April 2008

You are currently browsing the articles from TechToolBlog written in the month of April 2008.

Daily Find #56

Enabling .htaccess in OS X - This almost drove me up a wall yesterday.

Extract Hard Coded Strings to Resource Files

TIOBE Programming Community Index for April 2008 - A ranking of popularity amount programming languages.

Written by Tim on April 11th, 2008 with no comments.
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Dealer.com - Impressed

We recently were in the car market because of a bad transmission on our Toyota Corrolla. As I was browsing thru the different online car dealers websites, I ran across a few that really impressed me from a tech/geekie view. These sites were using lightbox for car photos, had some really nice icon work, their search had multiple filters you could apply, real nice rollover effects on their grids, all really good web techniques were being displayed. I started noticing a trend that these sites were being made from the same mold, not exactly cookie cut, but defiantly produced by the same web shop. Today I figured out they were all produced from dealer.com.

Here is the list of technology they are using to make car sites really nice for once and what other technology they use that I could gleam from their source & site:

Thickbox - I’m a big fan of this lightbox cousin.
jQuery - You know I love jQuery goodness.
Validation - They have their own validation routines that they are able add a <script> tag and plug in an array with fields that need validation. Not bad but they should look at my javascript generic form validation script which works in a similar way to jQuery.
Jive Live for the online chat sessions, although I thought Jive Live was defunct now but maybe not. Either way I’ll give them a pass for using Java
SEO friendly markup. Not a lot of of table tags and a nice usage of friendly seo markup on important keywords. Although I think they could do a better job on URL, meta tags, and title tags.
Icon/Images/Navigation. They stand out here, text style is pt so it scales to my dpi setting. Images are clean, navigation is standard (which is good), icons are meaning full and big enough to give a real impression.
Ext JS - A really nice framework for AJAX grids and other ajax aspects.
Java - Ah, dang I was so impressed until I found this out :). Half joking of course. In a world of dynamics language being the thing, it’s funny how I now feel more comfortable thinking about doing Java then say Ruby or Python.
MySQL - Another proof that MySQL scales, although they must have some really good DB guys to put their system on it.
CVS - Hey you guys should be using Surround SCM
Hibernate - Yes another good choice here. I’ve never messed with hibernate but ORM is a good thing.
Flex - No thanks, would prefer Silverlight

So here is a run down on their architecture and my choice if I was the evil mastermind behind the scene:

	Dealer.com	Mine
Javascript Framework	jQuery	jQuery
Imaging Javascript	Thickbox	Thickbox
Ajax Framework	Ext JS	ASP.NET AJAX
Server Side Language	Java	C#
Database	MySQL	SQL Server
ORM	Hiberate	LINQ
Rich Application Framework	Flex	Silverlight

Written by Tim on April 10th, 2008 with 1 comment.
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Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

Daily Find #55

Hartija - CSS Print Framework - This looks like a promising addition to add to my library.

3 Tips for working with AjaxControlTookits’ TabContainer Control

How to Quickly and Easily print from Firefox - 1 click printing.

Scott Hanselman outtakes - hilarious

SearchStatus FireFox Plugin - shows Google PR, Alexa Rank & Complete ranking in your browser -via SEO Blackhat

MVC Storefront Series - For you ASP.NETers

37 jQuery Plugins - Yes jQuery is great.

Written by Tim on April 10th, 2008 with no comments.
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Daily Find #54

Techtoolblog might have been down yesterday and part of today. Had some issues with the domain name and registration with the Yahoo! small business people. A phone call later and they were able to fix the issue.

iPhone SDK Beta 3 Released

Super Mario Brothers in Javascript - Wow

Add Windows Explorer to Visual Studio

Cache between sites

Gantt Chart in Excel

6 free web based WYSIWYG plugins

Written by Tim on April 9th, 2008 with no comments.
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Daily Find #53

Great NCAA game last night, Memphis looked really good down the stretch, good to see them win one…..opps, went to bed with 2 minutes to go and Memphis up 9, come to find out at the dentist office this morning that somehow Kansas won! Thanks CBS for the 9:20pm tip time…..

Google App Engine Preview - Their Amazon S3 Killer, for apps only written in Python.

Use a Single Web.Config for IIS6 & IIS7

Win a Palm Centro - via Zieak

Vista OS X - for those who can’t move on

jQuery ASP.NET Controls

Written by Tim on April 8th, 2008 with no comments.
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Daily Find #52

Web Development Bookmarklets - via Think Vitamin

Reduce Website download time by heavily compressing PNG & JPEG

25 moves to complete a Rubik’s cube - via Chris Love

Install Multiple Versions of IE on one machine - Trying now… Dang doesn’t work with Vista so….

Try this - IETester

45 Ways to Power up your Blog

Written by Tim on April 7th, 2008 with no comments.
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Daily Find #51

Opera Mini 4.1 beta - I’ve gotten use to my blackberry’s shortcuts so don’t think I’ll be using and I’m not a fan of the Opera company.

Getting nested ASP.net Applications to work!

ASP.NET MVC Membership Starter Kit

Another Stored Procedure vs Ad Hoc Sql - Every good blog has at least 1 post on this subject.

AJAXWorld 2008 East Overview

NHibernate 2.0 Alpha is out - For those of you not going to LINQ

IE 8 beta 1 vs Firefox 3 beta 5 - Looks like IE handles JS better

Written by Tim on April 3rd, 2008 with no comments.
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Firefox 3 beta 5 mini Review

Firefox 3 beta 5 is shipping soon or maybe already shipped, either way I got my hands on it today to play around. It’s much further along then the last 3 beta I tried (2,3?). Extensions don’t work and never will unless each extension developer updates their stuff to either tell firefox it is compatible or actual code changes to make it happen. I’m not a fan of the architect of their compatibility system, I think things should try to work and if not let you know an extension broke firefox and let you disable it. Microsoft Outlook does this very well.

Fast

Firefox 3 beta 5 is silly fast, so much so that I was browsing an internal web app today, thinking, "hey who ajaxified this thing?". Turns out the web app is still doing traditional post backs but FF is so fast you can’t tell, the screen never "refreshes" only by looking at the green loading indicator at the bottom can you tell.

Gmail has become paininfully slow on FF 2. With FF 3, the thing is blazing fast again. You know the FF & Google guys must be working on things together like this. Gmail search is still slow though.