<url>http://blog.hypothesistech.com/images/RSS2Image.gif</url> <link>http://blog.hypothesistech.com/Default.aspx</link> <width>77</width> <height>60</height> </image> <item> <title>Hosting on Amazon Web Services</h1> <article> <h1>Hosting on Amazon Web Services</h1> <p>Hypothesis — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 04:12:00 GMT</p> I just moved this blog and our <a href="http://www.hypothesistech.com/">corporate website</a> to a new host. I decided to go with Amazons Web Services (AWS). They offer all sorts of packages but basically what you are getting is your own server. You get to chose some performance parameters (like RAM) and the base OS. The base OS choices are Linux (Red Hat and Ubuntu) and Windows Server 2008. With Windows you also get to choose what kind of SQL Server you want.<br /> <br /> Since you have your own server you can install whatever you want on it and have complete control over your web environment. Of course any large website should have its own server. But where AWS, and other cloud computing services, can really shine is with sites that have been on shared hosting. Shared hosting is usually fine for small, simple websites that don't get much traffic. But shared hosting suffers from all sorts of restrictions that can result in lots of time spent getting a website to work properly. The beauty of AWS is that you only pay for what you use. So for small websites they can have their own server for a cost close to what many shared hosting plans typically costs. <br /> <br /> Another advantage with cloud hosting is the system is designed to allow you to quickly ramp up your hosting if you experience higher than average demand. This is a very attractive feature. Many websites can experience sudden jumps in visitors. For instance retailer websites can get a lot of traffic before Christmas. Their traffic can easily double during this period. With cloud hosting it is easy to just add a server to accommodate this extra demand. By doing it this way you aren't paying for more than what you need for most of the year.<br /> <br /> With AWS it takes only a few minutes to get up and running. Your basic account set up takes no more than five minutes. Getting a new server also takes no more than five minutes. So you can be RDPing into your server within ten minutes of starting the process. Of course you'll have to set up your server. That can take a while. It took me about an hour to get my Windows server set up properly. <br /> <br /> The best news is Amazon offers <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/free/">one free year of cloud service</a>. They limit this to their 'micro' plan, which has about half the power of their 'small' plan. But for many small websites this micro plan may be enough and certainly is no worse than typical shared hosting. </article> <article> <h1>How to accommodate smaller screen sizes with Drupal's Zen Template</h1> <p>Hypothesis — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:23:08 GMT</p> Making a website that accommodates different browsers and screen sizes is always a challenge. Deciding what screen size to target can be difficult. 1024x768 is considered an acceptable size to target these days. Fewer people are using 800x600 resolutions. But these people cant be ignored. The issue is especially important if you have a web design that uses a right sidebar to contain the site navigation. This style of navigation is especially popular with blog designs. With this design if a user has a smaller resolution than you are targeting the visitor will have to scroll to navigate. This could become quite annoying after looking at several pages.<br /> <h3>A Javascript Solution</h3> This problem can be easily solved with javascript. What you want to do is to detect the screen width on load and assign different properties to the sidebar to get it to display on the left rather than the right. In the code provided I am using Drupal's Zen fixed layout template. This template is great in that it allows you to easily use standard areas for content e.g. header, left sidebar, right sidebar, footer, closure and so on. It defines the layout in CSS that works well across all the major browsers. And it takes SEO into consideration by using negative margins to allow the sidebars to come after the content in the HTML. <br /> <br /> In the scenario I am accommodating there is no left sidebar and a right sidebar with the navigation. When the page loads I call a detect screen width script. If the screen width is less than 1024 the margins for the right sidebar and content are reset. Essentially the right sidebar and content are given the margin's that would normally be assigned to the left sidebar. The script makes use of jQuery to append an onload function to the the load event. <br /> <br /> <br /> <pre class="csharpcode">$(document).ready( DetectScreenSize ); <br /><br />function DetectScreenSize() <br />{ <br /> if (screen.width<1024) <br /> { <br /> $("#sidebar-right").css( {'margin-left':'0'}); <br /> $("#sidebar-right").css( {'margin-right':'-200px'}); <br /> $("#content").css( {'margin-left':'200px'}); <br /> $("#content").css( {'margin-right':'-960px'}); <br /> } <br />}<br /></pre> <br /> <br /> As you can see the script is really simple. If you normally have a left sidebar as well you could also assign it the properties that the right sidebar normally has effectively reversing their layout. </article> <article> <h1>Web Design using ASP.Net MVC</h1> <p>Hypothesis — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:22:05 GMT</p> ASP.Net is a great platform for building websites. The original architecture pushed developers down the path of using their form model for delivering content. This approach forces a web page to act very much like a form in a classic winforms application complete with event handling. The benefit of this was it was easy to transition from a classic winforms developer to a web developer. The drawbacks, well they are many.<br /> <br /> The biggest drawbacks, as far as a web designer is concerned, are<br /> <ul> <li>Search Engine Optimization</li> <li>Limitation of a single form per page</li> <li>Size of the rendered HTML</li> </ul> Microsoft has been working on a MVC model for ASP.Net. As of March, 3rd 2009 release candidtate 2 is available. I've taken some time to play around with MVC and so far really like it. It solves those three main problems quite well.<br /> <br /> Search Engine Optimization is made much easier due to the routing library. This allows you to register wildcard paths with IIS. These paths are mapped to a handler. In truth this works much like the HttpHandler routes some people might be familiar with. The routing framework is much more robust. Not only does it route urls but it can parse constituent parts of a url and pass them as variables to the 'handler.' So you can easily have a url like '/Products/{ID}.' Or even '/Products/{name}.' The advantage here is more to the developer as he no longer has to create a physical page for each web page. Instead a page correlates more to a method. A lot of rather reduntant code in the form of pages can be removed from a project.<br /> <br /> The single form limitation of ASP.Net is removed. You can now have as many forms as you'd like. This of course comes at a loss of the page event model that we are familiar with. But for experienced web developers this should not be a problem. Since the web is a disconnected environment full of requests and responses that event model was always an attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole. Now you are directly in control of where you post back to. If your web design calls for a sidebar search it is no problem to implement. Of course the old page model allowed you to have additional forms. But any form other than the main server side form was outside of the model. This change is more in the consistency of your programming approach. Now there is no longer this special server side form. All post backs occur in a similar manner.<br /> <br /> In order to get the page event model to work ASP.Net took control of your content's id tags. Nested controls were identified by their id combined with their parent's id. This made for a lot of hard work using web designs that rely on a lot of javascript. MVC removes this burden. Your ids will be the same in the rendered HTML as they were in the design. This also helps reduce the size of your HTML. But the biggest advantage with HTML size is in losing the viewstate. Again this is a philosophical approach change more than anything. The old model tried to mimic a windows application. The MVC world has web designers thinking more like the web actually works. Each request is figured to be unique. The downside of this is that developers have to handle tracking data across requests when that is a requirement.<br /> <br /> This new framework should allow web designers and developers to more easily work together. Of course this promise has been hard to fulfill. The original Asp.Net page model made this claims. Real life did not seem to verify this.<br /> <br /> From my point of view MVC is in some ways a step backward or an admission that the page model was problematic. When I say step backwards I dont mean it is a step in the wrong direction. The page model was a path heading in the wrong direction. It simply had too many flaws.<br /> <br /> MVC web developers will have to go back to doing some of the work Asp.Net did for us. In some ways it is like moving back to 'Classic' ASP as far as how we program a site. Thankfully there are some contributed libraries that help make our work easier. <br /> <br /> All in all I look forward to developing websites using ASP.Net MVC. I think it is the right direction to go in and we'll see lots of improvements in productivity once people start using it. I just wish we had a good CMS built on this!<br /> <br /> <h3> </h3> </article> <article> <h1>CSS Friendly Menu Adapter Problem in IE</h1> <p>Hypothesis — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:22:50 GMT</p> Part of good web design is keeping your web page size small. Anyone who uses ASP.Net knows that its default HTML rendering is often very bloated and relies heavily on tables for layout. A great solution to this problem is to use the CSS Friendly Adapters toolkit. <br /> <br /> I was working on a website whose design called for a left sidebar panel with a drop down menu, really I guess it is a drop out menu. CSS Friendly adapters consider this is a vertical menu. The menu has a top level stack of menu items. When you hover over the menu items sub menus appear to the right. I was using the CSS Friendly adapters and found that my menu worked perfectly for Firefox. But as anyone who does web design knows Internet Explorer (IE) is another story.<br /> <br /> In IE, and this was version 7, when I hovered over a top level menu item the submenu would appear to the right as expected. However, there was a gap between the top level link text and the submenu. When you moved the pointer off of the top level menu text the side menu would disappear. To be clear, in IE the only way a submenu would appear is if you were directly over the top menu text.<br /> <h3>The Fix</h3> What fixed the problem for me was setting the background color for the top level ul. In my original test the page had a white background as did the top level menu as it simply inherited the color set for the page. The submenu did have a different color. In trying to debug I started to set background colors to to verify the widths of my various menu items. I gave the 'ul.AspNet-Menu' class identifier a background color of gray. That immediately fixed the problem. I could now move the pointer off of the menu text and the submenu would continue to display. In experimenting I then set the background color to white, making it the same color as the page but now explicitly setting it. To my suprise that also worked. So it seems that setting a background color, any color fixed this problem.<br /> <br /> I cant say I understand the cause of this problem. Anyone doing web design is constantly amazed by the wierdness of IE. But this problem is to me one of the more bizzare. If anyone has any insight as to why this worked I'd love to hear from them. </article> <article> <h1>Godaddy Website Redesign</h1> <p>Hypothesis — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:35:48 GMT</p> Godaddy has redesigned their website recently. Their previous web design would be best described as compressed. They had tons of functional links crammed into as small a space as possible. It kind of hurt the eyes to read their pages. And it was easy to miss something as there was so much information jammed onto any one page. <br /> <br /> The new design is nothing too exciting. They dark grays and linear gradients ala late 1990s early 200s. But they do manage to make the page less clutured. And that is good. <br /> <br /> What is not good is it seems to me that whatever they did in revamping the site has made is extremely slow. Godaddy needs to be fast. I think speed is far more important for existing customers than the layout. Sure it is easier to find things, but you have to wait at least 3 times longer to load the page you want. Who would want to buy website hosting from a company whose own website runs so slow? The worst part is they use ASP.Net. They are giving PHP fanboys ammunition by having such a slow, high visibility site run on the .Net platform.<br /> <br /> Godaddy needs to make it a priorty to get their website back to the performance it had before the upgrade. That previous level was nothing too great, but it was acceptable. Their current performance is not. </article> </main></body></html>