Sometimes technical, sometimes not, never a kitty

Another little gallery app I used recently is ThumbGallery from FlashRelief.  It's $20, but that's really cheap considering how nice this gallery is.  You don't need Flash at all--they provide you with a pre-compiled Flash control which you embed into a web page, and you configure the whole thing with a simple XML file.  Downside is having to make both a thumbnail and full size image yourself, which can get tedious if you have a lot.

We used this recently on our prom corsage and boutonniere gallery at http://www.bloomery.com/promgallery.htm.

I found a free news scroller at http://www.rainforestnet.com/newscroller.htm.  It's easy to add to a page, easy to configure, and free.  There are actually two scrollers--one is a basic scroller which will continually flow a single message, and one which will scroll a page and pause to allow reading.  Installation and demo are on the download page.

nGallery was a great application on its own, but Community Server is just far too much overhead when all you need is a simple gallery app.  Even though it haven't been updated in a while, nGallery is still one of the better gallery apps out there.  After quite a bit of template tweaking, I have very customized gallery up at http://www.cleantownusa.com/gallery/.  The template seems difficult at first, but after fooling around with it for a little bit, it's actually quite easy.  You need either a great mind's eye, or you need to use the refresh button liberally as you tweak, and very liberal use of source control for the different template bits is highly recommended.  "I told you so", in advance, for those who don't.

BTW - CleanTown USA is Pittsburgh's favorite car wash and interior detail center.  Find them online at http://www.cleantownusa.com.  Shameless plug, but the marketing coordinator threatened to cut off my supply of free Mountain Dew if I didn't say it.  I hope you understand.

The folks at Pittsburgh Dot Net have been busy with preparations for Pittsburgh Code Camp, and they've released the confirmed topics:

-AJAX / Atlas for .NET
-An Inside Look at the .Net Framework Garbage Collector
-Common Pitfalls with .NET and COM Interop
-Eliminate Application Backlog
-Introducing Iron Python .NET
-Introduction to Custom Membership Providers (ASP.NET 2.0)
-Microsoft Composite UI Application Block (CAB)
-.Net using Mono/Open Source
-Quicker Implementation of Web Services with CRUD Generation
-Refactoring in .NET 2.0
-SOA-Building Services for Reuse
-SQL Server Integration Services
-Unit and Web Testing with Visual Studio 2005
-Using Attributes and PropertyGrids to Manage System Configuration
-Using the Enterprise Library
-Windows Workflow Foundation for .NET

Looks to be an awesome day!  Pittsburgh Code Camp is April 8, and you can apparently still regsiter at http://www.pghdotnet.org/CodeCamp/default.htm.

StoreFront includes some client-side design tools which plug into FrontPage or Dreamweaver, and they’re not too bad (especially for beginners).  One downside to these tools is that they completely rewrite the styles.css file each time you save your settings.  Not so good if you’ve made some CSS changes.  Instead of altering the styles.css, I recommend using an additional stylesheet.  Remember that styles are cascaded—that is, if you specify the same class in two stylesheets, the browser will mash them together and use both sets of settings.  If you specify the same element in both stylesheets, then the sheet which is listed last wins.  This is excellent for us, because you can add settings to all the basic classes in styles.css, and you don’t have to worry about losing your settings if you still want to use StoreFront’s design tools.

To make sure our new stylesheet is added to every page, you need to add one line of code to the CWebPage.vb file and recompile your site.  Open CWebPage.vb in FrontPage or Dreamweaver, and find the subroutine named PageHeader.  Scroll down to the end of the subroutine (marked by ‘End Sub’, at roughly line 938).  Add the following line of code right above End Sub:

response.write("<link type=""text/css"" rel=""stylesheet"" href=""MyStyleSheet.css""></script>")

You do need the double double-quotes where you see them, and remember to change the name of MyStyleSheet.css in the line of code.  This line of code will add a stylesheet link to the end of the header of every page.  Recompile your site using Compile Components on the StoreFront menu, and you’ll be good to go.

Now playing: Eddie Money - Gimme Some Water

We're getting a new Chili's here in Butler, and trust me, that's pretty big news in this small town. The pepper went up this week, and my mouth is watering. The general contractor is from Ohio, but the excavators and pavers are local companies. Thanks for that, Chili's, I know you'll get a lot of business from this town, and we appreciate the support back. Now, if you ever need flowers, call that nice shop practically across the street...

So my first pair went back because the headband cracked, and the headset couldn’t stay paired with the transmitter.  The replacements arrived fairly quickly, but the second set had a battery charging issue.  After trying several rounds of resets and pairing and more resets (keep the button pressed for 25 seconds!), Logitech is sending a replacement for this pair as well.  This is really disappointing, since I really like this product, but the toubles are making it less and less appealing. 

I’m not the only one suffering these problems; here are a few threads from Logitech’s support forums.

http://forums.logitech.com/pe/action/forums/displaysinglethread?rootPostID=10151625

http://forums.logitech.com/pe/action/forums/displaysinglethread?rootPostID=10150058

http://forums.logitech.com/pe/action/forums/displaysinglethread?rootPostID=10164588

http://forums.logitech.com/pe/action/forums/displaysinglethread?rootPostID=10163280

You’ll find more if you keep scanning their forums.  Wi-Gear’s iMuffs are a similar product that might be worth checking out.

Now playing: Jay Ferguson - Thunder Island

The Treo 700w comes with a VPN client, but my company uses a Cisco 3000 VPN concentrator, and the bundled VPN client doesn’t work with this.  I am trying a demo of the VPN client from Anthasoft, and it’s working like a charm.  Installation was a snap—copy a certificate manager CAB to the device and install it, then install the VPN client from the desktop and sync.  Somehow, the user guide didn’t make it into the distro, but if you e-mail them, they’ll send it to you.

Once I got the user guide, setup was easy, and I connected to my company’s VPN in only a couple of minutes.  I then fired up the terminal services client which comes on the Treo, and I was able to log on and administrate a couple of server.  In a pinch, this combo will work great, but I can’t see too many people working full time on a 2”x2” screen.

Now playing: The Raconteurs - Steady, As She Goes

Spammers are annoying, but the incompetent ones make me laugh:

Now playing: Georgia Satellites - Battleship Chains

According to Download Squad, SplashBlog (the photoblogging app I use with my Treo 700w) has been bought by the makers of Movable Type:

Six Apart, the company that owns popular blogging software Movable Type and web services TypePad and LiveJournal, has been busy lately. According to TechCrunch, they've raised $12 million in VC funding and, more interestingly (to me, at least), acquried SplashBlog. SplashBlog is a service for blogging and photoblogging from mobile phones and PDAs, and it's reasonable to expect Six Apart to integrate SplashBlog's offerings into its current line-up.

That's the entire post, but if you're interested, full story at http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/03/16/six-apart-gets-funding-buys-splashblog/.

Now playing: The Human League - (Keep Feeling) Fascination

Very cool: http://television.aol.com/in2tv

AOL is streaming episodes of classic TV shows for free.  Shows include Wonder Woman, Eight is Enough, V, Perfect Strangers, and more.  So far, only select episodes are available from each series, with more to come according to AOL.

Let's take a look at FTD over the past few months for some guidance.  In December, FTD reported a decrease in orders because they decided not to play in areas like Google's AdWords, since keyword bidding is becomming so expensive  (http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=17140 and http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=17389).  Granted, FTD was part of the problem in inflating keyword prices, but they'd rather we didn't consider that.  Total revenue was up slightly for the last quarter, and recently, FTD announced its 2006 Valentine's Day orders were up 14% year-to-year (http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=17691).  What are we to take from FTD's experiences?

• Keyword bidding for floral-related search terms is expensive, with the big players pushing each other around
• Reducing online marketing efforts will probably reduce online orders
• Customers are buying more and more everyday flowers online
• More and more customers are buying on-line at the holidays
• Customers are using search engines to research for floral purchases

Now, here's a very interesting study that came out recently:

A new study says that though a majority of shoppers use the internet to research products, nearly half still prefer to make their purchases through bricks and mortar retailers.
(http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3588131)

This is outstanding news for us local florists, especially the ones with a good website.  Probably the #1 facing local florists is simply getting found in the search engines.  Aside from the big players bidding keywords way up, and the skimmer sites, it's tough to be found.  And that's where a blog comes in. 

Blogs are quickly and happily indexed by search engines.  Your posts themselves will become pages in the search index promoting you.  If you're a member of a site such as floristblogs.com, links in your blog posts to your site will count as inbound links to your site.  Blogs also help build your brand.  People know about FTD, and familiarity builds confidence.  Your blog will give your customers a good idea of what you're about.  You want to try to write your blog posts as if you were conversing with your customers face-to-face.

Here are today's reasons to blog:

• Blogs are cheap.  Even FloristBlogs.com works out to $5/month.
• Writing a blog will increase your on-line marketing efforts
• Your customers will find you easier, and get a feel for your brand

For the next few months, I will be middleware.  I will be everywhere in our enterprise, integrating systems.  One of the Prime Directives is "get it done fast!"  We're not looking for beautifully architected n-tier solutions that can be abstracted and inherited ad infinitum.  Just make the ERP talk to the WMS, and back again.  It doesn't need to last forever, we're going to rip everything apart and implement the latest best solutions again in a few years anyway.

There are about as many ways to get retrieve and handle data as there are developers with string opinions--object-relationship mappers, custom business objects, strongly typed datasets, etc.

In Visual Studio 2005, MS really improved the designers for strongly-typed datasets.  These aren't everyone's favorite method of handling data, but they work, and they can be put together quickly, and I like them for some purposes.  Here are three excellent articles on using strongly-typed datasets in an application.

Build a Data Access Layer with the Visual Studio 2005 DataSet Designer, Brian Noyes

A good data access layer is critical for most business applications, whether that layer resides on a middle tier application server, a web server or on the client. Data access layers tend to involve a lot of error-prone, repetitive coding if you try to do it by hand. You can alleviate some of that by designing a good set of base and helper classes to encapsulate the repeating patterns, or by using a code generation tool. However, you still usually have to write all the data access methods by hand for the ad-hoc queries that service large parts of your application.

If you are using Visual Studio 2005, that does not have to be the case. Some significant improvements have been made to the Visual Studio 2005 DataSet designer and the code that it generates that make it so you will rarely have to write your data access methods by hand of you choose to work with DataSets. In this article, I'll walk you through what those features are and how to use them. I'll also discuss some of the pros and cons of using the new features and give some guidance on when you might want to do something different.

Building a DAL using Strongly Typed TableAdapters and DataTables in VS 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0, Scott Guthrie

Using the data designer and ASP.NET 2.0 together, you should be able to create a core DAL implementation and build from scratch a data-driven UI web app on top of an existing database very quickly (~10-15 minutes to build an application from scratch that supports master/details filtering along with data paging, sorting, insertion, and editing).

Using Strongly-Typed Data Access in Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0, Joseph Chancellor

Specifically, we will see how to create and use strongly-typed DataSets in Visual Studio 2005. As this article explores, strongly-typed DataSets offer a number of advantages over alternative, loosely-typed data access techniques and, with Visual Studio 2005, creating and using strongly-typed DataSets has never been easier. Read on to learn more!