wemoot - it's alive!

I have been building wemoot with Jorge Gonzalez in secret (kind of) for the last 8 months or so, fine tuning and redeveloping his idea to give everyone the oppurtunity to share/find and learn from a single place on the internet.

When asked what wemoot is I normally say "It's like Faceook with brains", don't get me wrong old facebook does a great job, but it doesn't have any 'information' in it, it's great for keeping in touch with friends, but I can't learn anything from it.

Wemoot gives me somewhere to share information I find/know and to do it easily, yes I could have gone to wikipedia to leave information, but I have tried that before and have had this information rewritten or deleted by other people, for me I wanted somewhere where I could write an article about web design for example or search engine optimisation and share it with a community of people in the knowledge that it was mine and it could not be edited by others, they should be able to discuss it and leave feedback etc, but it's still mine.

And that's why I thought Jorge's idea was a fantastic one and one I know will have great success and possibly change the way a lot of people interact with content.

I suppose the tech name for wemoot would be a content distribuition platform, with relted discussions and personal messaging. more wemoot tech stuff here.

The test site went live on the 9th of Febraury 2009 (929) and thanks to all the popel testing the full version went live last week!

If you have ever wanted to share some information you think others would be interested in or just want to throw some ideas out to a communtiy of people register and become part of the internet's coolest new cultural communitiy

www.wemoot.com

Open Space Code - a good day out

I spent my saturday with a group of programmers form around London taking part in the 2nd openspacecode event, I had never heard about these types of events before but it seemed like a great idea.

As a sole developer it can be really hard to 'see' what is going on in the industry, especially when all of my projects are based loosely around the same technology and 'patterns & practices'.

The day started with a short group planning session, where everyone is given the oppurtunity to put forward topics to discuss.
Following a brief democratic process we had our morning topics inplace - I was off to learn about BDD - Behaviour Driven Development

Thanks to Ian Cooper for filling us in on BDD, the topic was covered well and I got 2 main things out of the 2 hours or so.

1- I need to spend a fair chunk of time learning more about testing
2- I should probably take some time out to move some of what I do to c#

We then all headed off to lunch at Nandos!

The afternoon started with a quick planning session to decide what was going to be discussed over the afternoon session - I went a long to the DSL - Domain Specific Langauge talk.
Which although is probably not something I will be doing in the near future it is defeinitely a part of software development that I will have to use.

The day finished off with everyone back together to discuss the day, pros and cons etc.

Then something I have been looking to do for quite awile - I got to play on one of the few 'Microsoft Surface' devices in the world!
This is a cool piece of technology, if I had a spare £12k I would really like one, not sure what I would use it for, but there would never be a shortage of conversation starters (for those who haven't seen/heard about Surface, this one was an interactive coffee table with brains).

Special thanks to Alan Dean for organising a great event and to cochango for letting us use their really nice offices and allowing some of us to play on the Surface!

If you are a software developer and live in London and are keen to see how other developers do what they do, these events are what you are looking for!

be carfeul of skype when editing your website!

I have been building websites for a number of years so many in fact I now build websites to buld websites (content management systems), so it came as a surprised that while I was editing a customers live website I noticed a lrage number of missing images on the contact page.

This was easily fixed by turning the skype browser button OFF and removing the skype injected code from the editor before I saved the HTML again.

It's interesting to note that when this skype bar is turned on it has rendering control over every page you view, that is it can inject its own html/javascript into the page as its being rendered by your faithful browser. - is this some kind of loop hole int he broswer security?

So if you do use a web based wyziwyg editor, be careful of toolbar injectors, they can create a LOT of code that you will never need to use.

Dundas is reborm as MSchart

Well well, the purchase of Dundas by Microsoft has given us developers some new free tools for the asp.net framework.

And they look really good, oh did I mention they are free......

http://reddevnews.com/news/article.aspx?editorialsid=10419

cheers,

moving a database from sql 2005 to sql2000.....

This I would have thought would have been a fairly easy task, as the DB in question used to be hosted on a SQL2000 server and was detached, then attached to the SQL2005 development server to be adjusted etc etc. I even left the compatibility set to 80.

The only structural changes were via the aspnet provider script + the odd new table/stored proc etc

However when I came to move the DB back to the live server all hell broke loose. Well I might be exaggarating a bit there, but it felt like it.

To cut a long story short I followed these steps to get it all to work;

1- Script Database as .... Create to ...
2- Run the installProviders.sql for aspnet
3- Task ... Generate scripts ... (then manually edit this to remove any of references already created by the installProviders.sql above, also had to manually remove a number of the unusual SQL2005 extra bits)
4- Add required sql users
5- I used Redgate SQL Compare (trial edition) to move the actual data across (the SQL 2005 export tool failed)
6- crossed fingers and it seems to have worked...

It seems annoying that even if you set the compat to SQL2000t hat its still won't work, but I know now. ha ha.

As soon as possible I think the live server will get an upgrade....

Startup Zone

This is a great site from Microsoft for all new businesses to look at.

If you are an IT service provider like us, you can add you profile for others to find you, or if you are after some IT services there are loads of company profiles to look through.

Best of all if you are a IT type person and use microsoft products you can get tthem free if you register!!!


http://www.microsoftstartupzone.com/pages/home.aspx

New Google Analytics Feature: Event Tracking

This little dittybelow from the big 'G' will mean loads more data for SEO'ers and developers to work with, currently any action within an AJAX upadate panel for example is not seen by Google analytics.
Now it seems that is about to change, well at least for some sites they have selected in the pilot, keep an eye out as the launch of this to every other account may not be advertised and the functionality may just 'appear', so to make sure you can access this as soon its available it moght be worth updating your sites to use the new urchin javascript!

cheers,
craig

Greetings from Google Analytics,

We are happy to let you know that a new feature called Event Tracking is now available in the following Google Analytics profiles: www.visalogic.net. Please note that you are receiving this email update since you are an 'Admin' for the profiles listed above.
When you log in to these profiles, you will see a new set of reports called "Event Tracking" under the Content section. As posted on our blog, this is a limited release currently available only to select profiles.

Event Tracking allows you to track interactions with Web 2.0 style content such as Flash, AJAX, Adobe Air, Silverlight, social networking apps, etc. It essentially allows you to track interactions beyond just pageviews.

To use Event Tracking, you will need to upgrade your site to use the new ga.js javascript. Detailed instructions on how to set up Event Tracking on your site are available on our newly launched CodeSite. To find your ga.js code snippet, edit the settings for your profile and click the "Check Status" link on the upper right corner of the page.


Sincerely,

The Google Analytics Team