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Apple is Killing the Email Tracking Pixel. Here’s How Email Marketers Should Adapt.

During the World Wide Developer Conference earlier in June, Apple announced that its mail client would start blocking tracking pixels which allow email marketers to know when a user has opened their email. Tracking pixels, which are referred to by some as “spy pixels,” are primarily used to determine which subscribers are active and which …

How to Implement the SendGrid Newsletter API in ASP.NET and C#

A while back, SendGrid announced its newsletter functionality that provides functionality for managing and emailing distribution lists. If you’re a developer that makes use of SendGrid, you’re probably managing your list internally in a SQL database and have no need for SendGrid’s newsletter functionality, but there are two distinct advantages to using the Newsletter API.The …

How to Prevent WordPress Comment Spam

If you run a blog that’s powered by WordPress, inevitably your website will be hit by a deluge of comment spam. More often than not, it comes from automated software tools designed to build links back to the spammer’s website for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. If you leave your WordPress blog unprotected, your posts …

How to Automatically Insert Affiliate Links into your Blog Posts

My company has done pretty well with affiliate advertising over the last couple of years by creating high-quality content about a product or service that has an affiliate program and including appropriate affiliate banners and links in those articles. For example, you can read a review I did of Lending Club’s peer-to-peer lending service on …

Developing a Rock Solid WordPress Backup Strategy

Regardless of what type of website that you have, you need to back-up your websites on an ongoing and consistent basis. What would you do if your website got hacked? What would you do if your web-host goes out of business? What would you do if the server that hosts your website crashes hard? If …

How to Supercharge your WordPress Installation

WordPress has been the single best and single worst piece of software for my company. Almost all of the sites that my company operates are powered by WordPress. On one hand, it’s a fantastic content management system that’s easy to setup and upgrade. If there’s something you want to do on your website, chances are, …

Using SendGrid in ASP.NET

I recently launched a daily email newsletter on my company’s investing website, American Banking & Market News. The newsletter provides daily updates about ratings changes made by stock analysts. Initially, I planned on using my server’s local SMTP server to send out the messages, but realized that after getting more than 50 sign-ups the first …

How to Optimize Your WordPress Blog for Performance

WordPress is an excellent blogging/news website platform as a whole, but has been criticized for being a bit of a performance dog. One of my websites which is powered by WordPress receives between 100,000 and 200,000 unique visitors a month. I’ve gotten a few nasty emails from the two hosts that I’ve had the site …

How to Make Use of Namespaces in C# and Visual Basic .NET

If you’ve written any sort of software application of decent size, you’ll know that you need to structure your code, most often using object oriented design techniques, to keep your code-base manageable. Some languages such as Java and C# enable developers to write object-oriented applications relatively well out of the box without much extra work. …

Arvixe’s Customer Service Has Won Me Over

For years, I had been a DreamHost customer. I had their standard shared reseller hosting account that costs peanuts. Every few weeks my sites would crash hard when they had any remote amount of significant traffic. Eventually it got to the point where I was losing out on ad-revenue because of DreamHost’s inability to keep …

Facebook Goes Live with Bookmark Prompt

A couple of months ago, Facebook announced some ambitious changes to their API. We’re now starting to see some of the first of the newly announced features be released into the wild. A couple of weeks ago, Facebook added the ability for developers to ask prompt to bookmark their application. Previously, users were only able …

How to Post to Facebook's "Stream" using Facebook Connect and XFBML

For my day job, I’ve been developing a facebook application to coincide with its annual SpayDay event. Developing the application has caused several headaches, but once I realized that the majority of the facebook integration wouldn’t happen from the Facebook Developer Toolkit (an ASP.NET Facebook Development Framework), and instead from JavaScript-based XFBML, life got a …

Fast and Efficient C# and Visual Basic String Concatenation

If you do any sort of web development work on the .NET platform, you are going to find yourself concatenating (connecting) strings together on a very regular basis. There are two ways to do this. The first is with a traditional string concatenation, which would look something like this: string MyString = String.Empty; MyString = …

ASP.NET Performance Tip: Remove Unnecessary Library References

Over the last few days, I’ve been scouring the web for techniques and strategies to optimize ASP.NET code so that it runs faster and more efficient, resulting in quicker load times. A lot of what I found was pretty standard advice, disable viewstate, use the StringBuilder for concatenation, disable tracing and use AJAX. One piece …

How to Display Your Twitter Feed using ASP.NET

UPDATE 3/23/2010 – Ricky from Twitterizer commented below noting that basic authentication will soon go away via Twitter and OAUTH will be required. Note that the code below will only work for a few months. We will post an updated code-example soon. As I write this article, It’s about 75 degrees and Sunny outside. When …

How to Implement an ASP.NET Color Picker

One of the components of the 360 Web Content Management System (website in progress) that I wanted to develop was an events calendar that allowed you to post events into color-coded categories. You can see a demo of it here. At first, I had it so that users would manually enter in a 6-character HTML …

How to Validate Email Addresses in C#

I was recently doing doing support for a client that had a newsletter system. The previous employee had neglected to do much in the form of format validation for email addresses from both a user-input standpoint and system-integrity standpoint. Since there were several email addresses in the database that didn’t meet the basic conventions of …

Create a Sortable HTML Table with JQuery and TableSorter

One of the more useful features of ASP.NET’s GridView control is that users can sort the information in the table they are seeing by any number of fields. To allow this sorting to happen, ASP.NET sends a post-back to the server and the web server re-renders the page with the GridView re-sorted in the order …

How to Validate Forms with JQuery

Just about everyone who’s ever made a web-application knows that you generally can’t trust your users to enter data correctly into a form. Some of them will ignore important fields, others will type in data that couldn’t possibly be right. Some will try to choose two character passwords and others will enter in a long …

Hash Passwords in C# and Visual Basic Using SHA-512

We recently covered an easy way to hash passwords using SHA-1 in .NET using either Visual Basic or C#. In most cases, SHA-1 encryption is “secure enough”, but there are some mathematical weaknesses. Microsoft’s .NET platform (specifically the System.Security class) allows you to encrypt passwords with a number of differnet algorithms without having to know the …

How to Authenticate a User in Active Directory using ASP.NET

If you’re working in an academic or large corporate or government setting, changes are you’re going to have a network in place using Active Directory or an open-source equivalent. Every user in the organization will have some sort of an account to use. If you’re building an internal web-application or desktop-application, it doesn’t make a …

How to Resize Photos in ASP.NET

If you’re developing a website that allows users to upload any sort of photos or images, you have to expect that they aren’t going to bother doing any sort of basic image manipulation, such as resizing an 8 megapixel image down to something that’s appropriate for the web. Fortunately, there are a number of good …

JQuery Date Picker: One Step Torwards Making Forms That Work

While attending Microsoft Mix earlier this spring, I stumbled upon a book called “Making Forms That Work“, which was written by Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney. The book focused on building web-forms that aren’t intimidating and that people will actually fill out. One of the focuses was making sure to use the right controls for …

How to Export Data to Excel in C# and ASP.NET

If you develop a web-application for a client that involves creating and viewing reports, it’s very likely that they’re going to want to be able to export that data to excel very readily. Fortunately, you won’t need any special libraries or hundreds of lines of code to make that happen in ASP.NET. All you need …

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Your WordPress Blog or Website

WordPress is without a doubt the most popular blogging platform on the web. It’s easy to use, relatively secure, very extensible and best of all free. Unfortunately, it’s not optimized for search engines terribly well out of the box. The URLs that it generates don’t have any keywords in them. There’s no way to customize …

How to Generate Random Passwords in C#

If you’re developing a site that requires users to logon, chances are you’re going to need to be able to generate passwords at some point, whether it be when users initially create their accounts or after they lose their passwords and need to reset their account credentials. Here’s a very customizable function that will generate …

How to Build a Joomla Testing Environment on Windows

In the next couple of weeks, I’m planning on developing a Joomla 1.5 module so that I can flex my PHP muscles and get some more experience developing for Joomla. As part of this, It will be very helpful to have a local environment where I can test out the component that I’m plan on …

A Simple Way to Hash Passwords in ASP.NET

If you’re developing a website that requires your users to create an account, it’s a very good idea to not store their passwords in plain-text in the database. A good chunk of users use the same password for just about everything, so if your database is compromised, there’s the possibility of having some real reprocussions …

How to Crop Images in ASP.NET with "Web Crop Image Control"

When researching various web-based imaging cropping tools, I’ve found that there are a lot of good looking JQuery, MooTools, and other JavaScript based solutions out there, but there’s not a ton of good server-side support. The one ASP.NET control I found that I really did like was “Asp.net 2.0 Web Crop Image Control“. It’s actually …

ASP.NET Caching Techniques and Tools

One of the most frequent criticisms of the ASP.NET stack is that it’s less efficient than some of its open-source counterparts. However, Microsoft has actually built in a lot of neat technology into the framework related to caching that allows for much more scalability than you might think. Not only is there caching support built …

How to Set File Permisisons to Upload Files in ASP.NET

If you plan on doing any sort of file manipulation on a web-server using ASP.NET, you’re going to have to become intimiately familiar with the System.IO library and learn how to properly configure the permissions for the directories you would like to write to on your Windows Server ’03 or ’08 web-server. Fortunately, the process isn’t …

Make an AJAX-like Multiple File Uploader with Uploadify

I’m currently working on an file manager that will be integrated with the content management system software that we developed. In doing this, I’ve been looking for a solution that would allow users to upload multiple files at once, does so in a very easy to use way and shows a progress bar. For this …

Making Use of Escape Sequences in C# and Visual Basic

When working with strings of text, there are certain characters that you can’t represent in a normal string variable because the key required on the keyboard simply doesn’t exist or because of how strings are represented in text. Fortunately, modern programming languages provide “escape sequences,” or ways to represent certain characters that otherwise could not …

My "Finding a Windows VPS" Adventure

For the last week or so, I’ve been looking for a Virtual Private Server (VPS) for use on some of my websites and personal web-development projects. My adventure began by doing a Google Search for “Windows VPS” and found dozens of different providers that had different features at different pricepoints. At first, I found it …

How to Create a JQuery File Browser with JQuery File Tree

While looking at various tools that might aid in the development of an ASP.NET based file manager, I came across a JQuery based tool called jQuery File Tree. Typically we would think of a file browser for a web-server that would be something that’s almost uniquely server-side, but jQuery File Tree does a nice job …

LINQ 101: Getting Started with LINQ

LINQ has been out for around a year now, but I never have been able to get away from using traditional SQL queries and data-access classes. Today, I thought I would try to do the “Hello World” equivalent of a LINQ program and share that with you today. So What’s LINQ? LINQ stands for Language …

Using JQuery? Let Google Host It

In the last decade, Google has given us a lot of amazing free services, and web developers haven’t been left out of the party. For a while now, Google has been hosting popular JavaScript libraries on their CDN (content delivery network) and letting any website make use of them for free. On face, you might …

How to Format a DateTime in C# / ASP.NET

When I was a new developer making websites in .NET, I ended up doing some pretty screwy things to make date’s and time’s look how I wanted to. I would do things like: DateTime thisDate = DateTime.Now; string AMPM = String.Empty; if(thisDate.Hour>=12) {AMPM = “PM”;} else {AMPM = “AM”;} String FormattedDate = (thisDate.Hour%12).ToString() + “:” …

360 WebCMS Feature Look: Multisite Management

I’ve spent the better part of the last 3 months developing the new version of our company’s content management system that’s called “360 WebCMS”. It’s a product that Factor 360 has and is used to develop all of our client websites. One of the cool features that I built into it was multi-site management. Essentially, …

Make Custom URLs in ASP.NET with the Global.asax File

If you’re looking to do URL rewriting for a content management system or another .NET based website, there are a number of ways to accomplish the task. There’s a very mature free product called URL Rewriter.NET which gets the job done, and Microsoft has made their own URL Routing solution which was originally developed for …

Write Your Own Database Access Class in C#

If you use C# or VB.NET through the ASP.NET stack (or just as a desktop application) to connect to a  SQL database, you’ll have a few options. There’s the new entity data model from Microsoft, there’s also last year’s notion of LINQ. They both do a reasonably good job, but are sometimes on the over-kill …

Building a Simple Image Rotator with JQuery

I was recently working on a new website for an adult fellowship group at my church and one of the tasks I had was to create an image rotator that had various bible verses on it that would transition every few seconds. Since the site was Joomla-based, I initially searched for a free plugin that …