Microsoft Bing
Microsoft launched a successor to it’s Live search engine in June this year and included as part of that roll-out is a very comprehensive API.
Bing certainly raised a few eyebrows by virtue of its name alone (it is allegedly supposed to denote the “sound of found“), but the real point is that it is a worthy contender for Google. This isn’t to say that I think anything will knock the incumbent of his perch anytime soon, but Bing offers a solid UI and provides a lot of added value that I’ve come to expect from a Microsoft product.
Microsoft has also launched a new site, Discover Bing, that goes into all the details of how Bing works and the decision process behind the creation of it, for those really struggling to understand what the point of all this is.
Given that I’m not entirely happy with search at The Office and seeing a pretty solid API for hooking into Bing’s search engine, my curiosity was piqued and I decided to have a crack at building off it. Since the API offers a number of formats for returned search results, specifically SOAP, XML or JSON, I figured a good platform to use as part of the development would be jQuery.
Posted in Development, business.
Tagged with Ajax, Bing, jQuery, microsoft, search engines, web development.
To quote directly from Scott Hanselman:
ELMAH is one of those largely unknown and deeply awesome .NET Open Source projects that should be part of ASP.NET proper.
If you’re working on a web development project; either professionally or privately at home, you need to be aware of ELMAH and what it can provide.
Over the next few posts, I’m going to look at aspects of ELMaH: what it is, what it does, how you can leverage it and what it means for you and your clients.
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Posted in Development, Software.
Tagged with exceptions, frameworks, logging, Software, web development.
The web has moved on a long way from having all the structure made up from tables and dozens of barely-relevant animated images thrown around the page (although some people still need to be told). As sites are now starting to conform to a best-practice approach of separating out content from presentation, the next initiative needs to be placing more context around that content. There is a lot of focus placed on the Semantic Web and associating ontology with page elements, but the more important first step is to ensure that your HTML structure is meaningful and well-formed. This idea of using the correct HTML tags and their individual attributes is Semantic HTML.
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Posted in Development, business.
Tagged with HTML, Semantic Web, standards, UX, web development.
It surprised me a bit that with all the blog posts, tutorials, StackOverflow questions and other such resources, there was a scarcity of consolidated items available on how to do a simple AJAX post of some form values using an ASP.Net Web Method. There are plenty of PHP articles, but .Net ones seem to be a little harder to come by (at least when I was looking this week).
I’m going to describe how jQuery’s .ajax() method works when you’re trying to retrieve a series of values from a form (a contact form in our example) and post those values to a Web Method on an ASP.Net page using JSON.
Posted in Development.
Tagged with Ajax, ASP.Net, jQuery, web development, web methods.
Not-for-profit organisations (sports clubs, special interest and community associations) have a tricky balance to reach. On the one hand it’s very important to keep costs down: find ways to economise and try to get as many products and services on goodwill, charity or sponsorship as possible. On the other hand, it is important (in most cases) to provide as professional a service as possible to members.
So when it comes to websites, there are basically two [apparent] options. You could design and build it yourself (or ask a member / close friend to do it for you), or ask a professional to do it. Essentially these options boil down a trade-off between cost and risk.
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Posted in Development, business.
Tagged with business, mistakes, non-profit, projects, training, UX, web design, web development.
There have been quite a few people I’ve spoken to recently who want to break into the web development market. Asking me (like I’m supposed to be some learned officionado) all sorts of questions about how to get started in the industry, what disciplines to focus on and how to progress their career, it got me wondering just how buoyant the market still is these days and what skill sets are really required.
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Posted in At Work, Development, business.
Tagged with business, career, education, web development.
A close friend of mine asked for some computer support the other week (”You know computers. How do I configure this brand of wireless router?”. “Dude – I’m a web developer. I have no idea”). In the course of our conversation I asked when his company was going to invest in a website. His response initially horrified me, but then got me thinking: Does every business need a website?
Now as a web developer, I freely admit to having a pretty sizable bias on this matter, but I listened to my friend’s argument with the usual patience and good humour anyway and alarmingly, I found myself starting to see his point of view!
The argument goes something like this:
We’re about the only company in our field in the Otago / Southland region and anyone doing work with us knows who we are because they’ve used us so many times before. There’s only a small set of businesses who are closely involved in our field and we all work together. We don’t need a website because everyone is familiar with our services, standard of work and contact information.
This seems almost like a reasonable argument at first blush. And yet I can’t shake that conviction that the web is now your company’s calling card, it’s public face to your customers, the information source for existing and prospective customers and – increasingly – the mechanism for providing services and applications to your customers.
To say that your customers “just know you” and are therefore content to use the phone or email for everything is an anachronism at best; ignorance at worst.
If you’ve done extensive customer / market research and can prove that your customers actually do not want you to have an online presence, then ok (maybe). But I doubt that this would ever be the case – at least I can’t envisage a scenario when it would be true.
Having said all this, I wonder – when did we actually reach the date upon which it became unacceptable not to have an online presence? If businesses don’t want to be educated on the realities of the new connected world we live in, then what? Survival of the fittest or gentle encouragement to dip the toes in the water?
What are your experiences and opinions?
Posted in business.
Tagged with business, mistakes, web development.
Every now and then a really great feature or service on the web sneaks up on me that makes me wonder, “How the hell did I miss this?”. Mozilla’s Ubiquity plugin for Firefox is one such example.
Microsoft have (as you would expect) made quite the song and dance over their latest offering – Internet Explorer 8. While one of its prime selling points is the to-the-letter adherence to CSS2.1 standards (a massive improvement on any previous version), the appeal to the “Mum & Dad” users has been productivity aids. The highlights among the various features include InPrivate browsing, Web Slices and Accelerators.
Microsoft need this. They’ve been losing market share at an unprecendented rate to Firefox and, more recently, Google Chrome. They understood that they’ve been too slow to respond to market changes and now need a point of differentiation from the competition. But for all the new bells and whistles, how much is there really that sets IE8 apart from its nearest contenders?
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Posted in In the News, Software.
Tagged with browser, Firefox, Google, internet explorer, microsoft.
There’s been a bit of news floating around about a new approach to CSS design: object-oriented. On first blush, this looks like a revelation in design concepts that could make your site’s pages more flexible, robust and easier to code. I was quite enthusiastic about the idea and have been looking at it more closely over the past several weeks.
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Posted in Development.
Tagged with CSS, web design, web development.
