Sometimes technical, sometimes not, never a kitty

A SharePoint User Group is coming to the Pittsburgh area:

The Pittsburgh Area SharePoint User Group  is dedicated to providing educational  and informational resources for Microsoft SharePoint technologies and related products.  Its purpose is to bring the local SharePoint community together to network, and to share tips, tricks, and ideas on SharePoint technologies, as well as to provide a forum for people involved with SharePoint.  The target audience for this users group includes developers, designers, administrators, and power users. 

The first meeting of the SharePoint User Group will be held at the end of April or early May.  To help us define the format, content, and timing of this meeting, and to be notified of upcoming meetings, please help us by filling out a brief survey, at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=495253496362  This survey, which is being administered by the Pittsburgh Technology Council, will only take a few minutes to complete, and we hope to have all responses by March 31st. Your responses will be collected by the Council and kept completely confidential and, without your permission, no material that identifies your response will be distributed.

The Pittsburgh area User Groups have proved to be a great source of information and knowledge for users over the years--and we anticipate that the SharePoint Users Group will be as equally successful.

Additional comments and concerns are always welcome.

This is an outstanding article, full of great advice.  The author (Jill Whelan) is a long time search engine optimizer whose advice I’ve followed for years with success.  I trust her advice over that of many, many other people.

One example:

* The majority of the site will be static, as static pages are easier for search engines to crawl and rank properly.

‘Fraid not. Dynamic pages are just as easy to crawl and rank as static pages. Most websites today are dynamic because they’re simply easier to maintain. The search engines have figured out how to crawl and rank them just fine for many, many years now. It’s true that there are specific things you need to watch out for when creating a dynamic site, but most developers are aware of the worst of the issues. You certainly should consult with an SEO if you’re changing content management systems, or if you’re having problems getting your dynamic URLs spidered and indexed. But there’s no reason to have only static pages on your site because you’re worried about the search engines being able to index dynamic pages.

Full story at http://www.highrankings.com/advisor/not-important-to-seo/

Splogs suck.  We all know that.  And we all know where they are, and why they're there.  And we know Google has been slow to do anything about the problem, since Adwords are a gravy train for them.  Recently, Microsoft researchers have gotten to the bottom of the scum, and may have a way to filter splogs from legit blogs:

The researchers’ specific findings included evidence that some blog-hosting services have permitted an explosion of phony doorway pages. For example, the researchers noted that such pages were far more prevalent in Google’s blogspot.com service than in other hosting domains. The Microsoft Research team has worked extensively with the managers of Microsoft’s Spaces blog-hosting service to detect and identify search-engine spam, Mr. Wang said. Google would not comment for the record on its own efforts to combat such practices.

Full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/technology/19spam.html?ex=1332043200&en=63a9e5286915f3bb&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink.

(Hat tip: Stephanie's FlowerHaus)

Add to this the findings that blogger.com is riddled with malware, and it seems to be only a matter of time before corporate filters blog blogger.com (if they don't already).

Embedded resources in ASp.NET 2.0 are served up by a file listed as WebResources.axd.  If your validators aren't working, or treeview or sitemap images aren't showing, see if the debugging steps at http://www.rosshawkins.net/rfh/articles/webresource.axd.html fix your problem.

However, if you're running URLScan on your server, you may need to specifically allow the .axd extension in the .ini file.  Once we did that, our sitemap was good as gold.

http://www.vistadb.net/blog/?p=18

I have an HP ScanJet 4670, and after installing IE 7, the HP Director software wouldn't work.  Turns out, IE 7 breaks HP director, and there is now a fix:

Critical update to resolve an issue with HP Director after installing IE7: missing icons and contents of HP Director screens which may not function properly after upgrading to IE7

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?softwareitem=oj-46104-1&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=73501&os=228&lang=en

Hat tip: sandi

The flippin' awesome Ankh Subversion plug-in for Visual Studio has its 1.0 Final release the other day.  Official post at http://arildf.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E99F8B43533149B0!221.entry.  Download from http://ankhsvn.tigris.org/servlets/ProjectDocumentList?folderID=7315, you want the 2727-Final build (list isn't in order).

Congrats and thanks to Arild for a great tool.

(hat tip: Daily Grind 1064)

About a year ago, I tried to give an alternate way to think about "what is a blog".  Since then, I've also become a big fan of Pajama Market.  Great minds think alike; on the same day, Brian came out with his "what is a blog" post, I was trying to explain them in a private florist forum.  Here is my attempt:

This single post isn't a deifnitive answer, but a discussion opener.

A blog is a web-based application. Some people confuse them with a traditional website, and some use blogs instead of websites, but blogs are actually different. If you think about a traditional website, the navigation is very structured, and content is arranged usually hierarchically. The design of a webpage can get very complex, and may contain a considerable amount of content. It often takes a lot of work to create and maintain a traditional website, sometimes involving special software tools and technical knowledge. When a visitor returns to a traditional website, the new content is not readily apparent.

On the other hand, blogs are designed to be very simple. Content is shown in order of date added, with the most recent posts at the top of the page. After a certain time period or number of posts, older content rolls off the bottom. The blog application automatically creates the navigation. Posts are arranged by date, and into categories (a.k.a. tags). Clicking on a tag brings up all posts in that category, arranged from most recent to oldest. There is typically only one or two levels of navigation in a blog. The page layout of a blog is very simple.

Adding a new post is easy. You simply log in, click the "new post" button, and use a rich text editor, same as posting here. Very, very similar. No software necessary other than your browser.

Different blog applications differ in their capabilities. The software we use at FloristBlogs.com has some very advanced features, but is easy to use.

...

On many traditional websites, there was often a "what's new" or "announcements" page, that was cumbersome to work with, and just as difficult to update as the rest of the site. A blog is a far superior way to replace a "what's new" page.

One of the limitations of a website is knowing who is linking to to you. Blog applications are designed to talk to one another. When I post a link on my blog to someone else's blog, my software sends a message called a "trackback" to the other person's blog. They know immediately that I linked to them, and can follow the trackback to the post which has the link. Trackbaks were originally shown along with post comments, but trackbacks have become heavily abused by spammers, so the trackbacks are now rarely displayed, if the functionality is even enabled at all.

The obvious follow-up is whether to have a blog, or a website, or both. This depends on your business, but in our case, I'd recommend both if possible. They serve different purposes. A website should be considered an additional shop, while a blog is a marketing channel.

I missed a few points in my definition, which Brian covers in his post at http://www.pajamamarket.com/pajama_market_small_busin/2007/01/what_is_a_blog.html.  Worth a read.

The folks at ASP.NET have posted a new By The Community, For the Community poll.  Choices are pretty good--an e-commerce extension to the Small Business Starter Kit, an events calendar, AJAX popup calendar, an image gallery control, or a DB-driven menu with roles.  So far, the menu is way in the lead.

Vote at http://asp.net/default.aspx?tabindex=6&tabid=50.