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How Google Penguin kills my visitors part II
Published on 2012-05-08 12:40:00
A small follow up on my Google Analytics statistics I have posted earlier. This screenshot gives a good view of a full week with and without Penguin: As you can see, I have compared week 16 until 22 April (penguin free) with the week 30 April until the 6th of May. I cannot remember that I have ever seen a Google update causing so much difference in website statistics. I am glad that this blog is only meant as online reference and small how-to’s and that it is not my primary source of inc [..] > read more
Google Penguin kills my visitors
Published on 2012-05-02 12:54:00
Google announced Tuesday the 24th of April that they have updated the Google algorithm and named it Penguin. It focuses on keyword stuffing and grey hat link schemes. More about the update from Google can be found on the official Google webmaster blog. This blog has been affected by the penguin update as you can see here from my Google Analytics Screenshot: The first dot is a Saturday and the last dot is also a Saturday. This is a normal week for my blog. The most visitors hit my blog during [..] > read more
QR codes for Asp.Net with NuGet
Published on 2012-04-19 12:24:00
About a week ago, I received an email from a visitor about my QR code post which I blogged about back in 2010. I have been told that the most important reference was down. It was the reference to the DLL for generating the QR codes. So I uploaded the DLL as mirror Apparently the twitt88.com website is back online at http://platform.twit88.com/projects/mt-qrcode/files It also seems that there has been some new releases for the DLL. Since 2011 you only use NuGet to keep your packages up to date, [..] > read more
Innerzoom images with jQuery jqzoom
Published on 2012-04-12 11:49:00
I was looking for a good way to make a cool mouseover zoom effect for images on a website. CloudZoom came up and looked nice, but didn’t suit my needs. I stumbled upon the jqzoom library from http://www.mind-projects.it/projects/jqzoom/ You can donate Marco something and download the jqzoom library. The jQuery plugin is 733 lines of code (including the comments) and worked great. It was easy to use, here is my HTML and JavaScript: $(document).ready(function () { $('#holder li a [..] > read more
Extract jpg or png images from a PDF
Published on 2012-03-09 06:43:00
There are a lot of tools available online to extract images from a PDF, but most of them are shareware or trialware. If you need just a single image, you can right click it in Adobe acrobat reader and copy paste it into Microsofts paint, Paint.net or (overkill) Adobe Photoshop. But if you have a PDF with several pages and several images on each page, you’d like to have it automated. That’s when you start your search for a good free/low cost utility. Or, you can write your own! Much m [..] > read more
Test VS11 and Windows 8
Published on 2012-03-02 13:23:00
Windows 8 consumer preview release A consumer preview of Windows 8 has been released. I really recommend checking it out. I have seen it run on several ultra books (from about 700 euro’s each) and it ran great! So you don’t need a 2000 euro machine to run it and play around with the new metro interface. I have written earlier about the developer preview, but this release contains over 100.000 changes and a newer version of internet explorer. As web developer it’s always nice to test web [..] > read more
Make your own Wordfeud helper
Published on 2012-02-24 11:04:00
Scrabble is funny, and to play it with friends even more. Especially because you can spread the game throughout your day. But I am a coder, I like math more than words. So to keep up with this Wordfeud trend, I need help. So why not code a helper? I only use the Dutch library which is a modified version of opentaal. I downloaded the ‘opentaal’ library from this url: http://www.opentaal.org/bestanden/doc_download/18-woordenlijst-v-210g-bronbestanden- and used the following 48 lines of [..] > read more
Browser speed test 2012
Published on 2012-02-09 16:41:00
How fast are we today? More and more web applications are using JavaScript to improve the UX (User eXperience) Almost all websites use frameworks like jQuery and mooTools, extJs etc. for this. So it is important that our browsers are fast with JavaScript! Browsers are updated more often because they are more important every day. Since I have several extensions for Chrome and Firefox, it’s not fair to compare RAM usage. So I only looked at JavaScript performance. A way to compare it, is to run [..] > read more
Testdrive Windows 8
Published on 2011-12-29 22:40:00
It is always nice when there is a new version available from an operating system! I am currently using Windows 7 as primary OS on my development machine for Asp.Net development. Disclaimer: Before you start, make sure that you have a Live ID and a powerful machine to run virtualization software! I have downloaded this ISO from Microsoft.com: Windows 8 Developer Preview with developer tools English, 64-bit (x64) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/br229516 I have tried dual boot so [..] > read more
NDepend first view
Published on 2011-12-02 00:36:00
Today I have installed NDepend for the first time! I was really convinced because of this short video and the 7 minute version. Too bad that it isn’t really a human voice, but the feature set of NDepend will make up for that. I followed these instructions for the installation and installed the Visual Studio Add-In. All I had to do was select NDepend –> attach new NDepend project to current VS Solution. NDepend immediately showed that two critical rules are violated! Method too compl [..] > read more
Equal column height, div problem
Published on 2011-11-07 22:29:00
Years ago, everybody made a column layout with an Html table. If you do not remember why tables are bad, I recommend reading these nine reasons not to use tables. Today we use (external) cascading style sheets to solve it. Most of the time with the famous ‘faux columns’ trick. leftside block one block two block three The equal height problem is sometimes hard to solve. As you can see here with multiple blocks. The red should be as large as all the yellow blocks [..] > read more
Update to FxCop 10
Published on 2011-10-31 22:49:00
So we have all used FxCop before haven’t we? Well I found out, that my version was 9.x and it prompted with an available update! So Microsoft’s download page opened. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=6544 It only displays a small 1 kb file! a “readme.txt” file. That’s strange. So I checked again for an available download link, but ended up with the same readme file. This is the content of the text file: FxCop Installation Instructions 1. Download [..] > read more
Tidy your HTML with Asp.Net TidyManaged vs Tidy.net
Published on 2011-10-24 23:05:00
I recently stumbled upon a small bug which had to do with a part of C# code that cleans up an HTML string which came from a database. This string is used as output on the web and therefore needs to be w3c and tidy! I always used Tidy.Net for it. Really liked it and decided to check for a new version of that library while I was doing some code maintenance. That library's latest release date is from June 2005! that’s over 6 years old! So I decided to go and look for a better solution. I found [..] > read more
Filter a DataTable with LINQ to Objects
Published on 2011-10-02 23:44:00
Today I had a DataTable object with the top x rows of a query. select top 23 * from products So my Asp.Net C# code looked like this: private void SampleMethod(int toShow) { string sql = "SELECT top " + toShow + " * from products"; SqlCommand com = new SqlCommand(sql); DataTable dt = dal.GetDataTable(com); if (dt.Rows.Count > 0) { var a = dt.AsEnumerable().Where( p => p.Field("stock") > p.Field("ProductMinStock")) DataList2.DataSource = a; [..] > read more
JQuery with webform input validation, ajax posting json to asp.net C#
Published on 2011-09-25 23:39:00
This blog post is all about how to make a nice form and have client side validation with jQuery and the famous validation plugin. After validation the data, the form will be posted asynchronous to an Asp.Net C# Webservice/webmethod. While the post is being processed, a nice loading image will be displayed to notify the user of the progress. Add jQuery First you have to add jQuery to the form. This can be done by downloading a version from jQuery.com (option 1) or get jQuery as Nuget Package o [..] > read more
Upgrade BlogEngine 2.0 to 2.5
Published on 2011-08-01 13:34:00
The BlogEngine team has released BlogEngine 2.5 last 27th of June. I postponed it for a while but you have to keep your Online Software up to date! So I decided to give it a try. The migration from 1.x to 2.0 was almost painless, so moving to 2.5 should work out fine too. My installation as no database, but stores stuff in the App_Data folder. I followed this guide: http://blogengine.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Upgrading%20to%20BlogEngine.NET%202.5 my 8 easy steps: (maybe you only need 4) 1) d [..] > read more
Asp.Net switch site to SSL (https) the easy way
Published on 2011-07-01 08:24:00
For this small article, I assume that you have an Asp.Net web application running on IIS and that you have setup your SSL certificate. So navigating to https://www.yoursite.com works. This blog post will explain how to redirect all http traffic to ht > read more
Cyanogenmod on my HTC Desire: the easy way
Published on 2011-06-29 13:12:00
I have an HTC Desire and I have always liked it (and still do) but there is one (major) downside, it only has 70MB of internal storage for apps. Adobe Flash is over 10mb and so is Google maps, so there is still 50mb left. Whatsapp and Gmail are 15 to > read more
Make an animated gif with Asp.Net C#
Published on 2011-06-10 13:44:00
As you can read in the blogpost about access jpg’s through ftp with asp.net. I have explained there how I connected with FTP and retrieved images of the IP security camera. Now I have slightly modified the LINQ so that it downloads the latest 3 ima > read more
Auto process your E-mail with Asp.Net C#
Published on 2011-05-02 14:11:00
The common used email client Microsoft Outlook has (as every computer specialist knows) rules for processing email. This is great, but what if you have an mailing list application which sends bulk mail and you would like to automate the process of un > read more
Small jQuery plugin update: imgpreview
Published on 2011-03-09 15:07:00
There is a nice jQuery plugin called imgpreview. It’s from James Padolsey. He made it back in 2009 and you can read more about it on this page: http://james.padolsey.com/javascript/new-jquery-plugin-imgpreview/ This is the demo page: http://ja > read more
FTP with Asp.Net C# the easy way
Published on 2011-03-05 08:26:00
At the office we have a Conceptronic CnetCam2. I have configured this IP Webcam to log every x seconds to an FTP Server. But now I would like to view the taken snapshot images in my web-application. The webcam makes this directory structure: So ever > read more
Google URL shortener API (goo.gl) C-sharp class C#
Published on 2011-01-11 11:38:00
Google announced this API yesterday on their blog. There are no examples for Asp.Net C# so I made this class: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Net; using System.IO; using System.Text; > read more
SQL Server: Join tables from 2 databases, collation issue
Published on 2011-01-10 12:27:00
If you want to inner join two tables from different databases, you might encounter some collation errors.When I executed this query:SELECT ProductCode, ProductResalePrice FROM [database1].[dbo].[PRODUCTS] inner join [database2].[dbo].[items] on > read more
How to add a Captcha to your Login form Asp.Net in 10 foolproof steps
Published on 2010-12-15 10:35:00
A quick and good solution to add Captcha’s to your solution is to use Google’s. There are various solutions available online to make your own captcha, but I prefer using Google’s Recaptcha which can be found on: http://www.google.com/recaptcha > read more
(Windows)Tools for web developers .Net C#
Published on 2010-11-01 00:50:00
This blog post is just a list of tools I use for C# .Net(web) development. It gives you as reader a view of my personal tool set. Let me know in the comments if you know all 23 applications. Adobe Photoshop (or Gimp) Photoshop is a must > read more
Generate QR Codes with Asp.Net C#
Published on 2010-09-21 16:25:00
Have you ever seen QR codes? QR means Quick Response. It’s origin lays in Japan. Created by Toyota initially to track car parts during manufacturing. These days it’s getting more popular each day because of the mobile internet and the increase > read more
Pandorashop on Android [Flickr]
Published on 2010-09-08 08:08:15
JPHellemons posted a photo: Just tested our website on an android emulator > read more
Shorten your URL with Goo.gl or Bit.ly in Asp.Net C#
Published on 2010-09-01 02:04:00
While building an e-commerce web application, I realized that every e-commerce site needs social media button on the product detail page so that visitors can share what they have found. Of course you can let them share an URL like: http://www.my > read more
URL rewrite with asp.net 4.0 and IIS7
Published on 2010-08-08 15:16:00
This blog post is about how I used URL rewriting for a better organic search ranking. Maybe it helps out some other people who struggle to rewrite URL’s without components like URL Rewriter. It’s open source but it uses regular expressions in a c > read more
Troubleshoot Firefox 3.6.6 and Flash
Published on 2010-07-19 13:37:00
Since I am a C# web developer, I use my browser daily euhhh hourly! I use Firefox because of various add-ons. I’ve upgraded recently to Firefox 3.6.6 and Flash and it became unstable. I submitted several bug reports through the special Mozilla feed > read more
How I upgraded my Linksys WRT320N to DD-WRT v24
Published on 2010-07-14 16:40:00
Well it all started with having the router dropping my connection a lot. it happens almost every 5 minutes. So I started with some research to verify that it really dropped my connection. I did a ping to the router to see if it kept responding: p > read more