Google recently published a new tool to help web designers and developers assess the real estate on their pages. It's a basic tool which overlays a standard graph over your pages showing you the percentage of visitors who have their browsers open to the specific size. Check it out at http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/. I played around with it a bit and found it a little too elementary. Any good web designer knows that you have to stay above the fold and shouldn't exceed certain widths. If you w... [More]

I recently upgraded my blog to BlogEngine.Net and since then the comments stopped working. Seeing as I'm more busy than Obama right now, I never really stopped to properly troubleshoot it. Recently I took up the challenge and thanks to someone else having the same issue, my blog is now fixed and users can add comments to my posts. So please, comment away! If you're looking for the solution for your own blog, see http://blogengine.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=59277.

This is an issue I'm seeing a little too often on SharePoint installs. Trying to access a site that is hosted on the same server will prompt for login credentials 3 times then display Page Cannot be Found. From what I've gathered it's a loopback check issue. I've seen it come up as a result of installing WSS SP2 a few times as well. I've seen it "randomly" happen on customers' servers all over the place. I say randomly because I'm guessing that customers have installed Windows updates on these ... [More]

Happy New Year!I've recently jumped into the world of search engine optimization, and I'm enjoying myself. Funny though, there's a lot of tricks and cheats you can do for your site and from what I can see, if a search engine determines you are cheating, then no soup for you. Search engines like good, honest sites. I started my SEO experience with SEO Tools at http://www.webconfs.com/. Huge help, discovered the benefits of using <h> tags, static looking URLs instead of dynamic URLs and... [More]

Originally written 6/20/07, last updated 9/7/07  Welp, that was a fast two weeks! My initial response is if you’re not going to use Microsoft web based products, FireFox is just as usable as Internet Explorer, but please do read on. If you plan on EVER touching Microsoft web products (explained a little later) then IE is the way to go. You suffer little as far as I can see in features between the two browsers.  Below I explain some of the common differences between the two browsers th... [More]

For about a year and a half now my company Delphi Technology (www.delphi-ts.com) has had a dedicated server hosted in Florida and we can't complain. We have about 30 accounts on it and the server runs great. We offer quality hosting, not cheap hosting. Our base package is $19.99 per month for 1GB storage space. All of our plans are customizable and we're willing to work out a hosting plan that fits your needs and budget (even if it’s less than $19.99/mnth). Let me rant about cheap hosting provid... [More]

So, here's the scenario: IIS 6.0 on a Windows 2003 Standard SP1. Its a new ecommerce site (http://www.patternworks.com went live on 1/31/07) that replaced an old ASP site. That's not the issue, this is: When trying to view a page that is not in the site and ends in aspx, it errors. For example, www.patternworks.com/peace.aspx (not real) errors like so The page cannot be displayed Explanation: The Web server connection was closed. Try the following: Refres... [More]