I continue to develop my expertise in designing web sites for mobile devices. I’ve been dissatisfied with the display of my travel notes on my iPod Touch. Wide images would force the page width to exceed the limited width of the screen which is only 320 pixels. This made the page hard to read unless [...]
Yesterday I discovered what may be an unknown and undocumented Google search operator for listing the backlinks to your web site. A backlink is an incoming link to your web site. The number of backlinks to your web site is a factor in how well it will rank in the search engines. The Yahoo! Site [...]
I’m thinking about getting a cell phone. I don’t have a cell phone because nobody ever calls me. I really don’t need one. But now that I’m traveling more often it may come in handy in an emergency. I will probably get a prepaid mobile phone with a pay-as-you-go plan. I don’t want the recurring [...]
I like to take my iTouch with me on my trips to New York City so I can listen to music during the long bus trip. I also copy my compiled HTML notes on New York City to my iTouch so I can consult it when I need to. Neither of those uses requires a [...]
I have not been blogging enough about my business. I have been blogging about my travels just to let clients know when I am unavailable. At least that is my justification for blogging about my trips. Recently I have been gaining expertise with Drupal, the Content Management System. Drupal is a web application framework which [...]
Sorff is a Java application that you can download at http://www.sorff.com/. It is a social networking application for commenting on web sites that you and your friends like to visit. You could think of it as extending a comment system to the entire Internet. Sorff was created by the vlogger Paul Robinette (aka Renetto) who [...]
I have created a new Elgg widget to display your local weather on your profile page or the dashboard. In response to suggestions from Elgg users I have revised this widget to support International locations. You can download the plugin for this widget at: http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/rsrobbins/read/255213/international-weather-widget This is probably the last Elgg project I will work [...]
Pennsylvania still has not passed a budget so I continue to work on my web development skill set. Currently I plan to focus on Elgg and Zen Cart. Zen Cart is a new web application for me. I think it is being maintained more than OsCommerce so there are probably more web sites using that [...]
ASP.NET makes it easy to create web services but they usually return XML. Like many web developers I now prefer JSON. This article and sample code will show you how to get your web service to return data in the JSON format. The web service is written in C#. Since my web hosting company only [...]
I’ve allowed my client list to dwindle down to just one but now I need to look for more freelance work. Pennsylvania has not passed a budget for the 2010 fiscal year and instead of issuing IOUs like California, they are not paying state employees, vendors, suppliers, and non-profit agencies. This has caused an emergency [...]
I have not been putting as much time into my professional development as I used to but I still make incremental advances. ASP.NET technology has outpaced me since I managed to catch up with ASP.NET 2.0. I have not learned anything about MVC and very little about Linq or Silverlight. Now that Silverlight 3.0 has [...]
I think I have finally solved the problem I have been having with WordPress and Windows Live Writer. Windows Live Writer is a free Microsoft program that allows you to write blog posts and submit them to your blog. It is a useful program if you maintain multiple blogs and don’t like the built-in text [...]
As a busy web developer, I learn something new every day and I take the time to document what I learn in my notes. The following is a list of material I’ve recently added to my notes: A tagged regular expression for the search and replace in Microsoft Expression Web. This is useful for preserving [...]
I have started a personal project in order to see if I can make any money by producing content on the Internet. I’ve recently read a book, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, which got me to thinking about how much time I spend contributing content to online communities. Many web sites are making money [...]
I’ve been slacking off for the past two months due to travel but I’m finally getting back into gear. I recently added some material to my notes on creating web pages for the iTouch and iPhone. I have an iTouch which I like to carry with me when I am traveling, although I don’t always [...]
I recently finished reading the book ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking by Andrew Siemer. I consider this book to be one of the more important books to read because I’m very interested in building social networking web sites and ASP.NET is my area of expertise. However I’m currently devoting a lot of time to PHP and [...]
Today I examined how Elgg supports foreign languages for web site internationalization. I discovered that Elgg does not check the browser’s language setting. Instead you have to set the language for the entire site. This means that you cannot create a social networking site which supports two languages. Then I explored how PHP supports localization. [...]
Last night I watched the movie Paris, Je T’Aime, a collection of short films set in various arrondissements. This is undoubtedly one of the best recent films to see before you travel to Paris. I especially liked the short film 14e arrondissement (XIVe arrondissement) — written and directed by Alexander Payne. It is a brutally [...]
Elgg 1.6 Threaded Blog Comments
Elgg 1.6 has been released and I’ve created a new version of my threaded comment system to work with the current version. You can download the latest plugin at http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/rsrobbins/read/242714/threaded-blog-comments-elgg-16. I made a few improvements while working on the new version. All of the JavaScript is now stored within the module to make installation easier. [...]