Buta no Ie

Hey, what’s a couple of years between posts right?

I recently had the opportunity to demo our Contoso Riders Quick App at EnergizeIT in Toronto. A big thanks to Jean-Luc David and Chris Dufour for being such great hosts and for making our Services track a great success!

So you might be asking yourself; “What’s a Quick App?”

Quick Apps are projects that showcase the Microsoft Live Platform service offerings and also serve as templates which developers can use as a springboard to base their own projects off of. They are open-source projects release under Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).

In the case of Contoso Riders, we implemented services and APIs such as:

• Live ID for user authentication
• Live Messenger Presence API and IM Control for Instant Messenging
• Virtual Earth Map Control to display and Virtual Earth Collections for storing map and routing information
• Silverlight Streaming for hosting videos
• Live Spaces Weblogs and the Metaweblog API to store and manage content
• Live Spaces Photo Albums to store photos

You can download the source for Contoso Riders on CodePlex as part of the Windows Live Quick Apps project.

I attended the Microsoft presentation of “Atlas“, Microsoft AJAX Library and ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions, hosted by .Net BC this past Wednesday.

Something that had me intrigued was when Shaun Walker of DotNetNuke fame showed how easily it was to integrate “Atlas” into DNN. I’m wondering if the simplicity of the changes is due to the .Net Framework itself or if the DNN developers had pre-wired some hooks for “Atlas.”

While the rest of the presentation was pretty much the same top-level information I’ve heard in previous previews of “Atlas,” there are a few points about “Atlas” I would like to touch upon.

Read more…

Timeliness is everything when blogging. If you wait too long, whatever you were planning to write about may no longer be relevant or as news breaking. You’ll also start to lose details of your experience or the thoughts in your head, even if you originally took notes.

Unfortunately for me, I think I’ve missed the window of opportunity to blog about the Future of Web Apps Summit. I may still get around to transcribing my notes over the next few weeks.

Fortunately for you, there are plenty of good posts on the InterWeb to read about in the mean time.

UPDATED September 23, 2006:
Added CenterNetworks coverage of the Summit.

Read more…

mootools is a very compact, modular, object-oriented JavaScript framework and is less than 19Kb in size (compressed JS, 34Kb uncompressed) for the entire set of scripts and add-ons. mootools replaces the moo family of JavaScript libraries (moo.fx, moo.dom, moo.ajax, etc).

I prefer the moo.* libraries over the Prototype/Script.aculo.us combo due to the former’s much smaller file size. Prototype by itself weighs in at 60Kb uncompressed and add at least another 30Kb for Script.aculo.us.

What’s really interesting is the way you can download mootools. The download page allows you to pick and choose which parts of the library you want and whether or not you want to compress the JS source file.

Read more…

A quick list of a few must have additions for WordPress:

• Sandbox; a self-described theme for themers. It produces semantic and valid XHTML 1.0/Transitional markup, is widget compatible and has the ability to be easily skinned via CSS.
• Sidebar Widgets; makes it dead simple to add and order your sidebar content with drag-and-drop administration. No need to hack away at the sidebar.php code for the timid.
• Flickr Photo Album; this plugin will pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site. It will also allow you to easily insert your Flickr photos into your blog posts with just a couple clicks.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior; allows you to easily tag your posts inside the Write Post page and display your tags in many different ways.
• Search Everything; did you know that the default WP search doesn’t search pages and comments? I didn’t know that either but this plugin adds that functionality.

Just read this great article on SEOmoz on how to increase your blog’s traffic.

A must read if you’re just starting up a blog and want to actually have some people viewing it.

The default installation of WordPress that my ISP provides is 2.0.3. As I was entering my links, I noticed that single (‘) and double quotes (“) weren’t being displayed properly no matter what I did. I tried replacing them with their appropriate hex entities and HTML entities but no dice.

Turns out this is an issue afflicting the 2.0.3 release. Upgrading to 2.0.4 resolves this issue and I many others. If you’re a WordPress user and haven’t already upgraded, I encourage you to do so.

You never want to be up at 1:00 in the morning, bashing your head trying to figure out why your quotes don’t work.

First post!

Roll out the red carpet… I can’t believe I’ve been in the industry for almost a decade and have never started a blog.

A bit about myself. I’m an User Experience Developer (client-side development) with the Habañero Consulting Group.

I’ve recently been tasked to research how best to get our User Experience Group’s blog up and running. We’ve pretty much decided to go with WordPress. If it’s good enough for Jeffery Zeldman, it’s good enough for me.

Through the WP website I found BlueHost, an inexpensive hosting service. Can’t go wrong with $8/mo for 30gigs of storage and a huge gob of bandwidth. Hopefully they may finally give my website a proper home.

Over the next few weeks, and probably going into months, I’ll document the trials and tribulations of developing and designing a blog from the point of view of a guy who’s livelyhood depends on the web.

So welcome to SingChan.com… more to come.