simon-holman.net

Telerik CSS issues with Windows Azure

Simon Holman — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 12:12:27 +0000

There appears to be an issue with the Windows Azure system where the AssemblyResourceLocator does not work correctly when the compiled assemblies of a site is uploaded to Azure from a timezone ahead of the Azure servers timezones. You can read about this issue at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsazure/thread/751e27a9-4108-4446-9870-411f409d2c08?prof=required&lc=1033

This issue presented itself in my application by failing to load any CSS for any of the Telerik controls I was using. Telerik loads it’s CSS using WebResource.axd. As I’m in Australia and the servers I uploading to are behind the Australian timezones, the call to the WebResource.axd would return a 404 error. Once the time on the server caught up to the compile time of my site assembly files, the CSS would start displaying.

I found 2 workarounds before finding a permanent solution.

Workaround 1: Change my PC’s timezone to Samoa (this first timezone in the list) and deploying my application. Obviously not ideal.

Workaround 2: Deploy the site to Staging and wait until several hours past and the site started working, then Swap VIP to Production. Also no ideal.

The Solution

The solution I found to resolve the issue involved using the touch.exe app found at http://www.touchdotexe.com/ to touch the assembly dll file to update it to the current time on the server after the app had been deployed.

To do this I added the touch.exe file and a setup.cmd file to the root of my app, set the build action on the 2 files to Content and the Copy to Output Directory to Copy always.

I then added a startup task to the Azure Project’s ServiceDefinition.csdef file to execute the setup.cmd file at role startup.

"1">
      "setup.cmd" executionContext="elevated" taskType="simple" />

The setup.cmd file just has one line of code

touch.exe mywebapp.dll

As both of these files are copied to the bin folder, there’s no need to specify a full path the assembly file.

7 ways to improve your website and get more traffic

Simon Holman — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 07:47:08 +0000

In this post I will identify 7 ways you can improve your website’s Google Pagerank.

Pagerank is how important Google thinks your site is. It is measured on a scale of 0 to 10 with 0 being less important sites and 10 being the most important sites. There are currently less than a few hundred sites on the web with a Pagerank of 10. For those of you who like Math and large formulas don’t make you cross eyed you can find out more about Pagerank at Wikipedia.

My 7 ways to improve your website and get more traffic are:

Compliance with standards
Website HTML Structure
URL’s
Meta Data
Content and Keywords
Back Links
Using External Tools

1. Compliance with standards

The Google bot that indexes your site will have trouble reading and properly indexing it’s content if you have poorly written HTML. A missing doctype declaration, tags that are not closed properly or tag attributes that are incorrect are just 3 common issues.

Having a standards compliant site will also help to make your site look the same a variety of browsers.

2. Website HTML Structure

When looking at your page, Google tends to think that the content at the top of the HTML is more important than the stuff at the bottom. If your site has a lot of content in the header and maybe the menu in the left column, then your content is in the right column, chances are you code is written in that order as well. See my example below

<body>
    <div id="header">
        Here is all my header HTML
    div>

    <div id="leftcolumn">
        Here is all my left menu HTML
    div>

    <div id="rightcolumn">
        Here is my main content
    div>
body>

Now Google will be reading your HTML and be thinking that the content in the header and leftcolumn divs contain the most important info on your page because it’s at the top. As you can see this isn’t correct.

What you should be doing is something like this

<body>
    <div id="rightcolumn">
        Here is my main content
    div>

    <div id="leftcolumn">
        Here is all my left menu HTML
    div>

    <div id="header">
        Here is all my header HTML
    div>
body>

Now when reading your HTML, Google sees all your nice page content at the top and treats it with the authority that you want it to have.

All you need to do is to learn how to make this HTML look right on your site with a little css positioning.

3. URL’s

Let me ask you what makes more sense to you?

a. http://mywebsite.com/default.aspx?pid=124

b. http://mywebsite.com/puppies/puppies-are-cute

I’m guessing you prefer option b. Well so does Google. Google will still be able to index the content exactly the same way. With option b however, your URL will be a lot easier for people to read and remember and you will gain the added SEO benefit of having the keywords your targeting in the URL. This is of course assuming this page is about puppies and not about fighter jets!!

The second point about URL’s is that you should only ever have 1 URL per page. A lot of content management systems are very bad for this problem. Google sees

http://www.mywebsite.com

http://mywebsite.com

http://www.mywebsite.com/default.aspx

http://www.MyWebsite.com

as 4 separate URL’s even though they may point to the same page on your site.

This means that if 4 people link to your page using each one of these URL’s you lose the benefit of having 4 links to your home page. Google thinks you have 1 incoming link to 4 different URL’s and this can be detrimental to your PageRank.

You should always put thought into the URL structure of your site and utilise the tools that are available for the particular technology that your using. For ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC or really anything that runs on IIS 7.0/7.5 you can the URL rewrite module. For DotNetNuke you can use the iFinity URL Master module, Kentico has this feature built in and for WordPress you can use the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin. You will find a link to these tools in the resources at the bottom of this post.

4. Metadata

The Metadata fields Title, Keywords and Description play an important role in the SEO of your pages. The Title and Description are generally of more importance than the keyword field. Anyone can stuff a long list of keywords into the keywords metadata field. Crafting a Title and Description takes a little more thought.

The Title is shown as the result heading in a Google search result. It is also used in the title bar of the browser and usually what’s used as the title if a user bookmarks the sites.

The Description is less often seen by the user but is often used by Google as the summary shown in search engine results

If we do a search for “Expeed Web Hosting” and look at the result for the Expeed site you’ll see the following

You can see the Title as “ASP.NET Web Hosting, Virtual Servers, Software Solutions and Surveys”

The Description is “Expeed Technology is a premier provider of ASP.NET Web Hosting……………..”

Properly utilising your pages targeted keyword in the Title, Description and to a lesser extent the Keywords metadata fields will go a long to helping you improve your search engine results.

When using tools like Market Samurai you will see that having your keywords listed in the Title and Description are two of the key factors in determining the ranking of your site against others.

The screenshot from Market Samurai below shows the analysis of keywords in various parts of your page. I will talk more about keywords further on in this post.

5. Content and Keywords

On the web, content is King and don’t ever let anyone tell you differently. You can have the best looking site in the world, but without good content, you won’t get anywhere. Content serves 3 key purposes.

For search engines like Google to index
For people to read once they get to your site
For people to create links to when they’ve found your site and enjoyed your content.

You can have the prettiest site in the world but you have poor content in terms of both quantity and quality your site will suffer.

The art of writing good content which is keyword rich is just that, an art. It takes a long time to master. I am by no means a master but I am continually on the lookout for tips and tricks to help me learn.

The purpose of your site will have a big impact on the style of your content. A personal blog will be a lot more of a relaxed style than a corporate website. One of the greatest pieces of advice I ever got about writing for my blog is to write how you speak. It’s a lot less formal and gives the reader the feeling that your talking directly to them. I hope you feel that way reading this.

You should decide in advance what keywords you will target for both your site as a whole and for each page. If your site was selling shoes then you would incorporate more general terms like shoes and footwear into each page and then more specific keywords or keyword phrases into each specific page. For instance your page selling hiking shoes would have different keywords to your page selling running shoes.

You should aim to provide meaningful keyword rich content on your site and add new content regularly. If two sites had similar content but one was consistently adding new content then it will quickly rank higher than the other. I am often asked “I have all my businesses product details listed on my site and they doesn’t change, so how do I add new content regularly?”

There are many ways of adding fresh new content to a site.

Add a blog to your site talking about your industry
Ask customers for testimonials to add to your product pages.
Ask customers to review your products and create a reviews page.
Record some how to videos showing customers how to use your products or services
Run a competition on your site
Create an email newsletter to send to your customers and add the archive newsletters to your site

But ALWAYS be mindful to include your targeted keywords in your content. If your not sure of the best way to do that, cheat!! Do a Google search for your keywords and review the search results that rank above yours. Have a look at what content they have and how they’ve written and presented it. I’m not recommending stealing or plagiarising other people work. What I do recommend is to model the concepts that they use to achieve what you want to achieve.

6. Back Links

The content on your site will help Google to determine when to show your site in search results, but there is another factor that determines primarily where in the ranking that your site is shown. If you ask 95% of website owners where they want their site to show up in Google results, they’ll say on the first page. The other 5% (including me) say #1.

In order to get to #1 in search results or even on the first page, Google needs to see you as an authority on the subject that the user is searching for.

The PageRank algorithm used by Google says in simple terms that if Site A has 10 sites linking to it then it is more important than Site B that has 2 sites linking to it. In practice it is a LOT more complicated than that but that is the general idea.

So to be seen as an authority, your sites needs to build links from other sites back to your site.

It’s not just the quantity of the back links that’s important but the quality as well. Take the following example.

Site A and B are about Insurance
Site A has 10 incoming links from sites about insurance
Site B has 15 incoming links from sites about landscaping

Even though Site B has more incoming links, Site A will rank better for searches about insurance because Site B’s links are not related to insurance.

The PageRank of the incoming links is also an important factor to determine the quality of the links. Take the following example.

Site A and B both have 10 links to their site
Site A has 2 incoming links from PR 5 sites, 2 links from PR4 sites and 6 links from PR1 sites
Site B has 8 incoming links from PR2 sites and 2 links from PR0 sites

In this example Site A will receive better search rankings because the sites that link to that site are seen as more important as they have a higher PageRank.

The link text that is used in the back link to your site also important. You will be more benefit from a link that uses your keywords than a link that doesn’t use your keywords

The topic of gaining links to your site is huge topic and one that I’ll expand on in future posts.

7. Using External Tools

There are 3 main tools I use for my day to day website management.

Website Statistics
Google Webmaster tools
Market Samurai

There are number of options for you to choose for website stats. Your hosting provider should provide a tool like Smarterstats or AWStats for you to use. This will show you what visitors you’re getting and where they’re coming from. These tools will usually read your websites log files and be very accurate. Another very common tool is Google Analytics which is a free service from Google. Google Analytics works using a small JavaScript script added to each of your pages.

Google Webmaster tools are a must if your interested in optimising your site. The Webmaster tools show you information about keyword density, search queries, backlinks to your site, indexed pages, crawling errors and give you suggestions to improve your HTML.

Market Samurai is a recent addition to my list of tools but one I used A LOT. It has a huge array of features for tracking SEO and performing keyword analysis. You can do research on keywords, track your ranking over time for your keywords, analyse competitors sites and see info about their SEO. You can find domains, research monetization for your site, find content and help you build backlinks.

You will find a link to the Market Samurai site in the resources at the bottom of this post.

In summary, I have listed 7 of the cornerstone aspects of search engine optimisation. This is by no means a definitive list, and each topic is much more complex than the brief overview that I’ve given. Please make sure you leave a comment to let me know what you thought of the post and let me know which aspects you’d like me to go into more detail.

Post Resources

iFinity URL Master

Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin

Market Samurai

Review of HTC Mozart with Windows Phone 7

Simon Holman — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:38:52 +0000

Well I’ve had my new HTC Mozart with Windows Phone 7 from Telstra for 3 days now so I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring with a review.

Phone:

The HTC Mozart is an excellent handset. It looks great, is light to carry and has an extremely bright and crisp screen.

I find the Back, Windows and Search buttons at the bottom of the screen a little sensitive and I am regularly bringing up the search screen without meaning to. This is probably just a case of me getting used to the phone than a reflection on the design.

The speaker works well and is loud enough to clearly hear the person your talking too even if there’s background noise.

I initially set the email to deliver to the phone as it was received but that was chewing the battery quite quickly. It used nearly half the battery in 5 hours. I changed it to check email every 30 minutes and it’s made a huge difference. It’s been off the charge for 4 hours today and the battery level still shows aprox 95%.

My one complaint is that the camera button maybe requires too firm a press to take a photo. The extra pressure needed tends to move the phone a little and make the photo’s blurry.

Windows Phone 7 OS:

After using a Palm Treo with Windows 6.0 on it for 2 years all I can say about Windows Phone 7 is WOW!! The OS is a huge improvement over it’s predecessors. With the offerings from Apple and Google with the iPhone and Android phones they had big shoes to fill. In my opinion they have met and exceeded expectations in most areas.

The initial home screen shown in the picture above is simple but powerful. The active tiles provide an excellent snapshot of everything you need to know at a glance like number of emails, text messages and missed calls. It is also easy to scroll down the screen to quickly access your favourite applications or even people you contact regularly.

The People listing groups data for each of your contacts from Outlook, Facebook and Windows Live showing a complete list. You can scroll through the users or click on a heading letter to bring up the alphabet to jump to a specific letter. The contact profile page shows combined data from all sources including related people like partners and children. My one complaint about the profile is that it shows you updates and information from Facebook, but not recent email activity from that person.

As you would expect, Internet Explorer is the standard browser and seems to be quite quick to load sites. The pinch zoom feature of the phone is very handy when browsing sites. The fact that every time you open a link from an app or email it opens as a new tab in IE is a bit annoying. You then have to keep going in and closing the tabs so you don’t end up with 20 tabs open.

There are a lot of great apps out already with I’m certain a lot more to come. Having the Foxtel app and being able to browse the guide and set my IQ to record from my phone is very cool. You will also find apps for the main social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

We run an exchange server in our office and having my email synced to my phone is a critical requirement for me. Email integration is very simple to setup and get working quickly. I have my emails syncing within about 2 minutes of turning the phone on. Reading and replying to email is easy and the on screen keyboard is easy to use and allows you to type quickly.

I only have 3 issues with the new OS and I hope to see them resolved quickly my Microsoft.

No Tethering
No Copy and Paste
Cannot easily move cursor back into email or message to change or add

No Tethering

I used my Palm Treo a lot to connect to my laptop and use the internet via the internet connection sharing. I was very surprised to see that the new Windows Phone 7 OS doesn’t yet support this. People have been tethering phones to laptops for years and this is a glaring omission and frankly quite disappointing.

No Copy and Paste

I don’t use copy and paste all that often but it is very helpful to have it when I need it. Once again a surprising omission from a phone OS that has Email, Messaging and Word running on it.

Moving Cursor

This may be related to the copy and paste issue above. If I am typing an email and want to go back to change or add a section of text it’s quite difficult. The only option I have is to click on a word and select the whole word. If I then start typing my text replaces the word. From there I can retype the word and add my additional text. It really shouldn’t be that hard.

Summary

In summary, despite the few shortcomings of the OS (which I’m certain will be fixed in time), the HTC Mozart with Windows Phone 7 is an excellent combination and a phone that I’ll enjoy using each day.

Textboxes Timers and Updatepanels

Simon Holman — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:01:10 +0000

In a project I’m working on, I had to create a Facebook style notification system. I wanted the user to be able to enter a status and click the add button and have the list of notifications below it update with their most recent post. That is simple enough to do, all I had to do was to add the notification, clear the textbox then call the updateNotifications function in my button_click code behind method. This all had to be very smooth to the eye so i added the usual updatepanel around the textbox, button and div that listed the notifications.

As well as that, I also wanted the notifications system to automatically update with other users notifications within the same group. So I added a Time control to the mix and set it to refresh the notifications list every 10 seconds.

This seemed to work well until I was half way through typing a new notification when the timer triggered and refreshed the notification list. As the textbox was inside the updatepanel it stopped letting me type any text while it refreshed.

So then I thought that I’d move the textbox outside the updatepanel so it wasn’t impacted when the timer refreshed the list.

The only problem now is that because the submit button to add a new notification was inside the updatepanel and the textbox was outside the updatepanel the textbox could no longer be cleared on the partial postback. My txtNotification.Text = String.Empty; was being ignored.

I can’t quite remember the next thing I tried but it obviously didn’t work because now the whole page was refreshing everytime the timer triggered.

In the end I remembered about the UpdateMode property on the update panel. I set the updatemode to conditional around my textbox/button updatepanel and always on the notification list/timer updatepanel. That way the timer triggers updated the notification list without upsetting the textbox and submitting the add button updated the list and cleared the textbox. Perfect result.

ASPX code:

<asp:UpdatePanel ID="updStatusUpdate" runat="server" UpdateMode="Conditional">
    <ContentTemplate>
        <asp:TextBox ID="txtStatusUpdate" runat="server" TextMode="MultiLine" Rows="2" Width="570">asp:TextBox> <br />        

        <asp:Button ID="btnAddStatusUpdate" runat="server" Text="Update Status"
            onclick="btnAddStatusUpdate_Click" class="ui-state-default ui-corner-all"/>

    ContentTemplate>
asp:UpdatePanel> 

<asp:UpdatePanel ID="updNotifications" runat="server" UpdateMode="Always">
    <ContentTemplate>
        <div class="NotificationList">
            <asp:Literal ID="litNotifications" runat="server">asp:Literal>
        div>
        <asp:Timer ID="Timer1" runat="server" ontick="Timer1_Tick" Interval="10000">asp:Timer>
    ContentTemplate>
asp:UpdatePanel>

A function to convert a TimeSpan to an x minutes ago string

Simon Holman — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 06:50:06 +0000

An application I’m working on requires a facebook style status system and I thought it would be good to include the “posted x minutes ago” text after the status.

I’m sure my code is not the most elegant solution but it works so I thought I’d share.

public static String LastUpdatedText(DateTime DateNow, DateTime LastUpdated)
        {
            TimeSpan timeDiff = DateNow.Subtract(LastUpdated);

            if (timeDiff.TotalHours < 1)
            {
                return Math.Round(timeDiff.TotalMinutes,0) + " minutes ago";
            }

            if (timeDiff.TotalHours < 24)
            {
                return Math.Round(timeDiff.TotalHours, 0) + " hours ago";
            }

            if (timeDiff.TotalHours < 48)
            {
                return "yesterday";
            }

            if (timeDiff.TotalHours < 168)
            {
                return Math.Round(timeDiff.TotalDays,0) + " days ago";
            }

            if (timeDiff.TotalDays < 42)
            {
                return Math.Round((timeDiff.TotalDays / 7),0) + " weeks ago";
            }

            if (timeDiff.TotalDays < 365)
            {
                return Math.Round((timeDiff.TotalDays / 30),0) + " months ago";
            }

            return Math.Round((timeDiff.TotalDays / 365),0) + " years ago";
        }

DotNetPanel released as open source

Simon Holman — Thu, 06 May 2010 06:13:24 +0000

On 20/04/2010 SMB SAAS Systems Inc. released the full source code for their DotNetPanel control panel as an open source product named WebsitePanel.

See the announcement from SMB SAAS Systems Inc CEO Feodor Fitsner below

We are excited to announce that SMB SAAS Systems Inc. has revised theDotNetPanel codebase and posted that new code under the new name "WebsitePanel" to SourceForge.NET as an open source project:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/websitepanel

WebsitePanel is a line-of-business application and we recognize the benefits of using an open source development model as a more agile and flexible way to meet the growing needs of the web hosting community.

This will enable the hosting and development community to directly contribute to the future of the project, ensuring WebsitePanel’s continued development as an affordable and scalable control panel for Microsoft Windows hosting.

With this change, software developers and hosting providers can now easily integrate WebsitePanel directly into their own offerings and extend the functionality and features to meet their customers’ Windows hosting needs.

For current DotNetPanel customers SMB SAAS Systems Inc. will be providing free community support for a limited time. Future new versions and product updates (including enterprise modules) and bug fixes will be available at no cost to all customers via the WebsitePanel open source project.

We encourage all our customers to move to the WebsitePanel, which will continue to be supported, and participate in WebsitePanel project at SourceForge.NET.

We enjoy working with you and look forward to seeing WebsitePanel continue to grow!

Sincerely yours,
Feodor Fitsner,
CEO and President

Telerik ASP.NET MVC controls and jQuery

Simon Holman — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 11:47:18 +0000

For those who are using the Telerik controls for MVC you will most likely have the following somewhere on your page or Master page

<%= Html.Telerik().ScriptRegistrar() %>

This will create issues if you then try to add any jQuery to the page including jQuery plugins.

To get around this, you can append a method to the Telerik ScriptRegistrar to disable the jQuery reference. You need to change it to

<%= Html.Telerik().ScriptRegistrar().jQuery(false) %>

And your page should be happy again.

Getting random records from a table using LINQ to SQL

Simon Holman — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 09:57:18 +0000

I needed to get a number of random records from a table and a quick google search led me to http://mosesyap.com/BlogWeb/post/2008/07/C-Getting-a-Random-Record-from-a-Table-inside-the-SQL-Server-Database.aspx

This is a very quick and easy mechanism to use and will work on any table.

To load a specific number of random records change the .First() function

DataContext db = new QuoteDataContext();
var quote = db.Quote.OrderBy(q => db.GetNewId()).First();

to be .Take(x)

DataContext db = new QuoteDataContext();
var quote = db.Quote.OrderBy(q => db.GetNewId()).Take(x);

replacing x with however many records you need.

ADNUG Presentation Apr 14 2010 ASP.NET MVC

Simon Holman — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 02:37:42 +0000

Well I presented at the ADNUG (Adelaide .NET User Group) last night on the topic of ASP.NET MVC.

Only a few of the attending audience had used MVC and there seemed to be a genuine interest in the technology.

As we were running a bit late there were a few items that I didn’t get to cover and there are certainly areas that can be expanded upon further. If there is interest within the group I’m happy to return to go through more on MVC.

I have attached the solution file that I was working on last night. I have added the SQL db to the application which should make loading and running it easier.

I have also added the Edit functionality for the customer records to show how to handle a form postback.

You will need Visual Studio 2010 to run this application. I believe the Express Edition will be sufficient.

Some excellent ASP.NET MVC resources can be found at:

ASP.NET MVC

Phil Haack’s MVC intro at PDC 08

Phil Haack’s Blog

Scott Guthrie’s Blog

Attached Files

ADNUGMVC

Presenting tonight at ADNUG

Simon Holman — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 05:05:19 +0000

I will be presenting on ASP.NET MVC at the ADNUG meeting tonight.

Details below:

ADELAIDE DOT NET USERS GROUP.

The next meeting of ADNUG will be held on WEDNESDAY 14^h April at 5.45pm at
SA Innovation Centre , Level 2, Westpac House, 91 King William Street, Adelaide .

Visitors welcome.

PROGRAMME

5.45 pm Finger food an Drinks. Join with us for a drink and pizzas – members free – visitors $5.

6.15 pm What’s New – New developments and releases

6.30 pm Simon Holman ASP.Net Developer Using ASP.Net MVC 2.0

7.30 pm Meeting close