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 […]
View PostWorking with Committees: How to Build a Successful Website
Imagine that you and your ten closest friends are put into an industrial kitchen and told to make food item that contains everyone’s favorite ingredients. If you all like exactly the same types of food, you might wind up with something that’s not half-bad. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. You would more likely end […]
View PostHow 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 […]
View PostHow 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. […]
View PostArvixe’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 […]
View PostFacebook 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 […]
View PostHow to Build a Code Igniter Development and Testing Environment on Windows
I’ve been playing around with the Code Igniter Framework for PHP over the last couple of weeks, primarily because Net Tuts has a series of 6 high-quality screencasts showing off some basic functionality of the framework. Essentially, Code Igniter provides some additional functionality and provides a standardized means of creating pages and methods using the […]
View PostHow 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 […]
View PostFast 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 = […]
View PostASP.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 […]
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