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

Results only work environment

Tim Ferriss has posted a good blog interview on the concept of ROWE, or results only work environment. It's a concept from a new book about to come out called "Why work sucks and how to fix it". All I can say is - excellent. This is my kind of working environment. Away with the unnecessary pompous attitudes of self important leechers! Away with the negative attitudes!(public servants take note... not that I'm stereotyping, but from personal experience I run across them in this sector all too often).

Shut up and get it done - get rewarded for the results, and not how long you've sat at your desk trying to look busy.

The Internet loves good lists

Nothing gets a better reaction on a blog then a good list. Top 10 peeves. Top 10 web design sites. Top 60 AJAX scripts. Top 10 books on animal husbandry. Most popular articles for the last 7 minutes.

Why do lists work so well?

An article from Seth Godin touched on it - lists are great because there's so many infinite possibilities. It easier to choose a book you would like to read based on a list of top recommendations for any particular subject. I'm a victim of this myself - I find it very difficult to buy a book now unless I know it's been rated highly on Amazon. I don't want to waste my money on some equivalent of a steaming pile of dog poo.

A year or 2 ago, somebody caught on and created listable.com. It was a nifty little web2 site where you could create a top list of anything you wanted and publish it on the site. Then the porn kings caught on to listable and abused it. Now the domain just goes to a holding page. But that was the problem with listable - it was just lists. Some of them were good, but mostly not.
So what makes a good list? Anyone can make one. Here's mine:

• A list will absorb the readers attention more readily (a kind of "user friendly" reading?).
• Ability to contribute to the list from qualified commentators.
• Ability to refine the list from qualified commentators.
• Ability to publish the list to a wide audience and attract qualified commentators.
• Be easy to find for the right audience.
• Quality filters to keep out the noise, commercial influence or unrelated content.

Got anything else?

Google Visualisation API

This API has some excellent potential - we have recently started using Google Sites as an extranet platform, as it works well in a multi office environment and damn easy to use and update.

A nifty feature of Google Sites is that you can plug in Google gadgets anywhere throughout the site, which was nice. But now that I've seen these gadgets, it's not just nice, it's FANTASTIC! Pick a graph type, give it an XML feed and away you go.

The Gantt charts will be nifty for scheduling. I can just spit out a feed from my task system. Org charts so everyone knows their place. Gauges and pie charts and heat maps.... oh my!

Excuse me while I go and calm myself down.

Innovation with James Gosling

The Sydney Morning Herald had an excellent article this morning on James Gosling - the principal creator of Java.

The Gosling creed

• Reward risk and don't penalise failure.
• Innovation is about risk and thinking that risk and failure are good things.
• You have to learn to trust crazy people. It's the people on the edge that have the most interesting, insightful comments.
• Have confidence in yourself. People you think are oracles of wisdom - they're just making it up.
• Listen carefully, and try to figure out what the problem is to solve.

Test Driven Development

Steve from the Newcastle coders group did a informative session on test driven development on Wednesday night - and used Eclipse with JUnit to develop some unit tests. Was good to check out eclipse, and interesting to see his methods of testing.

In fact - I'm now beginning to take the following perspective...

Bad computer performance

During my illness earlier this week I decided to do some mind numbing tasks to keep me occupied - coding was giving me a headache, but my mind was still overactive so I got down to some good ol' fashion XP speed tweaks.

One performance issue that was bugging me big time was my laptop's sluggish performance using Outlook 2007 amongst other things. It was so slow it was unreasonable, especially for a core 2 duo with 2GB ram. I hadn't run a defrag since I first got the system so it was due for a reshuffle. The following quickened things up a bit (run in this order to get best results):

1. Delete all the junk. As much email as possible (my mailbox was over 2gb), all that crap freeware that I only ever used once, temp internet files, old log files, etc, etc.
   
2. Run a system wide defrag:
   (all programs > accessories > system tools > disk defragmenter)
   This will take a long time to run (e.g. 3 or 4 hours) if it hasn't been done for a while.
   This operation will most likely skip a couple of files because they are in use – mainly outlook and desktop search. After the defrag has run, run it again, but instead of doing a full defrag, just do an analyze. In the analyze feedback, take a note what files are still significantly large and fragmented.
   
3. Then use the “contig” tool to defrag individual problem files that the windows disk defragmenter can’t fix. You can get the contig tool here.
   
   http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/sysinternals/bb897428.aspx
   
   Be sure to install it in your windows/system32 folder. It’s a command line tool that you’ll need to follow the instructions as set out in the link above.
   
   Outlook.ost and the desktop search index file are the main ones you want to defrag individually as they are huge files (my outlook file was 2.7Gb in 650 fragments. My search index file was 345Mb in over 3500 fragments). If you're a gamer who plays Guildwars or similar, running contig on the ".dat" or main game files should also speed things up. Only do this after a full system wide defrag, and you have stopped the processes in task manager (e.g. outlook.exe, etc) as the first 2 steps free up large amounts of continuous disk space needed for the larger defragmented files.
   
   More info on the contig tool here: http://whall.org/blog/2008/02/02/defraggle-rock/#more-1812
   
4. As a last resort, reformat the hard drive and reinstall the operating system. Say goodbybe to 2 days minimum to get things back the way they were.... especially when apps like Visual Studio take hours to install.
   
5. Next time you get a new computer - get a faster hard drive. Laptops especially have slower RPM hard drives to save battery life - but once alot of files get piled on the system slow down will happen. Solid state hard drives should become more mainstream this year, get one if you can live with slightly less space.
   

Firefox gaining market share

According to reports - 31.1% of the oceania region browser use is now Firefox. This and more brow raising facts here:

http://www.webappexpo.com.au/content/view/136/45/

Will be interesting to see how IE 8 goes.

Thanks to Andrew V for the link.

Data Portability

John Dyer, the author of freetextbox amongst other things, has written a nice post about the introduction to data portability. It's almost a utopian idea that you should be able to move all your data from one site to another - for example all your friends and posts from facebook into the next new social network, or all your photos from flikr to photobucket to microsoft live to who know what else.

I like the idea. It gives way for a more democratic, less commercial ideal across the web from a user's point of view, and makes companies who want your patronage work harder by ultimately making better apps.

It's a long way off, but the liquid nature of the internet could welcome it with open arms if done properly.

Charting

Google has released a nifty new API that I can see myself using quite alot - a URL based querystring API that spits out a nice chart on demand.

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/12/embed-charts-in-webpages-with-one-of.html

cool!

Sony Reader

David Williams, a colleague from the Newcastle coders group, alerted me to the existence of these nifty devices that are dedicated to reading eBooks through his blog, Alivad.

I am a little excited about this device for these reasons:

1. My wife is a book nerd (or to put more lightly - FREAK. sorry wifey! but you know you are...) We have a storage crisis at home, there are too many books and not enough space. I actually gave a station wagon full of books to the Wallsend book exchange 2 months ago, and we still need to find more space.
2. ebooks are cheaper then real books.
3. ebooks bring up new business opportunities (for those of us that could not set up a book shop, or get a publisher)
4. The device very closely mimics a real book, but adds extra quirks of one touch page turning and other conveniences.
5. I only ever read when I go to bed. If I brought a laptop to bed to read an eBook - insomnia, which I already suffer from (along with many other unwanted side effects ;) .....) would be magnified. A Sony reader instead of a laptop would make sure I'm not checking my emails and RSS feeds at 1.00am in the morning. (although I can see the device expand in the future to have WIFI and Internet browsing capabilities which is scaring me slightly)
6. It reminds me of the resurgence in music players in the form of MP3 players - like this is kind of device (if done right... apple anyone?) will be the next must have gadget. So far Sony has the lead in their e-ink display technology - as long as they handle the sensitive DRM issue correctly.

UPDATE: 24-Nov-07

By now, most people will know about the amazon kindle, in relation to the Sony reader. Still all of my points above apply to the imminent paradigm shift in regards to books - except one thing: if the amazon kindle rules over everything else - ignore point 3. I predict the business opportunity idea will still be prevalent - but not through the kindle if amazon holds on to the publisher stigma (although it is currently necessary to keep quality reading at this stage). A community approach of quality control I believe will ultimately win out - kind of like the rating of you tube videos with comments allowed.

If a decent eBook review site was setup independent of Amazon it would be a good thing - a bit like getting away from the Murdoch's controlling the fox network and hence a large amount of their viewers opinions (please note, its election time in Australia ATM and I'm feeling political). As long as you could buy eBooks from that site too and read them..... but could you on a kindle?

Visionscape Content Management System

Finally - we have a marketing website for our content management system, Visionscape! Development on the system was always a priority over a marketing site, but our CMS is starting to mature nicely now, it's over 3 years old and still easier to use than anything else I've tried or seen (which is why I get frustrated with many of the open source solutions out there).

The site was built in about 2 days, approval and finding time for the design implemetation were the real time killers - the system does everything else in a snap. It really brings the focus back on timely approvals from management and good copywriting to get a site out the door now - there is no dev time and setting up a site takes about 2 minutes.

Version 2 will hopefully be released mid next year.

FBML

I got my first bit of facebook markup language working today in the form of a flash movie on my profile page - but according to the doco waitforclick="false" is disabled on profile pages for aesthetic reasons.... bit weird when you can put any image you want on there. I can understand why they'd restrict CSS and javascript so it doesn't become the mySpace monster, but click for flash?

The flash I have got going (after you click of course) is a nice little depth of field demo from Mr Doob. I guess I'll have to put a "click here to activate" sign.

I'm tossing up a few ideas for a facebook app, but I can't decide what yet.

Open ID

Finally we are starting to see some kind of standard rise up across the net on the subject of authentication in the form of Open ID. Some big names are starting to sign on - AOL have annouced support and apparently Microsoft has announced interoperbility with Windows Cardspace.

This looks like it could be a goer - I'll post more info once I am able to implement it somewhere.