Sometimes technical, sometimes not, never a kitty

Looks like this is as close as we're going to get to the Pittsburgh area for a while: http://centralpenn.web121.discountasp.net/home/CodeCamp/tabid/57/Default.aspx

I just picked up my new letterhead, and it looks great.  Ed Lackman at Guideline Printing was incredibly helpful in selecting the papers and working with Lynn Capestrani at Advertising Concepts to get the colors and bleeds just right.  It's amazing the variety of papers available today, and how much technical information on each Ed has stashed in his head.  Lynn also designed the PowerPoint template I use (you can see that in my SAF 2005 presentation).  Lynn and Ed's expertise made the whole process incredibly easy--I just had to pick a few things I liked, and they handled the rest.  Painless.  If you need design and print services in or around Pittsburgh (well, anywhere for that matter--they're digital), I definately recommend both of them.

Everything features my logo (which you can see on my homepage at http://www.rjdudley.com).  The original logo concept was designed by Molly Masood, but she got swamped with other work, and so Lynn and I traded some work with one another to polish it off and get everything printed.  You can see the proofs below; the bright blue was toned down to a more navy-blue for the actual pressing.

Business Card Proof

Letterhead Proof

Envelope Proof

Way cool, Eric!

This is the first in a series of articles showing how to integrate a Crystal Report Manager into DotNetNuke. This article will step through creating a private assembly using Visual Studio as the development environment and using the Data Access Layer in DNN.

Full article at http://aspalliance.com/733

I'm part owner of a flower shop in Butler, PA (The Bloomery, thanks for asking).  Butler is a rusted out steel town about 35 miles north of Pittsburgh, and about 15 miles north of the suburban sprawl.  We're having a holiday open house on November 6, and to promote the event, we're doing a postcard mailing.  We had 700 sheets of cardstock printed with postcards 4/page.  We then spent several hours cutting the cards apart.  We pared our mailing list down to about 2600 people based on proximity and purchases.  Mailing labels and return address labels had to be printed and applied, and stamps purchased and applied.  We're in for close to $1000 just in copies, stamps and labels, plus the hours and hours of our time.

By contrast, it would take me about 10 minutes to put the same information on our blog (at www.floristblogs.com), or about half an hour to get really artistic in the blog post.  Now, we're a long way away from 2600 people in this town reading blogs on a regular basis, let alone our shop's blog, but the time will come when we can really scale back the expense and effort it takes us to reach our customer base.  Cindy Closkey, one of the founders of Pittsburgh Bloggers, lives here in Butler and is doing her darndest to spread the word.

I hope the time is soon.  I want this week's evenings and 1 grand back.

I'm going to have to read this book twice.  "Naked Conversations" has me jazzed.  I'm probably supposed to be reading this book with a critical eye, but I find myself so interested in the content that I lose myself in it.  The writing style is casual and informative, and solid tips are worked in between the vignettes of bloggers.  So far, it's been part history lesson, part glimpse of the future, with a focus on the end result: relating to customers.  One aspect I really like about the book so far is the wide variety of people who are included.  Favorite quote so far: "Blogging is word of mouth on steroids."

One annoyance: page numbering restarts with every chapter.  I prefer not to have to refer to "page 10 of chapter 4", but rather "page 142".

I will definately be recommending several people add preorders of this book to their Christmas lists (consider this a personal recommendation for anyone reading this; there's a handy link below for your use).  And hey, my uncle's a master plumber in NH, so y'all may have your blogging plumber soon.

Developing Automated Tests Using NUnit and VB.NET
source: http://www.byte-vision.com/NUnitAndVBPrint.aspx

This article describes how to write unit tests in Visual Basic .NET using the market standard automated unit testing tool NUnit 2.0.

How to report off a flat XML file through a Visual Studio .NET application

source: http://support.businessobjects.com/library/kbase/articles/c2015522.asp?ref=devzone_net_howto

This short KB article has sample code that demonstrates how to trpoty off a flat XML file using Crystal Reports .NET.

There are several causes for this message, you should read all the information before trying any one of these solutions.

1) This is a known issue in some versions of Crystal Reports, and there is a hot fix at http://support.businessobjects.com/library/kbase/articles/c2012318.asp.

Note that although the article's metadata indicate this hotfix is for CR .NET, the body copy speaks only of CR 9.0.  As such, apply this hotfix with some trepidation.  On Win XP systems, you may want to make a retore point in case the hotfix messes up your installation.

2) On a Win 98 machine, exporting to HTML 3.2 or 4.0.  There is no known fix at this time.  http://support.businessobjects.com/library/kbase/articles/c2013300.asp

This error message seems to stem from problems in crqe.dll, which is the Crystal Reports Query Engine.  If you search the knowledgebase at support.businessonjects.com for crqe.dll, you'll find additional articles that aren't specific to this error message that may also help/

Crystal Reports .NET Programming
If you're new to Crystal Reports, or just to CR .NET, this is the book you need. Part how-to, part programming reference, lots of simple examples in both C# and VB.NET.

Shel Israel and Robert Scoble's new book, "Naked Conversations" arrived today, looking like the bizarre love-child of the USAF's Project Blue Book reports and the exam books at Allegheny College.  Thankfully, they have a real cover aready designed. 

Separated at birth?  Decide for yourselves.

Congratulations, Richard!
Your IQ score is 135

This number is based on a scientific formula that compares how many questions you answered correctly on the Classic IQ Test relative to others.

Your Intellectual Type is Facts Curator. This means you are highly intelligent and have picked up an impressive and unique collection of facts and figures over the years. You've got a remarkable vocabulary and exceptional math skills — which puts you in the same class as brainiacs like Bill Gates. And that's just some of what we know about you from your test results.

Not to pick nits, but the second sentence should start "You have a remarkable..."

Here's the link: The Classic IQ Test.  You'll have to create a free profile, but that's what GMail is for.

Specifically, to optimize blog entries for search engines, MoreVisibilty advises its business clients using blogs on their site to focus on a very limited set of keywords in any blog updates. The main keywords should appear it the title of the blog entry, and the same keywords should also be mentioned one to three times in the blog entry itself, based on its length.

Read more at http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=16268.

One of the best sources of content ideas are the statistics for your website.  If you run your own website, your host should have a statistics package that gives you summary information, or you can look in the raw log files.  What you want to find are the search engine referrals--the phrases people typed into the search engine that led them to your site.  You want to dig through these search phrases, and find ones that relate to your business.  By focusing a blog posting on these phrases, you'll draw people to that blog post when they search for these terms.  Make sure you link to specific products or categories on your site.

If you remember Chad and Bob talking about "search engine optimization", this is one part of doing that.  The idea is to put content on your site or blog that is interesting to potential customers, and that will be found in the search engines, hopefully turning searchers into customers.

In a previous post (http://aspadvice.com/blogs/rjdudley/archive/2005/05/21/2595.aspx), I showed one way to protect files from direct download by configuring IIS.  In a shared hosting environment, this usually isn't possible, so I'll show another way to protect these files.

First, a little review.  Out of the box, only certain file types are mapped to the ASP.NET ISAPI filter.  These include .aspx, .ascx, .ashx, etc.  If these pages are requested, IIS hands off processing to the ASP.NET filter.  Otherwise, IIS serves the file directly (or hands it off to another ISAPI, as necessary).  There are also a number of file types mapped to ASP.NET that are protected by the HttpForbiddenHandler.  This is an HTTP Handler that prevents direct download of files of the specified type.  If you examine the <httpHandler> section of your machine.config file, you'll see the list.

It would seem that simply adding a file extension to the <httpHandler> section and have the HttpForbiddenHandler prevent its download would be great, but unfortunately, you need to also configure IIS for any new extention you want handled, which is the problem in the first place.

However, there's a little trick we can use.  Let's say you have a file named "protected.pdf" which you wish to prevent direct download of.  You can rename this file to "protected.pdf.resources", and since the .resources extension is already forbidden, users will not be able to download this file directly even if they can guess the file name.  Try it and see.

When it comes time to allow users to download the file, you can use the System.Web.HttpResponse.WriteFile method to send the file to the user.  You may have to clear the response and add a content type to make this all work correctly, as shown:

In addition to all the information I have on my slides, I was making notes all through the breakfast and early session to work into my presentation as well.  I've numbered the slides here, but you'll have to count them on the printed copy:

Slides 9-10: Why blog?
As we heard in the breakfast session, consumers want/need educational material.  A blog is a great place to put some of this information.  You could create a section on your blog for "Care and Handling Tips", and have posts for the different types of flowers and arrangements.

Mike's study also found that the greatest barrier for younger consumers is that they don't know how or what to order.  These consumers probably do know how to read a blog, so adding content to your blog that is very basic could help draw younger customers to your shop.  I can almost guarantee a series of posts about corsages and boutonnieres as prom season approaches would be a great draw, and you could probably sell some different styles merely by highlighting them.

Slide 12: Blogs as a marketing tool
"Customer evangelism" is a fancy new term for "word of mouth".  This is where your loyal (or PO'd) customers talk about you, good or bad.  Be careful what you say or do, as it may be easily broadcast to thousands.  Personal blogs will tip the balance of business to consumer interactions back toward the consumer again.

Slide 13: What to blog about
Do you have e-mail newsletters like Chad, Marty and Tina?  Put copies on your blog!  You can keep the newsletter special by delaying posting for a couple of days.  As I mentioned in a previous slide, there is a growing reluctance for consumers to give out their e-mail address.  Blogs are anonymous, so there will be a certain percentage of consumers who would rather read a blog.  But, if they see great value in your newsletter, they might sign up.  Blogs and e-mail marketing are complementary technologies, and it would be good to do both.

Slide 14: Where to get content
SAF gave us great "Hip givers guides" at breakfast.  You have a number of great ideas in there.  Mike's presentation has some interesting statistics--some you'll want to share, and some you'll want to use to plan content.

I've posted my presentation at http://www.rjdudley.com/ArticlesPresentations/Presentations/tabid/109/Default.aspx.  To navigate the menus, go to www.rjdudley.com, and then Articles & Presentations >> Presentations.

The file is PDF format, so you'll need Acrobat Reader to open it.  Almost everyone has Acrobat Reader, but if you don't, you can get it for free at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.  If you need the slides in a different format, let me know (you can catch me at rich-at-bloomery-dot-com).

Thanks to everyone who attended our session today.  The room looked packed, and I know Chad, Brian, Bob and myself enjoyed sharing what we've done and answering your questions. We had several conference calls and e-mails to make sure we covered a wide variety of topics, and I know we hope everyone got a lot out of the session.

One question I think I failed to have a concrete answer for is "What is a blog", leaving some people feeling I didn't answer it at all.  I'll try and clear it up a little here.

As I mentioned in my presentation, a blog is really several technologies working together--data storage, presentation, and administration.  Data storage is usually a file format called RSS, presentation is usually handled by templates created in XSLT, and administration is the back end where you enter and maintain your blog posts.  Data storage and presentation are what make blogs so difficult to define concretely.

In a web browser, a blog (such as the one you're reading) looks like a web page with a number of short articles on it.  In an aggregator (a program that downloads RSS files so you can read and manage the posts off-line), the blog entries look just like e-mails.  Same exact data, just a different presentation.

This is where things get really cool.  Remember Chad's wedding gallery?  You can find it at http://www.kremp.com/album.asp.  Visit his site, open any gallery, and then open any album.  Look down in the lower right-hand corner of the album.  You'll see a little orange button with a white "RSS" label.  With Chad's gallery software, you can use a blog aggregator to subscribe to any of their albums.  When you first subscribe, you'll download all the photos in the album, each like an individual e-mail.  As they add additional photos, your aggregator will automatically download each one as a separate message. 

Does this mean their photo gallery is a blog?  In a way, yes.  It uses the same data storage (RSS), and templates to manage the presentation.  In a web browser, it looks like a web page; in an aggregator, each photo will be a separate message.  One of the main differences is the administration part.  Chad's gallery is geared toward the uploading of photos, and short comments.  The blogging app I use on this site is geared toward entering a lot of text data, but with some ability to upload photos as well.

The software I use at FloristBlogs.com has both a blog and a photo gallery built in together.  Why not--they're practically the same thing!

I hope this helps clarify a little what a blog is.  Unfortunately, there isn't a concrete definition, and that's just because blogs are so flexible that they can be many things.