Here comes the attribute ClientIDMode to the rescue. Simply stating ClientIDMode="Static" tells .NET to keep the id to what we assigned it. Front end developers, rejoice!

[code]
/* pseudocode */
if(IsSecureConnection){ }else{ }
[/code]

In debugging some code on our site, I noticed that the aforementioned stylesheet was only linked in the Secure check, and forgotten in the else.

Lo and behold, you can avoid these confusions by including your external references without the protocol included. That’s right, drop off the http: and just leave two slashes and the link, as follows:
[code] [/code]

It works perfectly and you can simplify your server code. C’est magnifique! I’m not sure about older browsers, so if you run into an issue, leave a comment and I’ll note my post accordingly.

This works well except in the instance where a user has activated the Skype Firefox Extension.

What is the Skype Firefox Extension? Skype is a messaging tool that also allows users to make phone calls over the web through your computer. The Firefox extension is a tool that visually highlights the phone numbers on the webpage (from what I can tell Firefox has soft-disabled the add-on for now but all of our users had previously installed it and/or re-enabled it). You can then click on the phone numbers and call them with Skype. Pretty handy, right? Yeah! So what’s the problem?

Well, the issues vary per site. To accomplish the highlight, the plugin injects some HTML around the phone number with inline styles to alter background color to highlight. For our case, the faulty injected syntax breaks the valid XHTML – inputting a tabIndex=-1 (without valid attribute markers) which breaks our XML conversion to PDF.

According to Skype’s Program Manager:

[T]here is a tag that you could use to make sure that the toolbar does not parse your web page for phone numbers.
Please insert this tag and no numbers will be highlighted.
<meta name="SKYPE_TOOLBAR" content="SKYPE_TOOLBAR_PARSER_COMPATIBLE" />

The meta tag works for some but not for others. In our case it did not work (the code was still injected) and we had to manually search for those class names and strip them out prior to export for the PDF builder. Following the manual stripping, it returned the DOM to valid XML and the conversion proceeded without fanfare.

Covering all of your bases develops quite the headache.

Stubbornella develops a brilliant heading class naming convention to handle this new development in front end writing. Typically, I disapprove of classitis in headings. However, with this growth in HTML regarding sections and headings, my opinion must evolve in like manner.

For future reference for myself, in case Stubbornella disappears before I do, the class suggestions are as follows:

[css]
.tera {}
.giga {}
.mega {}
.kilo {}
.hecto {}
.deca {}
.deci {}
.centi {}
.milli {}
.micro {}
.nano {}
.pico {}
[/css]

Which is implemented as:
[html]

Me on the web…

More stuff on the web

[/html]

Please visit Stubbornella and read the whole article. It developed my thinking to a more complete view.

Just a note, dear reader, that I came into this project after it was already written and was trying to eliminate some bugs as I was finding them.

So, there was no doctype. Interestingly, IE will throw the document into Quirks mode if no doctype is found. Did you know that? I sure didn’t.

What is Quirks mode?

Quirks mode refers to a technique used by some web browsers for the sake of maintaining backward compatibility with web pages designed for older browsers, instead of strictly complying with W3C and IETF standards in standards mode.

To sum up, it will make all versions of IE start to behave like IE5.5. Yikes, right? That’s what I thought. That’s actually the intended behavior, though. Just in case they had problems, developers could omit the doctype and thus have their tried & true version of IE. QuirksMode.org thoroughly explains it and tells us the rationale behind these decisions. It’s also called “DOCTYPE switching”.

Apparently all of this was already developed by the time I started learning web development, and so this was all new to me. Perhaps this will help you on a headachy night if you have to work on some code that relies on Quirks mode!

All references I found useful in learning about this matter:

• Activating Browser Modes with Doctype
• Quirks mode (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
• Quirks mode and strict mode
• Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 – by Aaron Gustafson

No. You mustn’t smatter your document with !importants. In fact, I have never, with CSS that I myself have written from the start, required the use of an !important. It is a matter of tracing the CSS specificity of what you’re trying to accomplish.

In the office, I was tasked with explaining CSS specificity to our newest team member. I struggle to explain without visual aids, so I pulled out our trusty whiteboard and put it to the test.

Every selector in CSS bears a numerical value, or weight.

Element selectors:

1 point

Class selectors:

10 points

id selectors:

100 points

With that in mind, I wrote out the following:

For accessibility, the CSS specificity example reads as follows:

[code]

[/code]

It then compares three selections and their weight.

1. #left p{} 100 points (#left) + 1 point (p) = 101 points
2. p.intro 1 points (p) + 10 points (.intro) = 11 points
3. #left p.intro 100 points (#left) + 1 point (p) + 10 points (.intro) = 111 points We have a winner!

So although all three selectors may have styles applied to them, in varying orders in the CSS document, whatever style is in the selector of the greatest weight wins our battle.

With that visual aid, our team member had a light bulb spark above his head, and there was much rejoicing.

The content from Zeldman’s talk rings true. I apologize for the slide references with no visuals – years have passed and those files have long ago bit the dust.

I took many more notes at that conference. Unfortunately, I have no clue where they are. Secrets of the CSS Jedi notes can be found referred to on this table of contents page for the Monday session.

Enjoy!

Writing the User Interface

By Jeffrey Zeldman

• Freshness counts more than looks
  • Bad code + bad design + bad IA = WHO CARES… if the content is fresh, these things do not matter. Case in point, MySpace.
• “Design helps people read less”. A “humane” feature.
• Hypertext: a different kind of narrative experience. It is an experience created by the user – hyperlinks, etc.
• Copy: easy and cheap to fix, and v. important (a brand opportunity).
• Guide Copy: the content explaining the site/content on the site
  • Blogger features fantastic guide copy (see slide): “Create in 3 easy steps: 1,2,3, create blog.”
  • Veer: “Preview type before you buy.” v. brief, and a good tone.
  • TimesSelect: “To continue reading this article, you must be a subscriber to TimesSelect” (“Okay” copy)
    • To continue reading this article, subscribe to TimesSelect (and make subscribe to TimesSelect a hyperlink – guide copy should enable you to continue your hypertext experience).
    • Someone from NY Times heard this talk of Zeldman’s and now, there is a link on Times’ site.
  • Must be brief to be effective
  • Audience appropriate
  • Site for girls (see slide) – copy can be neutral, and the design can be audience appropriate
  • Audience appropriate may mean “not inappropriate”
  • “Understanding your Medicare Benefits: you must have JavaScript and Flash enabled”
    • Obviously, look at your audience and the general capabilities of said audience. Those needing to understand Medicare Benefits will not understand Flash and JavaScript.
    • There may be no “appropriate” content for this audience, but certainly avoid the innappropriate
  • Basecamp login (see slide): log in screen – “Please log in first and then we’ll send you right along”
    • Very clear, very friendly, and the “first” should not be overlooked. It gives that subconscious reminder of a to-do list before able to accomplish your goal. Plus, it’s so friendly that it reminds us that fun can be had in your project management day.
    • Gain on the user side with simple, friendly copy (versus plain-old-jane “Sign In)
  • Brand Appropriate

Soon thereafter, I checked the voice mail, and I got another text message from blank phone number, with blank content!

It looked a little something like this:

December 31, 1969 5:59 PM? September 4, 2012 6:10 PM? I feel like I’m being given a secret code!

I googled to no avail. But, I searched MacRumors, and according to a post in a thread regarding this very topic:

The network sends a notification from the tower to the phone to send a v-mail notification and then when you check your voice mail it sends another notification to your phone and then it would say on your iPhone that you no longer have a new vmail. but because of the fact thats its not a TMOBILE PHONE that the signal is sent differently to there exclusive phones. So not only the iPhone will be affected other unlocked phones will have similar problems.

Update:
A user at the hackint0sh forum called T-Mobile in a thread:

Apparently they have been making updates to their software in the T-mobile system over the past few weeks. Part of the updates they did were to the speed up the internet on the network, but in the process they screwed up the voicemail notifier settings. They told me it is not a priority to fix it since the problem is only happening on phones they do not currently offer.
…
The only solution for the time being is to have T-mobile disable the voicemail notification. In this case you will no longer receive any text messages or a dot indicator when you receive a voicemail.

Apparently, T-Mobile is working on this issue. Ack! Hope this helps, and that they can fix it soon!

Have you had any fun messages or a different timestamp? Have you found another thread mentioning this issue? Have you called T-Mobile? Let everyone know here in the comment section!

Continued confusion Current lifestamp: April 28, 2009, 9:20PM. Awaiting future self to discover content based texts, rather than blank whispers into the void.
We know that December 31, 1969 is the birth of UNIX timestamps (corresponding to the UNIX timestamp “1”). But what is the significance of September 4, 2012? My precise timestamp above converts to 1240971028. I’ve continued to receive Voicemail texts – all for September 4, 2012, but at more times: 7:14 PM, 10:04 PM, 11:16 PM – with no correlation to the actual time of either receipt of voicemail or checking. And, my initial message is the only one from 1969.

It also seems that if you had a voicemail red dot prior to the text messaging weirdness, you cannot get rid of it. Whatever voicemail state you were, you continue to be. This is because these blank texts are your voicemail notifications – and your iPhone doesn’t know how to process the new T-Mobile notifications. Anyone know how to get rid of the red dot, just for the sake of aesthetics? Let us know.

A quandary, no doubt. Lots of conspiracies in the comments. Any to add?

Good news!
I received missed call and voicemail at 11:52AM Central Time on April 30, 2009, and I received a Voicemail dot! That means no text message! And the Voicemail dot went away when I checked it. So looks like situation normal. Everyone rejoice.

The only issue I had with user controls was that you had to register the code on every.single.page that you wanted to use it on before you could use it. So, that meant something like this at the top of every.single.page:

[vb]
<%@ Register assembly="Ektron.Cms.Controls" namespace="Ektron.Cms.Controls" tagprefix="CMS" %>
<%@ Register src="~/webassets/UserControls/WeatherWidget.ascx" tagname="Weather" tagprefix="NeatlySliced" %>
<%@ Register src="~/webassets/UserControls/Blog.ascx" tagname="Blog" tagprefix="NeatlySliced" %>
[/vb]

Oi! The frustration! There has to be a better way!

Some googling resulted in finding the wondeful haacked.com, with the article listing my answer. ASP.NET 2.0 allows for registering controls in web.config, thus making it available for all pages and eliminating a potential very long list of controls on every page.

The listings go inside the <controls> tag, within the <pages> section, such as follows:

[xml]




]]> http://blog.neatlysliced.com/2009/04/register-aspnet-controls-in-webconfig/feed/ 1 http://blog.neatlysliced.com/2009/01/how-painful-to-transfer-feedburner-to-google/ http://blog.neatlysliced.com/2009/01/how-painful-to-transfer-feedburner-to-google/#comments Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:55:12 +0000 http://blog.neatlysliced.com/?p=259 This morning I transferred my FeedBurner feeds from FeedBurner to Google. Recently, FeedBurner was purchased by Google and the team has been making many optimizations since then. Within the past week, FeedBurner account management pages have been prompting users to transfer (merge) their feeds over to a Google account. Since I already use Google Analytics and other Google webmaster tools, this was no big deal.

All right, how long will this take?

The whole process took about 5 minutes. Seriously. It was painless. I clicked the transfer link, it sensed that I was logged into Google, and prompted me to make a decision: merge FeedBurner with the currently logged in account, the Google account linked in my FeedBurner email account setting, or to create a new Google account to merge with. Then, it went grinding away for a minute or two. Finito!

That sounds easy. But seriously, there has to be some drawback.

I don’t see any drawbacks if you already have a Google account. I had a concern that I was going to lose subscribers in the process, because there is a new feed address (http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MyAccountName, where the old one started with http://feeds… – addition of the 2). However, the FAQ assures us that subscribers will not be lost, as Google instantiated a redirect of the old address to the new. And, this redirect supposedly lasts forever.

FeedBurner site visitor stats have been eliminated. However, Google Analytics is far more robust, and likely people with Google accounts already have Google Analytics in place. A reminder to those using FeedBurner site stats that your visitor tracking scripts should now be removed.

Another repercussion: users implementing email subscription forms must update the form code per instructions on the Email Subscriptions page. If you’re just using a link like in my sidebar, that link must also be updated.

Meh, this sounds lame. How do I get out?

If you don’t want to go with the Google/FeedBurner merger, you have until February 28, 2009 to enable a 30-day redirection option. You are to start using your own feed rather than FeedBurner. This option, for the first 15 days, serves as a redirect to your feed, and for the last 15 days shows users an empty feed that “reads ‘This feed is no longer active. A new feed is located at’ followed by the URL of your original feed.”

Okay, it’s not worth all that effort. I’ll just keep FeedBurner. What should I do again?

Well, after you do the transfer, update your feeds to point to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MyAccountName. Remove your FeedBurner site analytics. Add Google analytics if you don’t already have it. Update email subscription forms and links. Pretty easy, right? Five minutes, ten tops.

Lost RSS Subscribers? What up?

This happened to me 3 days ago (January 17), and I just today (January 20) transferred my feeds to Google. The loss of subscribers were all Google Reader/Feedfetcher subscribers. Are the lost subscribers due to the transfer? I doubt it. I bet Google is doing something is in the pipes that is affecting their reporting of Google Reader subscribers. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have noticed the issue until today. Just a thought.

I hope this helps you and eases any trepidation you may have or have had before switching to Google feeds. I wrote this up in answer of some of the questions I had regarding the transfer, and hope you benefit. All of my data was regarding my two blogs, Neatly Sliced and the Yum blog, so mileage may vary on users with many many FeedBurner accounts to transfer.