Williamsport Web Developer Weblog

This blog post is for my clients who may be wondering what I’m doing. I was recently hired by a local company for what may turn out to be a full time job. I needed to find a full time job because I can’t afford health insurance working on my own and my debt was rising. I plan to complete any freelance projects that I am currently working on or assist in transferring the work to another web developer. Please contact me if you have any questions or concerns.

Today I got another 250 GB Western Digital hard drive that I bought on eBay. I have installed Windows Server 2003 on it in order to run Sharepoint. You cannot install Sharepoint on Windows XP. Sharepoint interests me because it uses web parts which are similar to the new web parts technology in ASP.NET 2.0. As soon as I get Service Pack 1 installed on my Windows Server 2003, I will install Visual Studio 2005 Professional and Microsoft Office Sharepoint Designer 2007. I don’t think there is a lot of custom web development being done for Sharepoint so that may be a good opportunity for me. I may develop a few web parts to sell and even create a marketplace for web parts. I have been unable to find anything like that on the Internet. I want to start using my web development skills to create my own business ventures because I’m not making enough money working on freelance projects.

Unfortunately, there were so many operating system updates to install that I spent the entire day on this task and did not get any work done on my client projects.

Now that I’ve worked as a freelance web developer and as a web developer working for a small company that does a variety of Internet consulting and I.T. related work I have some thoughts on choosing one over the other. In my opinion, you are better off hiring a freelance web developer rather than giving your project to a firm. It does not matter how large or small the web development firm is, there will be serious disadvantages in having your project done by any firm that handles multiple projects.

For one thing, a web development firm is unlikely to spend much time on search engine optimization. They may offer SEO as a service but they are probably more interested in getting projects completed than they are in seriously helping a company rank well in the search engines. In order to get your web developer really involved in your search engine optimization efforts, you need a more intimate relationship with the developer who has to have some dedication to your project. Without this business relationship you are just going to get token efforts and a lot of reports that make it look like some SEO work is being done. SEO requires various technical skills and should not be treated as a purely marketing matter without any web developer involvement.

Another thing that firms tend to neglect is web application security. A web development firm is unlikely to want to spend the time to protect your web site from SQL injection attacks. Encrypting sensitive data to prevent embarrassing data thefts is also an extra step that a firm is unlikely to take. However, when you hire a freelance web developer that person will be free to dedicate more of his time to your project and therefore he can put in the extra effort to make the web application secure. This is particularly important for custom web applications that don’t have the built-in security of open source or commercial web applications.

In my experience, both search engine optimization and web application security are rather involved matters that require specialized knowledge which the typical web developer is unlikely to delve into. Developers tend to be isolated from the marketing concerns vital to search engine optimization. And developers are not inclined to build in web application security because they are more focused on functionality and opening up permissions to get their web applications running. Management is focused on getting projects done in a timely manner which means no extra effort will be made to promote your business or secure your data.

Last night I installed the Joomla open source content management system on my local web server and explored its ability to consume XML data feeds (web services, developer APIs, and RSS news feeds). The News Feed module did not allow me to specify a news feed stylesheet, aka XSL file, so I had to look for an extension to add this functionality. I found botMosXslt, a Mambot allowing processing from xml/xsl file using xslt processor and render the result in content. There were no instructions on how to install it so I will describe how to do so on a Windows web server running PHP 5.0:

1. Copy mosxslt.php and mosxslt.xml to C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\joomla\mambots\content
2. Create directory for XSL files at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\joomla\custom\xml
3. Select Mambots / Site Mambots in Joomla Administrator!
4. In the Mambot Manager [Site] click the New button
5. Enter “botMosXslt” for the Name field
6. Leave content selected for the Folder field
7. Enter “mosxslt” for the Mambot file field
8. Leave Yes radio button selected for Published field
9. Click the Save button

The new botMosXslt mambot should now appear in the list:

Next I will describe how to use it to display LiveVideo Featured Videos and deal with an error:

1. Select Content / All Content Items in Joomla Administrator!
2. Click the New button
3. Enter a title
4. Enter the title alias
5. Select a section
6. Enter “{mosxslt GetFeaturedVideos.xml FeaturedVideos.xsl} ” as your content
7. Click the Save button
8. Copy GetFeaturedVideos.xml and FeaturedVideos.xsl to C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\joomla\custom\xml
9. If Fatal error on xslt_create function, edit mosxslt.php

I got a fatal error because I did not have the required libraries to process XSLT using PHP on my system. Fortunately, I had already figured out an alternative way of doing it using the built-in capabilities of PHP 5.0. So if you get the following error add the code I list below it:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function xslt_create() in c:Inetpubwwwrootjoomlamambotscontentmosxslt.php on line 74

Edit the mosxslt.php file to work around this problem:

/* // Process xml
$xh = xslt_create();
$xsltResult = xslt_process($xh,
$fullXmlFilename, $fullXslFilename);
if ($xsltResult)
$htmlContents = $xsltResult;
else
$htmlContents = "!!! Error in executing XSLT !!!";
return $htmlContents;
*/

// Process xml on Windows
// edited by Robert S. Robbins 02/24/2007
$xml = new DOMDocument;
$xml->load($fullXmlFilename);
$xsl = new DOMDocument;
$xsl->load($fullXslFilename);
// Configure the transformer
$proc = new XSLTProcessor;
$proc->importStyleSheet($xsl);
// attach the xsl rules
return $proc->transformToXML($xml);

As you can see I finally got this to work for me. However I did have to use a static XML file rather than pull the current list of LiveVideo Featured Videos using their Developer XPI.

I devote a lot of time each week to studying new technology. It is very important for a web developer to keep up his skill set because his expertise is his major asset. I prefer to learn incrementally because most programming languages and software have too many details or features to master. I can’t spend all day studying so I just try to pick up one new language feature or software feature to document and experiment with during the day. Sometimes it is just a regular expression or a JavaScript function that I found useful.

I’ve decided to give up on my plans to study Eiffel and Java Server Pages. There isn’t much work to be found in those programming languages and I do need to specialize. JSP was only of interest because a local company, Brodart, is always looking for JSP developers. I will continue to expand upon my knowledge of ASP.NET 2.0, XSLT, PHP, and C#. In regards to software, I will continue to study DotNetNuke 4.0 and After Effects 6.5. I should mention that my study of ASP.NET 2.0 will include the AJAX extensions.

I recently finished learning to use some additional aspects of database management using the new ASP.NET 2.0 Data Server Controls. I tried out the DetailsView, GridView, and FormView server controls that can be used to insert, edit, or delete records without writing any code. I also learned about CommandFields, DataKeyNames, and Parameters which are new properties and tags associated with these server controls. I’ll probably be doing more of my work in design mode within Visual Studio 2005 because it has many wizards and graphical user interfaces for working with these server controls. I rarely use design mode in Visual Studio 2003 because it does not compare with FrontPage 2003.

I have learned that DotNetNuke 4.0 has a module for XML and XSL transformations which is probably better suited for the developer APIs that return data as XML.

I put a foam windscreen on my StudioProjects B1 Cardiod Condenser Microphone and it really helps to reduce plosives, pops, and spikes.

Tonight I tried to use some of the XSL stylesheets I created for my ASP.NET 2.0 web parts mashup in the DotNetNuke 4 web portal. I was very pleased to find that most of them work when used with the News module. The News module allows you to specify both the news feed and its news feed stylesheet so you can actually use any kind of XML feed. You can use web services, developer APIs, or RSS feeds. If you are not actually consuming a news feed then you just use your own stylesheet to control how the data is formatted.

I was able to use several of my web parts in my DotNetNuke 4 web portal because they were basically just XSL used to style XML feeds. Please see the screen shot below. I was able to use my local weather widget, the show my IP address widget, LiveVideo featured videos widget, and the actual news feed for the Newsvine Web Development Group (did not require a stylesheet). Therefore it appears as though my work with web parts will port to this web portal as long as it is based mostly on XML and XSLT (stylesheet transformations). DotNetNuke 4 does not use web parts but you can still minimize modules and move them from place to place when logged in as an administrator. I have the book Professional DotNetNuke 4 by Shaun Walker and others from WROX Press.

I’ve switched form using ASCX user controls for my web parts to using VB class files that are real web part controls. I made the switch because you can use title icon images in your web parts when they are actual web part controls. I really wanted those icons in my project because I’m an icon freak. I have a large collection of web site favorite icons. You can use regular Windows icon files .ico for web parts as long as they are 16×16 pixels. I have noticed a major drawback to web part mashups. Web parts do not use AJAX so there is an annoying refresh of the web page every time I make a change.

Today I purchased RegexBuddy, a tool for creating and testing regular expressions. Regular expressions are strings that describe or match a set of strings, according to certain syntax rules. In other words, a regular expression is a complex syntax for searching through text. It is very handy for search and replace and many mundane programming tasks that require text manipulation. I bought RegexBuddy because I am doing a lot of work with XSL, stylesheets for XML. Unfortunately, there are many occasions when XSL is not sophisticated enough to pull data from a RSS or XML feed. It is often necessary to do additional string parsing using JavaScript. One of the more useful features of JavaScript is its support for regular expressions. RegexBuddy is great for creating complicated regular expressions and testing them against sample data. It will even generate some of the JavaScript code you need to use regular expressions. RegexBuddy is only $29.95 so I found it affordable.

I need to write some JavaScript functions for my XSL stylesheet I’m developing for the YouTube user RSS feed. This XML feed is using RSS 2.0 with the xmlns:media extension. The description tag has been causing me a lot of grief because it breaks the design principles of XML. The description tag actually contains 5 pieces of information; the video thumbnail, the video description, the author, the keywords or tags, and the date added. All of this information is provided as HTML within a <![CDATA[...]]>. CDATA sections instruct the XML processor that the content included in a section is not markup and should not be parsed. This makes it very difficult to extract the video description.

So far I have written the JavaScript function to strip out the newlines in the HTML, because regular expressions don’t work well on multiline text, and the function to trim the description. I’ve also come up with a good regular expression to find the text contained within the first paragraph HTML tags <p></p> which surround the video description. However, I am still having problems with the XSL which needs to pass the description element to my JavaScript function and then return a string I'll use within a title tag attribute as a tooltip. When you mouse over the video title I want to display the video description.