Nik's Technology Blog

Learning jQuery 1.3 - Book Review

2009-06-20T19:08:00.001+01:00

My first exposure to jQuery was using other developer's plugins to create animation effects such as sliders, and accordion menus. The highly refactored and compressed production code isn't the easiest to read and understand, especially if you want to alter the code to any great extent. After reading a few tutorials, I thought I'd buy a book and get more involved with the jQuery library.

No defining declaration found for implementing OnValidate(System.Data.Linq.ChangeAction)

2009-06-12T13:04:00.000+01:00

If you happen to be getting an error message like the one below, then read on. Error 1 No defining declaration found for implementing declaration of partial method 'mvcCMS.Models.WebPage.OnValidate(System.Data.Linq.ChangeAction)' C:\mvcCMS\Models\WebPage.cs 28 22 mvcCMS I'm using LINQ to SQL designer in Visual Studio to create a database schema and I'm using a partial class

Nik Makris is now Google Analytics Qualified!

2009-06-04T20:10:00.000+01:00

I just passed the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) test with a score of 88%! I'm now officially qualified in Google Analytics! If you're interested in taking the test or simply want to learn more about Google Analytics then visit the Conversion University and brush up on your knowledge with the tutorials and presentations before taking the test. I was actually quite surprised

Create a jQuery Tag Cloud from RSS XML Feed

2009-05-29T20:20:00.000+01:00

I previously created a jQuery Blogger Template Category List Widget to retrieve blog categories from a Blogger.com RSS feed and create a list of links which click through to Blogger label pages. I've now taken this code a step further and modified it to calculate the number of times each category/tag occurs enabling me to create a tag cloud from the data, like the one below. Accessibility

Setting Up ASP.NET MVC with NUnit for Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition & Visual Web Developer Express 2008

2009-05-22T13:50:00.000+01:00

I've just spent my lunch hour downloading and installing ASP.NET MVC. I also downloaded the sample chapter from Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (large PDF) which walks through the development of NerdDinner.com. I began to create a test ASP.NET MVC project on Visual Studio 2008 Standard. One of the main positives of ASP.NET MVC is that Test Driven Development is so much easier than with ASP.NET

jQuery Blogger Template Category List Widget

2009-05-20T20:38:00.001+01:00

Blogger is a hosted blogging service which allows you to publish your blog to your own URL and create your own custom HTML templates to match your website design. I have been using Blogger for this blog for several years, and have been trying to find a good way of displaying a list of categories on each blog page. As yet I haven't found an official way of creating a category list using the

An Introduction to Web Development and Design for Work Experience Students

2009-05-17T18:28:00.001+01:00

We have a school student coming into our agency for work experience shortly, so I'm putting together a programme which will introduce him to the various areas of web development, such as HTML, CSS, client-side and server-side code, databases and XML. It is going to be difficult to cover the various different skills involved in web development in a week, and without knowing what sort of web

Language Interoperability in the .NET Framework

2009-05-14T19:30:00.000+01:00

.NET is a powerful framework which was built to allow cross-language support. All .NET code is compiled to Intermediate Language (IL) whether you are developing in C#, VB.NET, J# or any other .NET language. This means it is possible to build applications with modules written in different languages, because when the application is compiled it will all be compiled to a common language, IL. This

Does your PC Keeping Forgetting the Date & Time?

2009-05-13T19:30:00.001+01:00

Yesterday my aging desktop PC decided not to boot, and instead displayed this helpful error "CMOS Checksum Error". In order to get it to boot into Windows I had to press Delete to go into the BIOS settings and change the configuration from "Halt on all errors" to "halt on no errors". Upon saving the BIOS settings and restarting the error disappeared. Sometimes though a PC with a dead CMOS

Pictures from Internet World 2009

2009-05-02T09:24:00.001+01:00

Pictures from Internet World @ Earls Court, London, 30th April 2009

Nike+ SportBand Review

2009-04-29T20:37:00.000+01:00

Last year I decided to get healthy and take up running. Being a gadget lover, I had been researching the iPod nano and Nike+ sport kit. I liked the idea of being able to record my progress, set myself challenges and map my routes etc, see http://nikeplus.nike.com/nikeplus/ for more details. The thing was, I already had an iPod classic which was too bulky to run with, and not compatible with

TargetInvocationException - Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation

2009-04-23T12:28:00.001+01:00

This exception isn't very useful because it's a general exception thrown when a method invoked through reflection throws an exception, took me a while to figure out what the issue was. Even though I knew the page causing the error. This exception was thrown by a ASP.NET web form which contained a GridView connected to an ObjectDataSource. The ObjectDataSource references methods in a data

ASP.NET Content Disposition Problem in IE7

2009-04-21T11:20:00.001+01:00

I've just spent quite a while debugging a problem with content disposition I was having with Internet Explorer 7, the code works fine in Firefox but causes this error message to occur in IE7. "Internet Explorer cannot download xxx from xxx." "Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later."

Create a Simple Windows Service to Request a URL at Set Intervals

2009-04-14T21:11:00.004+01:00

I needed a simple Windows Service to request a web page at set intervals indefinitely. Windows Services are the best way of doing this as they have the ability to start automatically when the computer boots up and can be paused, stopped and restarted. You can also get them to write events to the Windows Event log.I found this Windows Service sample tutorial on The Code Project and downloaded

Can we rely on Cloud services to look after our data?

2009-02-20T15:30:00.003Z

With the current trend moving from desktop applications to web applications, more and more of our data is being stored in the data centres of computer service companies around the world, rather than on our computer hard disks like in the old days.The benefits of storing data in the "the cloud" are that you can access your documents anywhere you have an Internet connection. However, you have to

Stricter Guidelines for the use of Voucher Codes on Affilliate Websites

2008-12-02T20:02:00.004Z

From January 1st 2009, there will be stricter guidelines for voucher code use on affiliate websites in the UK.The Affiliate Marketing Council (AMC) , part of the Internet Advertising Bureau has issued a code of best practise to avoid putting it's members brands at risk.The following affiliate networks have so far signed up to the new code of conduct.Affiliate WindowAffilinetCommission Junction

Authenticate with MailEnable SMTP using ASP.NET 2.0

2008-09-11T13:56:00.003+01:00

I've recently been trying to send emails using ASP.NET 2.0 on a web server which uses MailEnable. MailEnable had relaying locked down to avoid opening the server up to spammers, but I wasn't able to authenticate with MailEnable to relay emails to external domains.I tested my code was working by temporarily checking the "Allow relay for local sender addresses" checkbox in the SMTP properties on

Apache Web Development Testing Server Set-up

2008-07-16T15:45:00.006+01:00

I've been setting up an Ubuntu linux machine for web development testing on my local network, but because the machine has only one IP address assigned to it I wanted a solution to be able to serve more than one website without changing the config in Apache each time.One method would be to use a separate folder for each site but .htaccess rewrites don't work properly using this method and if you

Freesat for free HD TV in the UK

2008-06-10T13:50:00.000+01:00

If you haven't already heard about Freesat then you should look into it, I'm not referring to the free satellite service from Sky, but the new not-for-profit organisation set up by the BBC and ITV to help distribute digital TV to areas of the UK where Freeview signals are not strong enough.If you also own a new high definition capable flat screen TV or are looking to buy one you should also

Internet World - eBusiness Legal Tips

2008-05-14T18:41:00.005+01:00

It's been a couple of weeks since I attended Internet World at London's Earl Court and the follow-up emails have started to arrive in my inbox where I exchanged business cards with some of the exhibitors.The show ran for three days, but I only managed to attend on the last day (1st May 2008).During the exhibition, as well as general networking, I attended several presentations about marketing,

How to get the BBC iPlayer on your Nintendo Wii

2008-05-05T16:40:00.010+01:00

You can now get the BBC iPlayer on the Nintendo Wii games console!Before you can start watching programmes broadcast on the BBC over the last 7 days you'll need to connect your Wii console to the Internet (see instructions below) and download the Opera web browser from the Wii Store (Which costs 500 Wii points or about 3.50 Pounds Sterling).Before you can buy Wii points to purchase the Opera web

TradeDoubler Affiliate Trademark Keyword Bidding Reminder

2008-05-04T18:54:00.006+01:00

Following on from Google's change of stance, allowing UK and Irish AdWords users to bid on trademarked keywords of other companies, TradeDoubler the affiliate marketing platform has sent its affiliates an email.The email reminds TradeDoubler's affiliates that even though Google now allows its AdWord users to bid on trademarked keywords, it does not mean that any previous keyword bidding

Use Browser Toolbar instead of Address Bar to Avoid Phishing Sites

2008-05-01T19:19:00.007+01:00

I've just read a post over at Search Engine Journal about statistics from Hitwise UK suggesting British users are increasingly using browser toolbars to search for domains they know already like tesco.com rather than typing them directly into their browser address bar.I use this technique a lot because I frequently misspell a domain name or get the wrong domain extension for a website. When this

Time to start testing your websites in Safari on Windows?

2008-03-22T18:15:00.006Z

Apple recently added their Safari web browser to the Apple Software Update and pre-checked the box by default. This effectively means that a lot of Windows users will now, possibly without knowing it, have installed Safari.I'm not going to discuss the ethics of this practice here, instead read John's Blog - CEO of Mozilla.But what it means for the humble web designer or developer is that we

Product Review: Train Signal's IIS Web Servers CBT Video Training

2008-03-10T19:53:00.004Z

As an ASP.NET web developer, I think it's important to understand and know how to configure Microsoft's web server, Internet Information Services (IIS). Depending on the organisation you work for you may or may not get the opportunity to tinker with IIS, but this shouldn't stop you from learning the basics.You could go out and buy a book on configuring IIS and then install IIS on your computer