Fractional CTO | Sustainability, Climate & Impact
An open letter to Google.
I’ve been doing online publishing since 1999, across various successful websites, and have never knowingly been affected by any of your previous algorithm changes – sticking to the motto of great content, and optimizing for our user experience had so far done us well.
However, the Google “panda” algorithm changes being made over the last … Read more “Google “panda” update – impact on small publishers”
We recently re-designed Developer Fusion and as part of that we needed to ensure that any external links were not broken in the process. In order to monitor this, we used the awesome LogParser tool. All you need to do is open up a command prompt, navigate to the directory with your web site’s log files in, and run a … Read more “Detecting 404 errors after a new site design”
If you want to post to a facebook page using the Facebook Graph API and the Facebook C# SDK, from an “offline” app, there’s a few steps you should be aware of.
First, you need to get an access token that your windows service or app can permanently use. You can get this by visiting the following url (all on … Read more “Posting to Facebook Page using C# SDK from offline app”
Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t have the same support for app.config files in the way that their web projects do, in order to vary connection strings and other configuration settings for different release modes – a real shame. You can vote on the issue here. In the meantime though, the ASP.NET team have a fix, detailed here.
All you need to … Read more “Applying app.config transformations (in the same way as web.config)”
If you’re trying to use web.config transformations in VS 2010 with nHibernate you might be hitting the same issue I’ve been getting the transformation to match the hibernate-configuration node. The reason is because you have to specify an xmlns=”urn:nhibernate-configuration-2.2″ attribute as part of the configuration:
<configuration> <hibernate-configuration xmlns=”urn:nhibernate-configuration-2.2″> <session-factory> <property name=”connection.connection_string”>connection string</property> … </session-factory> </hibernate-configuration> </configuration>To fix, just set … Read more “web.config transformations for NHibernate”
I run OpenX (an open source ad serving platform) under IIS and PHP …. but after upgrading to PHP 5.3 noticed the following error appearing in the PHP error logs file (c:\windows\temp\php-errors.log by default).
PHP Warning: date_default_timezone_get(): It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. … Read more “Running OpenX under IIS with PHP 5.3 – date_default_timezone_get errors”
I’ll keep this short and sweet as it’s covered in depth elsewhere. After installing PHP 5.3 suddenly my website stopped working – but instead of throwing errors, it simply sat there and eventually timed out (with no error). Turns out there are issues with both PHP and MySQL around IPv6. The most common solution is “turn off IPv6 support” – … Read more “PHP 5.3 and IIS 7 – beware of MySQL issues with IPv6”
If you’re thinking of upgrading to MVC 2.0, and you take advantage of the AntiForgeryToken support then be careful – you can easily kick out all active visitors after the upgrade until they restart their browser. Why’s this? For the anti forgery validation to take place, ASP.NET MVC uses a session cookie called “__RequestVerificationToken_Lw__”.
This gets checked for and de-serialized … Read more “Beware: Upgrade to ASP.NET MVC 2.0 with care if you use AntiForgeryToken”
Visual Studio 2010 includes much improved deployment tools – but by default it only includes files “needed to run this application”. If you’re using the Spark view engine for ASP.NET MVC, then the Spark views aren’t considered one of them!
The trick is to ensure your .spark views have a build action of “Content” instead of the default “None”. Clearly … Read more “Including Spark views in VS 2010 web deployments”
As some of you will know, I’ve run the developerFusion community for many years now, as a part-time hobby. Now, some big changes are afoot! 2 months ago I packed in my day job to focus on the site full-time, and have now made the first big step and re-launched the site.
You can check it out at http://www.developerfusion.com/.
Having been caught out by this issue once again this weekend, I thought I’d better blog about it so I don’t scratch my head searching around again for a third time!
If you’ve been getting some wierd “Cannot use a leading .. to exit above the top directory.” exceptions occuring on your site (you *do* log those, don’t you?), that … Read more “UrlRewriting, .NET 2.0 SP1 and Search Engines”
protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { // we use this so that we can set the enableViewState property in the web.config // although it sets it at the page level, it doesn’t pass it on to the master page this.EnableViewState = this.Page.EnableViewState; base.OnInit(e); }