Seniors Housing Online - website overhaul

We had the opportunity to work on a website overhaul for Seniors Housing Online recently. It was a great project to sink your teeth into - incorporating a wide variety of features such as property management specifically targeted towards retirement villages, senior living, and aged care facilities. See www.seniorshousingonline.com.au to view the site.

From a technical point of view we got to work on a number of features, from fully integrated Google maps to display locations of seniors properties, to a highly refined searching facility to filter different types of property features specifically targeted to retirees and aged care residences. We had the pleasure of working with former realestate.com.au founders, now called Classified Ad Ventures - who demonstrated great project management in lining up the refresh from inception to launch.

Expansion continues on the site - customised property alerts and more rich data is constantly being made available. It is well on the way to being Australia's primary search destination for seniors specific housing needs.

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Framework issue and Google Chrome

I had a problem when testing in Google Chrome where it would not show Tab Panel controls from the AJAX toolkit. It worked in Internet Explorer and Firefox.... and it was even more baffling because it would not occur in the production environment. The error experienced (as picked up by the Chrome Developer Tools window) was:

Sys.ArgumentUndefinedException: Value cannot be undefined. Parameter name: method

There are other reports where ajaxtoolkit controls don't work (not just tab panels, but cascading dropdowns, etc). Because it worked in the production environment provided clues to the solution: Turns out it's a simple fix - it only happens when your application's debugging is turned on. Set compilation debug="false" in your web.config file and you should be set to go. (i.e. theres a bug in one of the Javascript files (debug version only) that run the asp.net ajax framework, and because asp.net ajax 1.0 is an old version [more specifically - it's for asp.net 2.0], it's unlikely it'll get fixed anytime soon)

Twitter

I realize I havent posted here in a while.... sorry 'bout that.

The reason why? I got a little addicted to a tool called twitter. There are a few important things that I believe have contributed to my take up, and this is my spin on things:

• Use a decent twitter client. Tweetdeck's grouping capability is excellent. Seesmic desktop is another popular choice. Group people into what you're intersted in.
• Understand the power of retweets (RT), replies (@username), and hashtags (#keyword). All of a sudden there will be a little more interest and interactivity to what you're all about to other similar industry folks. It also expands the network of the people you're interested in following.
• Use http://search.twitter.com/ to find like minded people. Search for the #hashtags applicable to your industry.
• Become part of a more geographically common "likeminded" group, within the greater twittersphere. It gives a sense of collabritive power and community locally. I attended my first Newcastle coffee morning yesterday and saw this first hand.
• Follow:Followers ratio - Take note of the follow to followers ratio, but don't rule out anyone who's not 1:1. A follow:followers ratio of more than 2:1 is slightly suspicious... some poeple like to have symmetry... but me? I follow a fair few high profile people which I'm interested in, who I don't expect a folllow back from, therefore the 5:4 (ish) ratio. High profile people who don't follow back may think they're too busy/cool/insert-interpretation-here to follow every schmuck, but hey, I'm interested in what certain experts have to say. I don't expect a handshake every time. High profiles are the only people who are allowed to do it though (e.g. TV personalities, or extremely high industry professionals).
• When tweeting industry news: Tweet about interesting things to your chosen industry... but don't rehash old news. Be the first (or close to, or do an intelligent take on breaking news) or forget about it.
• Be yourself.
• Dont spam. Crazy ideas on how to get 1000 folowers in 1 day really shit me.

I've been a twitter member for about a year now, but it's only in the last few months it's started to take off. These points are what helped me get it.

More Clouds

So Microsoft has just officially announced their cloud layer - Azure. Time to accept this is the way things are headed me thinks, with Google App Engine, Amazon EC2 and now Azure all competing for world domination in the hosting/dev markets.

It'll be intersting to see Steve Ballmer talk about it next week when he's in Sydney. I'm anticipating a sales pitch... complete with air fist pumping and shouts of "we love developers!", but we shall see.

I wonder if Apple will go the same way? I doubt it at the moment being more hardware focused - but maybe the iphone app store is a sign of things to come.... after all, it's just another thin client hooked into the brain that is the Internet.

Clouds

The Web Services division of Amazon has had a new platform for a little while now called EC2, or the Amazon computing cloud. Just yesterday they announced support for Windows Server – which means they are going to be offering a “Bulletproof” like hosting service – except on a frickin huge scale. You’ll be able to get you own Virtual Machine(s) powered by Amazon datacenters.

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/10/coming-soon-ama.html

It’s a little bit like the start of the Matrix. :)

Over the next year or so it’ll stir up the hosting reseller market big time too.

Download Day

I just made my pledge on the firefox 3 download day site. woop woop!

geek humour

hehehehehehe