to step forward and create a Hub in response to your prompt.

When I initially signed up for HubPages I nearly got dragged into writing a Hub about “How to Avoid Internet Addiction,” but I remembered I had a deadline for updating my resume so I had to drop it unfortunately. The point, however, is that the network is addictive and a lot of fun; within a few minutes of signing up for the service I was drawn to its community features, which is more than I can say for StumbleUpon and Digg, which are slowly growing on me.

Business Model

HubPages’ service is free to all of its users; however, the service makes money by allowing its users to inject AdSense blocks, Ebay, and Amazon referral units into every Hub, the idea being to share AdSense impressions with the HubPages service itself. I don’t know what the impressions split is off the top of my head, but the proportion of revenue isn’t the point.

The draw of the service is that given the service’s high volume of traffic throughout the site (Alexa Rank: 2713,) the community, and the editing interface that anyone can use, even people with little-to-no computing experience can make a few bucks publishing content using the HubPages service.

Core Competencies and Weaknesses

The greatest strength of HubPages is its management team, without a doubt. HubPages was founded by members of the former team of MongoMusic, which was acquired by Microsoft in September, 2000.

The three executive members listed on HubPages’ about page, Paul Edmondson, Jay Reitz, and Paul Deeds, were all integrated into Microsoft’s organization following the MongoMusic acquisition. Edmondson and Reitz both rose quickly in Microsoft’s MSN Entertainment division while Paul Deeds, the senior software engineer for HubPages, worked as a developer for Microsoft’s search engines, match technologies, and scalable data systems.

These guys are experienced developers, managers, and all of them have experience working for startups and industry leaders. They all have backgrounds in online entertainment and media, which speaks a lot to me; the mechanics of HubPages prevent it from being as temporal as a blog, meaning it can’t produce up-to-the-minute content like how news blogs can. HubPages is, in my opinion, geared more towards timeless information - entertainment; HubPages’ management team has an understanding of online entertainment, given that they’ve worked for an online entertainment giant. This is a VERY strong team.

The greatest weakness of HubPages is its business model - I simply don’t like the ad-supported model. While HubPages does a very good job in ruthlessly monetizing it’s content (I set the number of AdSense panels on my article to low; there’s 3 blocks on it) I worry that the revenue from ads won’t be enough to cover the costs of HubPages as it grows.

Overall, HubPages is a promising company with a solid management team who’s “been around the block” before.

Technorati : HubPages, Online Business, Startups, Web 2.0
Del.icio.us : HubPages, Online Business, Startups, Web 2.0

I’m looking for a brave WP Theme designer out there who’s willing to cook up a unique theme for AjaxNinja, for a price of course.

Theme Specifications:

• Must be optimized for search engines;
• Must be widget-ready;
• Preferably I’d like the theme not to be a fixed width;
• Must support the latest version of WordPress;
• and lastly, after I’ve paid for the theme it becomes my intellectual property, meaning you can’t sell it to anybody else.

I’ll gladly include a link to the designers blog at the bottom of the page.

Payment:

I’d like to pay in installments for deliverables (this is the payment system I use for my own projects); please email me at jiive.aaron@gmail.com for discussions about specific payment arrangements and a quote for the rate.

Get in touch with me, get an idea of what my requirements are, and tell me how long it’s going to take you to make the theme, and then charge me a competitive rate.

Here’s a quick list of some of Google’s recent key acquisitions, in no particular order.

• In October, 2007 they acquired Jaiku, a Twitter clone, for $30 million dollars. (I liked the Uncov article better than the TechCrunch/Mashable ones.)
• In June, 2007 Google acquired FeedBurner, the immensely popular feed syndication and tracking service.
• In April 2007 Google acquired DoubleClick, one of AdSense’s biggest competitors, for $3.1 billion in cash.
• In October, 2006 Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion dollars in cash.

You can view a detailed list of Google’s acquisitions on SEO by the Sea.

With the exception of Jaiku and some of the other minor acquisitions listed on SEO by the Sea’s list, most of these acquisitions make sense from the standpoint of Google’s original stated mission as quoted in The Google Story:

To organize the world’s information.

• FeedBurner provides direct access to the updates of most major blogs in real time, making it easy for Google to instantly inject the latest buzz on the blogosphere into its search index.

• YouTube provides direct access to the largest collection of cottage-industry videos on the public domain, thus Google can combine YouTube’s index in order to enhance its video search results.

• The DoubleClick acquisition, while not firmly in line with Google’s stated mission, makes sense from a monetization perspective: acquiring DoubleClick’s network is simply a way to stretch the reach of AdSense.

But what about Google’s more bizarre deals?

When Google started investing millions of dollars into its online office suite (see Zenter), I have to admit, I started scratching my head. I couldn’t help but wonder:

“how in the hell does competing, or attempting to compete, with Microsoft Office help improve the quality of Google’s premiere product, its search results?”

The Jaiku deal had convinced me that something was wrong with Google; was it acting like a dog off a leash because of its newly improved profit margins? Or was someone high when they thought that microblogging was actually worth that much?

It all came crashing down on me when I read about Google Knol, the supposed “Wikipedia killer” under development by Google.

Google Knol is the Forefront of Google’s Strategy

Wikipedia is inherently anti-Capitalist; it’s a socially-driven (socialist) website. Argue it anyway you want it, but you’re not going to find a shred of monetized content anywhere on the site. As per the Wiki Media Foundation’s description, the website operates in a non-profit fashion with no advertisements anywhere on the site. Sounds pretty good, right?

Not if you’re Google.

Wikipedia is a PageRank monster and a traffic giant. I’m going to illustrate the sheer magnitude of WikiPedia’s power and, in the eyes of Google, untapped AdSense potential, that the site has using some statistical measurements:

• WikiPedia has an average PageRank between 8 and 9, the best possible rating being a 10. This means that WikiPedia is one of the highest linked-to sites in the world, and WikiPedia dominates in the search results for any keywords that are well-represented on WikiPedia’s pages. WikiPedia’s PageRank is so strong, in fact, that certain “black hat” SEO optimizers can actually use WikiPedia to bump off an opponent’s page from the top of the search engine rankings.
• WikiPedia is rated as the 12th-most visited site in the world by Quantcast, reaching 43 million Americans a month on average.
• WikiPedia is rated as the 8th-most visted site in the world, according to Amazon’s Alexa Service.

As you can see, WikiPedia is retains a large audience and places very well across a broad range of search erms, and Google Knol is Google’s attempt to get a piece of the pie.

Maybe Google is just trying to pressure WikiPedia into giving in and serving up AdSense content; it’d be awfully hard for Google to lure contributors away from WikiPedia and have them build up Google Knol to the same level of maturity that WikiPedia has reached over the course of its short life thus far.

Google already has a plan for luring contributors, however.

Everything comes back to AdSense with Google. I noticed this gem when I was reading up on Google Knol:

[Google Knol] will allow editors to place Adsense advertisers on their content and Google will share the revenue with them. At first, Google won’t verify the content introduced on Knol and so, as the company announced, everybody is free to publish whatever he/she wants.

Google’s grand strategy has shifted away from trying to become the best in search; it’s already won that battle for the most part. No, Google has moved on from trying to monetize the first click with paid search to trying to monetize the second click with Google AdSense.

Google has moved on from trying to “organize the world’s information;” it’s much more interested in quickly becoming the world’s largest advertising network and owning the most advertising real estate.

Think about it; why else would Google do the following:

• Launch GMail and give out 5 gigs of email space for free (keep in mind that an email client is a site-model that produces a large number of page views for each browsing instance);
• Launch an online office suite, which by design gives users long-exposure to a single set of advertisements;
• Build OpenSocial, a tool which could potentially give AdSense advertisers access to every major social network in the world (except Facebook, for now;)
• Buy YouTube, the world’s largest user-driven video portal;
• Buy out DoubleClick, one of the world’s largest online advertising networks;
• and lastly, build an AdSense-driven Wikipedia clone?

Obviously, it’s to help create more real estate for AdSense.

AdSense is the wave of the future for Google, and if you look down deep enough, you’ll see that all of Google’s latest moves have been to create either high-PageView pieces of AdSense real estate (GMail, Google Documents) or high-breadth real-estate (YouTube, Knol).

So that’s my $0.02. Feel free to ad yours.

If you run a Web 2.0 company or a prestidgious Web 2.0 blog, please, don’t bother writing any articles about the following. Not only does it make you look desperate for content and attention, but it will ultimately prove to be a waste of PR dollars.

Breaking: Facebook/MySpace/Some other Web 2.0 service Redesigned its Graphical User Interface

Today as I was perusing AjaxNinja’s authority on Technorati I noticed that they had upgraded their interface since the last time I had used it a few days ago. I immediately thought “you know, if this were Facebook, I bet my RSS reader would be polluted with posts on it,” hence the inspiration for this article.

Unless you’re doing something revolutionary with your UI, like Amazon’s “one-click” shopping (which they don’t have a monopoly over anymore, fyi), then most readers don’t care. The last thing I want to read about is how some lame Web 2.0 firm outsourced an AJAX hack job to a bunch of script kiddies from Palo Alto who managed to produce 13,000 lines of JavaScript just to get mouse-over tool tips.

News Flash: No one cares but a bunch of geek fanboys who would still love the Web 2.0 outfit in question even if its executives dressed up as Hitler Youth for Halloween.

David vs. Goliath Posts - How a Handful of Web 2.0 Startups with No User Base are Going to Defeat Microsoft/Google

If you want a great example of a laughable David vs. Goliath post, check out Robert Scoble’s Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years entry. I’m confident that Mahalo won’t be around in four years; the only time I have ever heard of TechMeme is when Scoble brings it up; and we’ll be lucky if Zuckerberg isn’t brought up before an SEC investigation for unlawful business practices before then.

Number 8 of Guy Kawasaki’s The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs is “Oracle is too big/dumb/slow to be a threat.” It can really be any company, but Guy uses Oracle as an example. Simply, if your Web 2.0 company tries to claim that it’s going to unseat an 800 pound gorilla, like how Live Documents claimed that it would unseat Microsoft Office, you’re going to make your operation look like a pack of naive fools.

It makes me laugh just reading this stuff, simply because the people who write it are so drunk on their own Kool-Aid or just plain stupid that they are bold enough to commit such arrogance to writing.

Web 2.0 Outfit A Received $5 Million Or Less from Venture Outfit X

If a Web 2.0 company receives a tiny sliver of venture capital (relatively speaking,) it’s simply not news-worthy content. Sure, it might assuage your angel investors if your web 2.0 outfit scored a hit with some funding, but they’re going to be in the loop during the negotiating to begin with; worthless “momentum” posts like these need to be deleted on sight.

Time to make good on my promise for some new Facebook-related content this week.

I’ve spent the past two weeks grinding away on an Facebook.NET-powered Facebook application that relies on the FBML approach for user interfaces and it’s finally finished.

Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to share some wisdom I accrued during the course of this last development cycle.

Use User Controls for FBML/UI Reuse

Custom server controls are often unnecessary for a lot of the needs of typical FBML-powered interfaces in Facebook.NET. They can take a while to program and given how rapidly the FBML standards are changing, they will require a large amount of maintenance. In addition the HTML writer classes don’t support the FBML markup.

User Controls, on the other hand, offer a cheap, robust way to reuse user interface elements without any additional coding.

Example 1:

A quick example of where a user control might be necessary is the stylesheet element.

One of the drawbacks of FBML is that you can’t import external stylesheets into your FBML elements, thus you have to hardcode any custom CSS elements into those lovely <style> tags that we are so found of.

It’s bad practice to copy and paste the style sheet from page to page; we want to maintain the stylesheet from a single location, which is why we have external stylesheets to begin with.

Obviously, we should stick the stylesheet into a User Control and insert that tag on pages where we need stylesheets. You can also use MasterPages and Themes to potentially resolve this issue, but in my experience, User Controls offer the most flexibility.

Here’s a quick bit of sample code:

FacebookCSS.ascx

<%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="FacebookCSS.ascx.cs"
Inherits="Controls_FacebookCSS" %>
<style>
p, body{
font:10px/12px arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
color: #022e37;
}
a:link{
text-decoration: none;
}
a:visited{
text-decoration: none;
}
a:active{
text-decoration: none;
}
a:hover{

text-decoration: underline;
}
</style>

Web.config (relevant sections only)

<pages>
<controls>
<add tagPrefix="fb" assembly="FacebookNET.Web" namespace="Facebook.Web"/>
<add tagPrefix="fb" assembly="FacebookNET.Web" namespace="Facebook.Web.IFrame"/>
<add tagPrefix="FBNet" tagName="FacebookCSS" src="~/FacebookCSS.ascx"/>
<add tagPrefix="FBNet" tagName="FBJS" src="~/FBJS.ascx"/>
</controls>
</pages>

MasterPage.Master

<%@ Master Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="MasterPage.master.cs" Inherits="MasterPage" EnableTheming="true" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="Facebook.Service" %>
<fb:FacebookApplication runat="server" ID="FacebookApplication"
ApplicationName="Facebook.NET App" Mode="Fbml"
EnableDebugging="true" EnableAjaxScenarios="true"></fb:FacebookApplication>
<fb:fbml version="1.0">
<FBNet:FacebookCSS ID="FBCss" runat="server" />
<FBNet:FBJS ID="FBJS" runat="server" />
<fb:dashboard>
<fb:action href="Default.aspx">Home</fb:action>
<fb:action href="About.aspx">About</fb:action>
</fb:dashboard>
<div class="primary_container">
<asp:contentplaceholder id="ContentPlaceHolder1" runat="server">
</asp:contentplaceholder>
</div>
</fb:fbml>

Although this tip is somewhat simple, it will allow you to design your FBML application as though you were using an external stylesheet, although you’ll be editing a .ASCX file instead of a .CSS one, I suppose. Regardless, this will serve as a fine substitute for external stylesheets.

I’ll have a few bigger posts up this week about Facebook Applications and Social Media, but I wanted to rattle off this sucker real quick since I’m buying a new laptop.

If you’re buying a new desktop or laptop and you want to do ASP.NET debugging locally, you need to have one of the following operating system:

• Windows XP Professional
• Windows Vista Ultimate
• Windows Vista Business
• Windows Vista Entreprise

I know Windows Server 2003 also works but I can’t imagine anyone putting that on a desktop or laptop designed for personal/work related use.

I hope everyone’s having a good Thanksgiving! I’m in the midst some heavy development currently (that’s how I like to celebrate the holidays) so I’m a bit behind on some of my social media articles; however I thought I’d share some of the .NET 2.0 resources I’ve been using for my current project!

Yes, I know the big news is that .NET 3.5 went live yesterday and now everyone’s trying to get their mitts on Visual Studio 2008 Web Developer Express, but come on, it’s jnot realistic for me to start moving all of my projects to .NET 3.5 right away (I wouldn’t have anywhere to host them, for one.)

In addition I’m keeping the list down to 5 for this week, simply because I only have the 5 helpful articles for this week.

1. Output Caching in ASP.NET 2.0 - Learn how to use partial and full Output caching (meaning HTML output produced by ASP.NET) to decrease the amount of processing done by the ASP.NET host. I use shared Output caching (meaning the cache is shared among all users of the service) extensively in many of the Facebook applications that I am developing.

2. Themes in ASP.NET 2.0 - I had never used themes until my most recent project, since they seem to conflict with Master Pages in some annoying areas, but this article on OdeToCode gave me a lot of help figuring out how to use them, specifically how to override the theme in the Page_PreInit function.

3. Master Pages: Tips, Tricks, and Traps - Speaking of Master Pages, OdeToCode’s master page article was helpful as well. Themes and Master Pages bump heads at certain intervals, and I may even write an article about my experience with that, but again OdeToCode’s master page tips helped me work around some of those issues.

4. A Custom ASP.NET Server Control for Displaying RSS Feeds - The title is somewhat self-explanatory; the dudes at 4GuysFromRolla lay out some easy-to-follow instructions on how to build a smart ASP.NET server control for consuming RSS feeds.

5. XSL Transformations using ASP.NET - A detailed guide on how to apply XSL transformations on the server-side using ASP.NET.

I have not included resources for launching your own business in this list; I will, in all likelihood, write a separate post on that subject in the future. It’s much harder finding resources about JOINING a startup than it is to find them about starting one.

Again, everyone’s an expert but me

Why You Should Join a Startup

• Nine Questions to Ask a Startup - Guy Kawasaki’s blog How to Change the World and 9 questions you need to ask any startup before joining it.
• Altgate: 10 Things to Consider Before Joining a Startup - Altgate has good list of things one needs to take into account when considering a startup for employment, specifically concerns that may not necessarily arise when applying for a job with a larger, mature firm.
• Monster.com Career Advice: Pros and Cons of Joining a Startup - Monster.com, the world’s most powerful job site, offers some basic advice on the pros and cons of joining a startup.
• Top 10 Reasons to Join a Startup - 10 convincing reasons why you should consider joining a startup company.
• The Value of Leadership: Why Start-Up Ventures Need a Steady Hand at the Helm - What to look for in the leadership of a startup company.

How to Join a Startup

• FAQ: How to Get a Job at a Silicon Valley Startup - Explains the pros and cons of startups
• 5 Tips for Landing a Job at a Startup - Covers the search process, some of the pay-grade challenges, and other issues facing job-hunters looking to land a startup.
• Startup Hiring: Why You Should Date Before Getting Married - This article comes from a startup owners’ perspective; basically startup owners should flirt around with a number of potential employees before settling on a hire.
• WorkMash: How to decide if you should join a start-up - Assuming you land a job, now you need to know how to decide if you should take it or not.
• How to Hire like a Startup - Again, more advice geared towards employers, but it can’t hurt to see what’s going on on the other side of the interview table.
• InfoWorld: How to get a job at a hot startup - Self-explanatory title, hopefully.
• Everything You Wanted to Know About Getting a Job in Silicon Valley But Didn’t Know Who to Ask - More good stuff from Guy Kawasaki.

Resumes & Interviews

• FAQ: Writing Your Resume for Silicon Valley - Explains how to write a resume for jobs targeted at Silicon Valley firms.
• The Simple Dollar: How to Construct a Killer Resume, From Start to Finish - A great step-by-step guide for building a solid resume.
• InterviewUp - Online resource for researching popular interview questions and answers to them.
• Nine Steps to Acing a Job Interview - Not specific to Silicon Valley, but provides a good frame for understanding the “behavioral interview.”
• VentureLoop Blog: Basic Startup Resume Construction - How to target a resume specifically for startup companies, written by the CEO of VentureLoop.

Compensation

• Key Compensation Components - This guide breaks down and explains all of the key compensation components one will find during job hunts.
• Establishing a Fair Equity Allocation within a Startup Venture - A handy set of resources for understanding equity allocation within a startup venture; startups, which are often short on cash, will often try to use easy access to equity (ownership) as a tool to leverage new hires. Read some of the resources listed here to gain a better understanding of how fair equity allocation works.
• How Much are the Stock Options in a Start-Up Worth? - A guide for determining just how much those “awesome stock options” are actually worth.

Finding Jobs in Silicon Valley (and Elsewhere)

• FAQ: Jobs in Silicon Valley - Great list of resources for finding jobs in Silicon Valley.
• VentureLoop - Web-based job boards for several major Silicon Valley venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.
• StartupSearch - Directory of web-based startups.
• CrunchBoard - TechCrunch’s job board.
• 37 Signal’s Job Board - Another Silicon Valley job board.
• GigaOm Jobs - Yet… another… Silicon… Valley…. job… board.
• Guy Kawasaki’s Job Board - So… many… job… boards.

General Resources & Libraries

• Y-Combinator Startup Library - Full listing of Y-Combinator’s articles in their startup library
• On Startups - A community for entrepreneurs; lots of articles and resources.
• StartupNation - by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs; another large startup community.

If you have any good resources on finding and JOINING a startup company, please leave some links in the comments and I will append them to this list.

Just a quick post for today, but a valuable one nonetheless. I have mentioned before how I prefer developing Facebook.NET applications using the Iframe method of implementation, namely because I didn’t think it was possible to debug FBML implementations on the localhost.

Cameron, an AjaxNinja reader, found the following comment on Nikhil’s blog, which explains how you can debug FBML on the localhost:

JustinM
Posted on 10/22/2007 @ 7:14 AM
Manjit,

Yes you can debug locally with fbml apps. What I did is get a free dynamic dns (gotdns.com), port forward port 80 (actually in my case port 8080, as some other machine is using 80) directly to my development laptop that has IIS running (Vista Ultimate, note the Application Pool may need to be set to “classic”).

Then made a local dns entry in windows\system32\etc\hosts file to have the dns entry point to 127.0.0.1 for resolving url’s that point directly to my site (images). Everything works fine.

While I haven’t tried this yet (I’m still developing my applications in IFrame), I may give it a go if I keep running into an annoying post-back issue that causes my application to force existing users to re-add it.

Nice find, Cameron!

Update

I received a couple of emails from Cameron this morning; apparently this Dynamic DNS solution isn’t as easy as it sounded initially:

Having been running into issues the the DNS redirect solution.

1. You need access to your WIFI access point to complete the port
   forwarding.
   This rules out mobile workers, ie. coffee shops
2. host file will need to be updated every time your DHCP server assigns
   a new IP
3. I have been able to get past the above two but have had some issues
   discovering the IP that points to my default gateway’s IP.

Hope this helps with your article. I will send any other suggestions
that arise.

Thanks for the great feedback!

A lot of people have heard of DotNetNuke, SubSonic, and some of the other big name .NET open source projects, but I want to talk about a few products that I have used that I think are worth discussing. I’m a big fan of user-friendly open-source, which all of these applications are (DotNetNuke fails in this regard), so my list will reflect that.

ScrewTurn Wiki

ScrewTurn is a piece of software that I’ve used on a couple of different DiscountASP.NET deployments. It has all of the basic features of a Wiki engine, but what I really like about ScrewTurn Wiki is the ease of deployment.

Cool Features:

• Doesn’t require a database, but does include an optional DB provider.
• Takes only a few minutes to deploy.
• Allows collaborative editing and has a wealthy number of administration features.
• Requires no server/database tweaking.
• Rapid response times.

Drawbacks:

• Uses a ton of service handlers to serve up pages; ScrewTurn wiki relies pretty heavily upon session-based data and I’ve had experiences where this has decimated my PageRank scores since Google ends up indexing a ton of .ashx pages (service handler extension) with compressed session hash-code stuffed in the URL, so this can really decimate your PageRank. ScrewTurn’s main page has a PageRank of 5, however, so perhaps they’ve made some changes since I last used it to improve its search engine optimization.
• I’ve had one of my wiki pages hacked and defaced before with strict security settings applied; I’m not sure how they did it, but there were some definite security problems with ScrewTurn.

The Verdict: ScrewTurn is a great tool for creating general documentation and it’s a really straight forward content management system for “horizontal” websites, meaning websites that publish content in no particular order. I do not recommend ScrewTurn for mission-critical applications, given some of the problems i mentioned.

BlogEngine.NET Blogging Platform

I’m running two different instances of BlogEngine.NET currently; one up at the AjaxNinja lab and another on my new project, which I may mention on AjaxNinja at some point in the future. BlogEngine.NET is another great open-source project which is very easy to deploy.

Cool Features:

• Doesn’t require a database, but does include an optional DB provider.
• Takes only a few minutes to deploy.
• Responds very quickly; handles traffic waves very well.
• Has a great project leader, Mads Kristensen.
• Project is developing quickly and has been met with a lot of enthusiasm from the .NET community.
• Supports multiple authors.
• Has native support for using FeedBurner as an alternate RSS/Feed source.
• It is incredibly easy to modify themes for BlogEngine.NET. It’s much easier than WordPress by contrast.

DrawBacks:

• BlogEngine.NET is still a young project; it has some kinks.
• BlogEngine.NET is a new entrant to the arena of blogging platforms; it’s missing a lot of the functionality that seasoned bloggers expect from established open source blogging engines like WordPress and Movable Type.
• Few published extensions.
• Limited number of available themes. It is incredibly easy to make your own themes, however.
• For some reason, BlogEngine.NET’s editor does not cooperate with FireFox’s built-in spell checker, so I have to manually spell check all of my published works.

The Verdict: BlogEngine.NET is a great blogging platform, and it’s only going to get better as the project progresses and more rich functionality is added by both the development team and contributors. I’ve got a number of my own extensions that I’m going to be writing (time permitting) in the near future, and I’ll make those public to the community.

I’d highly recommend using BlogEngine.NET if you need a lightweight, simple blogging platform; if you need a complicated, multi-blog community, you’d be better off using a proprietary product like Community Server 2007.

DotNetKicks Community-Driven News Platform

Alright, I have to admit, I have not yet deployed DotNetKicks to a live server. I plan on using it for my other project that I kept mentioning, but the time is simply not right to deploy it yet. I’ve been a big fan of the actual DotNetKicks community for a few months now, and it is hands down the best place to get the latest news regarding .NET-based technology.

Cool Features:

• DotNetKicks may be one of the strongest ASP.NET open-source projects to date. It helps when your primary user base happens to be .NET developers and enthusiasts.
• DotNetKicks is rich with a lot of features found on popular social news sites like Digg, such as the “kick spy,” “who’s online now,”and my favorite innovation, the “kick zeitgeist.”
• DNK utilizes SubSonic in order to build a reliable and sturdy data access layer.
• DNK incorporates a revenue sharing system with its contributors, which in my opinion helps create a stronger sense of “user ownership” in the community and provides a strong incentive to contribute.

Drawbacks:

• I’ve had some bad experiences with large-scale systems on my DiscountASP.NET shared hosting accounts lately; I’ve been told by the DNK developers that this won’t be an issue with DotNetKicks, but I’m a tad bit skeptical.
• These guys really need to roll all of their SQL commands into a single batch file; You have to execute 7-8 SQL scripts in a particular order to install the database properly.

The Verdict: I will be stoked once I deploy DotNetKicks to my other project; I love being a user of the actual DotNetKicks community, and managing my own little niche community sounds like it can be a lot of fun.

While I’ve been a bit behind on my buzz tapping for the week, I have been paying some attention to Google’s OpenSocial technology, which appears to be an implementation of the web 2.0 middleware concept that I described a couple of a weeks ago.

This technology may solve the “eggs in one basket” problem for web 2.0 application/widget developers, thus adding some stability to that blooming industry via standardization.

While I’m not surprised that someone sat down and actually made an API to implement a common framework, I am surprised that it happened this quickly. All of the major players, including MySpace, are aboard the OpenSocial train with one major exception: Facebook.

There’s some speculation as to whether Google didn’t invite Facebook to participate in the OpenSocial Platform (as Facebook claims) or whether Facebook simply did not want to participate, believing that it can stand strong against Google and all of the other social networks.

My Take:
Can Facebook beat out Google? Depends on how heavily Microsoft supports them and if Facebook can continue its current growth trend. However, I think Facebook would be insane not to adopt the open API; if it becomes more lucrative and stable to use the OpenSocial API over the just the F8 platform, then developers who are looking to just get started with social network widget/application development are going to move right past Facebook. In addition, given that OpenSocial is supported by Google, a staple of online business an a company that’s not going to disappear anytime soon, it makes OpenSocial a safer bet over Facebook.

Lastly, the number of potential users one can reach via the OpenSocial network is significantly larger than the number one can reach via F8; Facebook has 48-50 million users, roughly, whereas MySpace, an OpenSocial member, has 110 million by itself; Orkut, LinkedIn, and others all contribute additional millions of users, making the potential reach of an OpenSocial application significantly larger than Facebook’s alone.

Bottom Line:

The only risk for Facebook in joining the OpenSocial platform is that it gives Google the ability to dictate the terms and standards; Facebook may lose some of its own flexibility and control over its own platform! However, I still think it would be in Facebook’s interest to go ahead and adopt the OpenSocial standard, simply because they are the odd man out right now, and despite all of the buzz given to them by hapless Web 2.0 hype blogs, they are in a vulnerable position by virtue of the fact that the social network market place is highly unstable. Moving to the OpenSocial platform can only help them increase their stability.

I’m going to have a bigger post up this week about my new blog project that I’ve started, but I wanted to describe some bug issues that I’ve found with BlogEngine.NET in the course of running that project.

Yes, I’m using BlogEngine.NET (Community Server didn’t work out for reasons that I will explain later this week; I have a software engineering midterm tomorrow), and it’s been a painless experience for the most part.

However, two quick bugs:

1. Enabling Trim Stylesheets Under settings –> Advanced Settings can cause hidden HTTP 500 errors on the behalf of the style sheet renderer at random intervals, causing the blog to appear without any applied CSS. This can be resolved by simply unchecking the option.

2. For some reason, portions of the blog’s default copy appears in localized languages other than the one I specified. For instance, in the image below is some German (?) text when it should read “Related Posts” in English.

   

While the German text is annoying, at least I have a work-around for first issue.

On a related note, BlogEngine.NET performed magnificently under a medium-sized traffic wave this weekend

I had a decent sized traffic wave from a social media source on my other blog project this weekend, approximately 2000 unique visits in the span of 12 hours. I know it’s not exactly a “Digg effect” sized traffic wave, but the wave did hit within a couple of HOURS of BlogEngine.NET’s deployment and there were no hiccups at all for BlogEngine.NET.

This stands in stark contrast with my initial experience with WordPress, which would choke and start vomiting MySQL connection maxout errors under relatively modest traffic loads*. I guess that’s one of the benefits of not using a SQL database in your blogging engine.

After tomorrow’s exam I promise some more updates on my other blogging project, plus some more Facebook development tips and some other .NET-related musings.

*Note: I resolved those maxout problems by using WP-cache, which you can read about on my WordPress hacks for IIS page.

Update: The German letters have disappeared. I wonder why they even showed up in the first place?

Learn the Fundamentals

“Remember that all talent is founded on fundamentals and that fundamentals win it.” - Vince Lombardi

The fundamentals of programming are just as important to VB.NET programming as they are to developing in C#, C++, Java or any other language. Sure, you can be a weekend hobby programmer without knowing much OOP or using good programming practices. VB.NET makes it relatively easy to do this. However, if you’re going to program professionally, take the time to learn essentials
of structured programming, OOP, good UI design, algorithms and data structures, and so forth. Knowing these fundamentals will serve you well no matter what kind of applications you may end up writing. Also, you will find it much easier to switch to or borrow from other programming languages if you have this knowledge.

How can you learn these fundamentals? The best way is by writing programs that use them. For example, if you want to learn about stacks, write a Towers of Hanoi simulation using a stack. If you want to learn string parsing, find a real world application, such as a password strength rater, to write. Develop small, working, bits of code that you can build your base of knowledge upon. Simply memorizing Framework trivia may help you pass a certification test but it won’t help you in the real work world.

Find Your Niche

What kind of programming do you enjoy doing the most? Do you find designing web pages to be your strongest point? Or maybe it’s working with databases? As you work toward learning the fundamentals you will probably find yourself gravitating toward a particular type of development. When you do, work toward becoming an expert in this area. Keep applying the fundamentals but
also expand your knowledge out from there. Pretty soon you’ll find that you’re an expert in this field and that will help you in your work and beyond.

What if you don’t really have a niche? In that case, you still should continue to expand your knowledge with a generalist outlook. Experts sometimes can’t see the forest for the trees. You can offer insight that they may miss.

Apply Your Knowledge

As you begin your career, seek out places that allow you to really apply what you’ve learned. If you don’t find your skills challenged and improved by a job, you will soon find your skills diminishing. If you feel that you aren’t improving in your job or if you sense a kind of hopeless when you interview at a company, get out of that situation and find a place to work where your skills will be appreciated and can grow.

Another way you can keep your skills fresh is to write your own blog and/or participate in programming forums. This is a great way to hone your skills, to learn new things, and build relationships with other programmers.

I hope you’ve found this article helpful. I have to give Aaron a big “thank you” for allowing me to guest blog.

BIO: Frank Carr has been programming professionally for almost 20 years and has written production programs in MASM, C/C++, QuickBasic, VB Classic 1-6, VB.NET 2002/2003 and 2005, Classic ASP, and ASP.NET and dabbled a bit in C#, Java, and PHP. Visit his blog at Visual Basic Notebook for .NET if you’re interested in learning VB.NET. He posts about 3 VB.NET tutorial articles along with job interview practice questions every week.

Yesterday I wrote about history bracing to repeat itself by forcing developers to pick one widget API over another for social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and others. Facebook is the only platform that has a truly open API for widget developers at the moment, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to develop third-party content providers for popular social networks.

To summarize what I went over yesterday, with the upcoming release of Google’s API for Orkut and MySpace’s platform, which may or may not be releasing it’s open platform in the coming weeks, third-party application developers now have to weigh their options when deciding what platform to support.

• Do I go with MySpace because it has the largest audience?
• Do I go with Facebook because it has the most developed API and the most buzz?
• Do I go with Orkut because it’s backed by Google, which may mean that it will have the most longterm viability?
• Do I go with LinkedIn because it has the most business users, who are more likely to spend money than the younger audiences on Facebook and MySpace?

Quick factual note: LinkedIn has indeed announced that it’s going to launch it’s own third-party application API, although it’s going to keep out the goofiness of Facebook applications.

The bottom line is: should you trust any single one of these social networks with your business?

Not if you don’t have to.

A quick history lesson. In the early 1990s Professor Douglas Schmidt came up with a radical idea: to develop a framework to encapsulate all of the common low-level business objects in the POSIX and Win32 OS APIs into a common object-oriented wrapper facade.

Professor Schmidt’s idea came to fruition through the development of the Adaptive Communication Envrionment (ACE), which not only encapsulates all of the common OS resources into OO classes (threading, processes, synchronization mechanisms), but also simulates some OS features that aren’t traditionally available on particular operating systems (ACE simulates POSIX condition variables on Windows using the Win32 “event” API). ACE effectively allows developers to build software that can manipulate operating-system level resources in a platform-independent way.

When I had my revelation yesterday after reading Dave McClure’s post about social network monetization, I immediately recognized another application of Schmidt’s wrapper facade concept.

Develop a Web 2.0 Middleware Service - a Common Set of API calls that can be applied to any social network

Why not create an Adaptive Communication Environment for Web 2.0 APIs for social networks? Here’s what this “Web 2.0 Middleware” would do:

• Encapsulate common data objects found on all social networks (Profiles, Friends, etc..) into a handful of robust abstract data types
• Simulate uncommon data objects to add additional functionality for social networks. For instance, develop a Middleware-standard equivalent of the Facebook Newsfeed for MySpace/LinkedIn/Orkut, thus you can effectively extend the utility of existing social networks
• Implement a common data tier which can intelligently differentiate users from each social network; perhaps even allow for cross-network friending and publication.
• Handle all social network authentication processes intelligently without specific instructions from the applications; the application designers would provide their API keys for the respective interfaces and the middleware would be able to rout all of the proper inputs and outputs to and from the corresponding social networks dynamically.
• Invert control away from the third-party application and handle all communications with the social network platforms, return to the application only when that communication has been executed. Inversion of control is a standard property of frameworks.

How would the middleware be implemented? What would it’s interface be like?

Here’s a couple of places to start:

• A good place to start would be to adopt Facebook’s current API as the standard, since there has already been a considerable amount of time and money invested into developing Facebook applications. Why force developers to learn yet another API when we can simply develop our objects around the current defacto standard? This would not only eliminate the initial learning curve to adjust to the middleware, but it would also effectively allow application developers to plug their existing Facebook applications into MySpace & LinkedIn with no refactoring.

• The middleware should only adopt the current Facebook API and not the entire lifecycle of Facebook’s API because to do so would give Facebook an unfair competitive advantage over the other social networks. After the adoption of the current F8 API, the constant growth and expansion of the middleware’s API would be determined solely by the middleware developers and users.

I have a lot of ideas regarding whether the middleware should be developed as a stand-alone client library, but that has its own problems. Unlike ACE which only needed to be programmed in one language, C++, a web 2.0 middleware would need to be able to support the mirth of languages used by web developers. Ruby-on-Rails, PHP, .NET, Java, Python, and lord knows what else.

So the question would be then how would you develop a multi-platform solution that can handle all of these different languages, server configurations, and operating systems without needing to be rewritten in each and every supported language?

I do not have a certain answer to that question. That’s the real engineering challenge behind this concept. Personally, I’d just develop the middleware as a proxy web service, build a business around allowing application developers to use it, and charge app developers a premium on bandwidth once they go beyond a marginal amount of usage.

On that note, have a good weekend. Time to try out my new 22′ monitor with some Team Fortress Classic 2.

Edit: If there’s any resonant interest I’ll write another post covering some of the obvious problems this middleware approach would have, like the instability of the underlying platforms, and some more business/software modeling ideas. Leave a comment or shoot me an email via the contact form.