Creating a small institutional site

Every now and then non-tech friends ask me to get their startup’s site up and running. Usually I tend to choose Joomla for the flexibility, but sometime it’s just an overkill. Just keeping Joomla security updates is something I really don’t want to think about.

So this time, for my dear sister-in-law Sofia pre-scool project, I’ve tried out Weebly. In a couple of hours I’ve chosen a template, defined the organic, uploaded some content and photos and here’s the result: chuvadepapel.com:

To be true this is not entirely free, as I chose to pay for the domain (chuvadepapel.weebly.com was the free version). Ok, this is just the bare minimum needs for a static site, don’t expect too much. But it’s simple to edit, and costs nothing o manage. Cool.

 

PS: on the next opportunity, I’ll probably try out wix.com.

Will IE9 be te one?

People tend to forget the past. Here’s a cool article reminding us of IE past glory: How-To Geek Explains: Why Do So Many Geeks Hate Internet Explorer?

1996: Internet Explorer 3
This version of the browser, introduced in 1997, was the first browser to implement CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Yes, you’re reading that correctly—in fact, it introduced many new features like Java applets and sadly, ActiveX controls.

1997: Internet Explorer 4
IE4 introduced a blazing fast (at the time) rendering engine as an embeddable component that could be used in other applications—this was a lot more important than people realize. This version also introduced Dynamic HTML, which allows web pages to dynamically change the page using JavaScript, and added Active Desktop integration.

Even more weird? Seems like nobody remembers this anymore, but IE4 was actually cross-platform—you could install it on Mac OS, Solaris, and HP-UX—and by the time IE5 was released, IE4 had reached a 60% market share.

1999: Internet Explorer 5.x
Microsoft invented Ajax. Wait… what? That’s right, it was this version of IE that introduced the XMLHttpRequest feature in JavaScript, which forms the underlying technology behind every web application you’re using today—you know, like Gmail. Of course, the term “Ajax” wasn’t actually coined until years later by somebody other than Microsoft, but this release supported everything required to make it work.

So Yes, Microsoft Innovated
From IE3 until IE6, Microsoft used all their resources to simply out-innovate the competition, releasing new features and better browsers faster than Netscape. In fact, Netscape 3 Gold was a buggy piece of junk that crashed all the time, and Netscape 4 was extremely slow and could barely render tables—much less CSS, which would often cause the browser to crash.

To put it in context: web developers used to complain about Netscape the same way they complain about IE6 now.

 

I’d like to add:

• Netscape was a paid product, IE was free. Funny how this looks like now
• Most of the times IE was closer to W3C standards than Netscape – still, too far from the standards, I’m afraid
• IE was very forgiven to badly written HTML – if I remember correctly on Netscape, an unclosed tag on a table was all it took to stop displaying it
• Probably AJAX actually pre-dates XMLHttpRequest (implemented to support OWA) – old interdev versions had a server object based on a java applet capable of invoking an async remote procedure. We had a series of clients that insisted on making a browser interact like excel – now that a think of it, they were visionaries! But yes, XMLHttpRequest, XML and SOAP did brought it to the masses.

So what went wrong?

The trouble all started when Microsoft integrated IE into Windows as a required component, and made it difficult to uninstall and use an alternate browser. Then there was the whole business with them exploiting their monopoly to try and push Netscape out of the market, and a lot of people started to view Microsoft as the evil empire.

Microsoft Stopped Trying
By the time Microsoft released Internet Explorer 6 in 2001, complete with lots of new features for web developers, since there was no competition and they had a 95% market share, Microsoft just stopped trying—seriously, they did nothing for 5 years even after Firefox was released and geeks started migrating left and right.

Microsoft-Specific Features
…

Security Holes and Crashing

…

IE7 and IE8 Were Too Little, Too Late

…

Supporting IE is Like a Fork in the Eye for Web Devs

…

Geeks Forced to Use Internet Explorer

…

 

The article ends with a vote of confidence to IE9. I agree, finally we see a lot of potential on a new IE, let’s see what happens.

Bottom-line is: boy, do I miss NCSA Mosaic…

Best Practices for form design

Here’s the next book I have to read: Best Practices for form design. It’s written by Luke Wroblewski, current Chief Design Architect at Yahoo, former Lead User Interface Designer of eBay and Senior Interface Designer at the NCSA, the birthplace of the first popular graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic NCSA Mosaic (link corrected).

Here’s a presentation of the book.

Thanks for finding it, Tiago.

 

<update>

Sign of times…

</update>

Strongly typed rules!

I admit, I’m an old fashioned curly brackets kind of developer with a crush for early binding and strongly typed models!

Here’s a cool post from Scott Guthrie about my kind of views:

<%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.Name) %>

Don’t you just love it when everything breaks apart on compile time? :)

Bing vs google: oops

Ok, nowadays I can use either bing or google and hardly find any great difference. But sometime I still get some glitches in the matrix:

.NET OpenID

Here’s a cool library: DotNetOpenAuth:

This C# library adds OpenID 2.0 Provider and Relying Party, OAuth Consumer and Service Provider, and InfoCard Selectorsupport to your web site both programmatically and through convenient drop-in ASP.NET controls. Use as much or little of the functionality as you want.

Download it now

Download the latest version

or Get the latest source

All downloads include both the library, samples, and tools to help you get started.

We use GIT for source control, click here to find out more

Features

• Compiled library that adds support for your site visitors to login with their OpenIDs by just dropping an ASP.NET control onto your page. It's that easy. An AJAX-style login control is also included for a slick, streamlined user experience.
• Give your site members their own OpenIDs with the provider support included in this library.
• Sample relying party and provider web sites show you just how to do it.
• Easy access to all the functionality so you can customize how OpenID will operate on your site, whether you use ASP.NET or not.
• Classic ASP support
• Full support for custom extensions. Plus built-in support for Simple Registration, Attribute Exchange and PAPE.
• Works in partial trusted shared hosting environments.
• Support for web farms where state persistence, front-facing web servers and ASP.NET may not be standard or even available.
• OpenID 2.0 and 1.x
• OAuth 1.0 and 1.0a
• Superior support for multi-byte Unicode identifiers.
• Lots of security features
• 490+ unit tests to verify correctness.
• Library behind the OSIS OpenID interop testing
• About 1500 downloads per month. See who's using DotNetOpenAuth

Google Chrome just got fatter

Yeap, Google Chrome now has extensions! We can say bye bye to the minimalist approach, but hello to many goodies.

Here are some of the most popular extensions – yes, there’s a basic ad blocker:

Google Mail Checker

(698)

-  115,343 users

Displays the number of unread messages in your Google Mail inbox. You can also click the button to...

AdThwart

(327)

-  70,693 users

Blocks ads on websites. Includes the EasyList ad filter list as of 9 Dec 2009.

Google Translate

(180)

-  69,760 users

This extension translates entire webpages into a language of your choice with one click. By the...

RSS Subscription Extension

(227)

-  49,322 users

Adds one-click subscription to your toolbar

Google Wave Notifier

(123)

-  37,235 users

Displays number of unread Waves.

Xmarks for Chrome Beta

(211)

-  35,478 users

Xmarks for Chrome Beta is a beta preview of Xmarks for Chrome

 

Please note: you’ll have to install version 4 beta.

WSS: recovering an overwritten AllItems.aspx

Let’s start by stating the obvious: you should never assume that the software you’re using can’t be as dumb as that, it often can. That simple assumption itself is quite dumb. And that is how I’m feeling right now: dumb.

I was saving an excel worksheet into WSS and copied the full path from IE including AllItems.aspx! So what our friend WSS decided to do: it uploaded my excel into AllItems.aspx! Argh!!! I’ve lost access to my library!!!

The solution I’ve found was to create a new default view. The majority of binged results suggested an alternative approach: using Sharepoint Designer to copy AllItems.aspx from another library.

<update>

Here’s how:

Site Settings > Site Libraries and Lists > Customize "My Library"  > Views > Create View > Standard View > “AlternativeAllItems”     [X] Make this the default view

</update>

Bing is still growing

According to comStore:

It appears that Microsoft Bing has continued to generate interest from the market for the second consecutive week,” said Mike Hurt, comScore senior vice president. “These early data reflect a continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch.”

Here’s their data:

Microsoft Sites Search Performance Work Week: 5/25/09 – 6/12/09 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch
	Work Week
5/25/09-5/29/09	6/1/09-6/5/09	6/8/09-6/12/09
Searcher Penetration (Avg. Daily)	13.7%	15.8%	16.7%
Share of Search Result Pages	9.1%	11.3%	12.1%

Who’s afraid of bing?

According to New York Post bing is getting on Google’s nerves:

[…]co-founder Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft's rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service, The Post has learned.

Ok, bing won’t knock Google down, but according to the same post the predominant features that dictate how people search the Internet are ease of use and force of habit. It seems like:

Google has been so dominant for so long that it will be tough for anyone to take significant market share away from them.

Doesn’t this remind us of another company?

PS: the announced 11% market share is probably way more than bing has right now. And let’s see how it goes from here, will the trend continue uphill or will it fall to the usual 5% after this very aggressive ad campaign?

Three-strikes bill is out… there, somewhere on a waste bin :)

As expected, the French Constitutional Council declared unconstitutional the new Création et Internet law which would disconnect repeat online copyright infringers.

This council instructed Mr. Sarkozy:

• Every man is presumed innocent until has has been proven guilty
• Freedom of expression and communication is so valuable that its exercise is a prerequisite for democracy and one of the guarantees of respect for other rights and freedoms and attacks on the exercise of this freedom must be necessary, appropriate and proportionate to the aim pursued

Let’s only hope that the content providers don’t have influence enough to rewrite the basis of the European constitutions.

Hear about it at ars technica.

.NET RIA Services

The first time I’ve heard about .NET RIA Services was only a couple of weeks ago, when a colleague of mine (thanks Rui Rasteiro) introduced me to this pattern he was trying it out.

So what is .NET RIA Services:

Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. The RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier.

It is basically a pattern to implement N-tier architectures (with N tending to 3) on RIA apps, targeting rich the presentation layer for Silverlight (and ASP.NET), decoupling the physical data stores by the introduction of ADO.NET DataServices, articulated through an application mid-tier which can focus on domain logic as the plumbing solves:

[…] write application logic on the server and display, validate the data,  as well as supporting authorization,  querying, sorting, filtering, paging, etc, not to mention providing a clean way to mock out the data layer to do testing (a la TDD, etc).  All regardless of what data store you use (Entity Framework, Linq2Sql, nHibernate, Xml file, REST service, WCF-server, etc). 

Here’s the roadmap:

July 2009 CTP

PDC 2009 Beta

First part of 2010: RTW

Windows 7 to be shipped in Europe without Internet Explorer

Ok, I can understand the antitrust action based on the way Microsoft back in the 90’s, but on 2009 this is starting to look ridiculous. Take the market share (by Net Application):

Isn’t this a little bit out of date? Since Microsoft is no longer tying Internet Explorer to Windows (nor shipping), shouldn’t the same shipping prohibition be extended to Safari and Firefox on Mac OS X and Ubuntu? Or better yet, shouldn’t we stop this anachronism?

Oh well, probably the OEMs will just pack IE on the distributions we get here in Europe so I’m just wasting our time on what won’t probably be a problem…

Bing still not fully supported in Portugal

Here’s bing in Portugal:

Not too much to ad to google, I’m afraid… :( And here’s bing in the US:

And here’s some gadget finding:

So my advice to you is: set localization to United States. Though it shouldn't, the same happens in google in respect to functionalities…

It look like bing is deserving the 6% Share Within Hours of Launch – bye bye Yahoo?

Benchmarking search engines

Here’s a simple yet cool engine search reviewer: blindsearch:

Type in a search query above, hit search then vote for the column which you believe best matches your query. The columns are randomized with every query.

The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive the results?

Here’s how it looks:

Strangely enough, and for the few searches I’ve submitted, Yahoo and Bing won…

update: it’s my eyes or nowadays the difference from google to bing an yahoo is not what we were used to?… no wonder this site is written by a Microsoft employee :)

Windows 7 task bar thumbnails

Microsoft applications seem to be quite well prepared to project independent windows thumbnails on Windows 7 task bar. And for some strange reason, applications like Chrome and Firefox still didn’t react, leaving IE with a (I admit, small) competitive advantage. When will Chrome and Firefox respond? Since Windows 7 I’m inverting my browser usage from Chrome to IE, can this be a reason?

Google Chrome: Mac and Linux builds available

It seems like Chrome is finally available on Mac and Linux:

In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.
How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won't yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.
Meanwhile, we'll get back to trying to get Google Chrome on these platforms stable enough for a beta release as soon as possible!

I can’t wait to get my hands on Chrome on Mac OS – Firefox loads very slowly on Mac OS. Though I probably won’t find it most different from Safari on startup speed… let’s see how it goes…

<update>

It work just fine! It even brings more options than the Chrome 2 Windows version :)

</update>

bing.com is available

Here it is: http://www.bing.com. For now the experience has been a little disappointing, at least in Portugal, could it be dependent on local data? Hope it gets better...

bing: yet another search engine or something new?

Only time will tell. The concept is cool, privileging the decision engine over the raw search paradigm, providing customers with a first step in moving beyond search to help make faster, more informed decisions.

Though bing is not live yet, some lucky testers have been trying it out (I’ve only managed to get a 15 minute demo). What they say: at first it seems like another search engine. But the differences start to show up: queries are somehow semantically categorized, providing a reading in context. And context can be shopping, travelling, health, geography. Some rather explain that bing offers improved filtering tools with an interface similar to Google, but with different multimedia search results.

bing will be a though battle for Microsoft: Microsoft search technology has traditionally been years behind google, and it will probably be nothing but a cool concept over a poorly design search engine infra-structure. If the search infra-structure doesn’t get the results we expect, there’s not much bing can help Microsoft here. It may patch it, but won’t fix it.

So where can bing beat google: on the structured and cool looking results? May be, let’s see how it goes. For now bing is only guaranteed to win over on criteria: it’s 2 letters shorter! Can you believe this, there was still a 4 letter domain being saved for later usage :)

Hope it comes live soon. Until then, here’s a preview video.

Beware of SkyDrive…

SkyDrive seems to be religiously repeating some of Windows early mistakes by privileging easy of use over privacy and security.

Is respect to privacy, SkyDrive default option to announce on messenger all the new public uploads is just as hard to explain as when Windows used to start unnecessary services just because they could ever be used! When people upload public files, they sometimes expect this publishing to get unnoticed. SkyDrive just defaults to announce it for you. A couple of friends had some problems with this unexpected announcement and they finally unchecked this option. So did I.

In regard to security, things aren’t much better. One of my friends closed this public folder and asked me if I could still get to his file. And I still had access. Why? Because I had the folder page opened, where the document link stood. It seems like all you need is the link itself, after that you won’t be needing authorization – not even authentication!…

Oh well.. at least it is free :)