Yesterday Microsoft announced a new extension for II7 called the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. The toolkit will help developers and hosting providers to increase your site’s search engine relevance. The toolkit includes three modules that integrate with IIS Manager: Site Analysis, Robots Exclusion, and Sitemaps and Site Indexes. You can read more about the new toolkit (which is currently in beta) and download it from iis.net.

The feature list below come directly from IIS.NET:

Site Analysis Features

• Fully featured crawl engine named ‘iisbot’
  • Configurable number of concurrent requests to allow users to crawl their Web site without incurring additional processing. This can be configured from 1 to 16 concurrent requests.
  • Support for Robots.txt, allowing you to customize the locations where the iisbot should analyze and which locations should be ignored.
  • Support for Sitemap files allowing you to specify additional locations to be analyzed.
  • Support for overriding ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ metatags to allow you to analyze pages to help improve customer experience even when search engines will not process them.
  • Configurable limits for analysis, maximum number of URLs to download, and maximum number of kilobytes to download per URL.
  • Configurable options for including content from only your directories or the entire site and sub domains.
• View detailed summary of Web site analysis results through a rich dashboard
• Feature rich Query Builder interface exposing large amounts of data
• Quick access to common tasks
• Display of detailed information for each URL
• View detailed route analysis showing unique routes to better understand the way search engines reach your content

Robots Exclusion Features

• Display of robots content in a friendly user interface
• Support for filtering, grouping, and sorting
• Ability to add ‘disallow’ and ‘allow’ paths using a physical view of your Web site
• Ability to add ‘disallow’ and ‘allow’ paths using a logical view of your Web site from the result of site analysis processing
• Ability to add sitemap locations

Sitemap and Sitemap Index Features

• Display of sitemaps and sitemap index files in a simple user interface
• Support for grouping and sorting
• Ability to add/edit/remove sitemap and sitemap index files
• Ability to add new URL’s to sitemap and sitemap index files using a physical view of your Web site
• Ability to add new URL’s to sitemap and sitemap index files using a logical view of your Web site from the result of site analysis processing
• Ability to register a sitemap or sitemap index into the robots exclusion file

Today’s topic is not a new one, at least for me. I have seen some tweets the last few days that has brought this topic back up for discussion: The quality of good web hosting.

I will go ahead and say right off the top that I am in the camp of believers who say you get exactly what you pay for with web hosting. If are paying $5 a month to host a site, you are going to get $5 of service and performance. Believe me, I know this from past experience! When I first started developing web applications I would look for the cheapest place around and give them a go. Over the years I have used a great number of these lower end web hosts, especially in the ColdFusion arena. I was never 100% happy with the performance or the level of support. I then began diving into the system administration world at my job some and began to learn everything that goes into maintaining web and database servers. I quickly saw the value of paying for a good web host.

The cheap shared hosting plans can have numerous problems if you to choose to go this route. Your site will be sitting on a server with hundreds or even thousands of other sites. So your site’s performance is dependent of a number of factors ranging from hardware issues to bad code written by other developers. If one site is hacked into on the server your site could also be at risk. Support is another drawback to most cheap shared web hosts. They have thousands of customers who are paying in the cheap, so your wait time for customer service can be painfully long in some cases.

I run across clients quite often that have some rather large web applications they spent good money on, but still choose to go the cheapest route for their web hosting. If they care about their applications, it’s not too long before they see the light and are forced to look elsewhere.

Not too long after my experience with shared web hosting and my increase in system admin knowledge I decided to bite the bullet and set up a high end VPS account with a top level web host. I could then use the knowledge I had gained over the years to tune my VPS to my desired settings. If I needed to change something in the ColdFusion Administrator, no problem. Need to upgrade my .NET framework level? No problem there either. The level of support I currently receive is off the charts. The hosting company has dedicated staff who deal only with VPS customers, so help is only minutes away. And best of all, my applications perform great and the up time is not reliant on having hundreds of other sites on my server. Now, with these added benefits it does come with an increased cost. The cost is worth it to me to have good performance and high availability for my clients.

This is just a quick little tip to help you display alternating row colors in your C# code for a DataList or GridView control. Using the AlternatingItemTemplate method is a pain, as it forces you to duplicate your entire ItemTemplate block just to add the alternating CSS class. While trying to find another means of accomplishing this I found the Container.ItemIndex syntax. Using this you can write a little if statement with a MOD function in it to have the code display your alternating style. So my DataList now looks like this:

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 copy code |
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<asp:DataList ID="ContentList" OnItemDataBound="ContentList_ItemDataBound" runat="server" Width="100%">
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	<HeaderTemplate>
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		<table id="listing" cellspacing="0">
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			<tr class="header">
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				<th>Title</th>
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				<th style="text-align:center;">ID</th>
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				<th style="text-align:center;">Edit</th>
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				<th style="text-align:center;">Delete</th>
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			</tr>
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  </HeaderTemplate>
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  <ItemTemplate>
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	<tr class="<%# Container.ItemIndex % 2 == 0 ? "" : "trDark" %>">
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		<td valign="top" width="400"><a href="add.aspx?id=<%# Eval("job_id") %>"><asp:Label ID="Title" Text='<%# Eval("job_title")%>' runat="server"/></a</td>
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		<td style="text-align:center;"><a href="add.aspx?id=<%# Eval("job_id") %>"><asp:Label ID="Number" Text='<%# Eval("job_number")%>' runat="server"/></a</td>
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		<td style="text-align:center;"><a href="add.aspx?id=<%# Eval("job_id") %>"><img src="/admin/images/structure/edit-icon.gif" alt="Edit Record" /></a></td>
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		<td style="text-align:center;"><asp:ImageButton ImageUrl="/admin/images/structure/delete-icon.gif" id="deleteBtn" OnCommand="delButton_Click" CommandName="deleteID" CommandArgument='<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "job_id") %>' AlternateText="Delete Record" runat="server"/></td>
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	</tr>
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  </ItemTemplate>
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  <FooterTemplate>
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	</table>
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  </FooterTemplate>
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</asp:DataList>

So every other row will now use a class named trDark. To use this with a GridView you would use the syntax of Container.DisplayIndex.

Just a quick note that Microsoft has released beta 1 of Visual Studio 2010 to MSDN subscribers. This also includes the first look at .NET 4.0. Currently it’s only available to MSDN subscribers, but should be released to the general public on Wednesday. You can read all the information on VS 2010 on the Microsoft product page.

Finally, some good press for ColdFusion! Mark Driver, a Gartner analyst, recently published an analyst note on ColdFusion. It has some good things to say about ColdFusion and that Abobe has strong support for the product. Nice to see others praising a product that we in the ColdFusion community have praised for years.

The report is not free, but Kristen Schofield has some excerpts posted on her blog.

Twitter rolled out a new “small settings update” that has changed the options for the @reply features. The change has caused an outrage for most users in the Twitter community. Before the update, you could set the @reply features for yourself, choosing from 1 of the 3 options: Show @replies from nobody, show @replies from everybody, or only show the @replies of people you were following. After the update you only have the last option, show @replies from the people you are following.

Twitter appears to have made this change to reduce the noise from @reply features for new users. That is well and good, but the users could have changed this option their self, and Twitter could have kept the other features. Will Twitter revert this “small settings update” soon? I hope they do and that they put the choice back on the user.

By the way, the top trending topic on Twitter right now is this very subject, using the #fixreplies hashtag.

You can read more about this subject here:
Mashable
Download Squad

I just wanted to pass along a very in depth article by the folks at Smashing Magazine comparing Flash and Silverlight. They compare the two technologies between 14 different categories ranging from animation to media streaming. Also, make sure you read the comments at the end of the article as there are some great thoughts from others on the topic as well.

While reading my morning sports news, I came across this article on ESPN.com about former Nebraska quarterback Sam Keller taking EA Sports and the NCAA to court. Keller is claiming that EA Sports wrongly uses the names and likenesses of collegiate athletes and that the NCAA allows this to happen. If you have ever played one of the NCAA games (basketball or football) you know that due to NCAA rules the makers of the game cannot use real names or pictures of the athletes. The rating of the players are true to life, but that’s about it. The lawsuit goes on to say that the games dodge this rule by allowing owners of the game to easily share files that contain entire rosters, including player names and bio information.

Now, some would not see the harm in this. But remember that NCAA athletes do not get paid (unless you count the scholarships which provides a free education for some). So the main contention in this lawsuit appears to be that EA Sports and the NCAA are profiting (and profiting greatly I might add) from these games, but the athletes get nothing and the games are built around the athletes.

So what are your thoughts on this lawsuit? And, do you think the athletes should get some kind of compensation?

I have read numerous articles this week on the subject of Twitter replacing RSS feeds for some people, so I thought I would share my two cents on the subject. I’ll start by saying I was a late adopter to Twitter, having been signed up for only a few months now. Over that time period Twitter is slowly overtaking my reading of news from my RSS feeds. I have always been a huge fan of Google Reader, and it’s been my primary source of news, sports information, tech blogs, etc… Every day now I find myself removing feeds from Reader once I see the site I was subscribed to also offers a Twitter feed. In the near future I can say I will probably not use Google Reader anymore. Twitter will become my main source of content. So count me in the large group of folks who see Twitter as an RSS killer.

In the next couple of weeks I will be sharing a ColdFusion based project I have created that aggregates RSS based content on certain news subjects (Pro Cycling and Motorsports). This is just one other step I have taken to provide a means of having more content viewable via Twitter.

For those of you that follow this blog, you know I was looking for a web based code snippet library. After checking out some of the ones I came across I ended up making the decision to use a WordPress blog for the library. It has everything I needed out of the box (categories, tags, multiple authors, RSS etc…). The only two pieces I needed to add in were a code highlighter (which there are many of) and most importantly a mechanism to allow me to make the entire blog private. I did not want the general public to come across the code snippets, nor did I want the blog indexed. I was surprised to see that out of the box WordPress does not offer this feature. After a quick search I came across a new plugin named Absolute Privacy written by John Kolbert. This plugin does exactly what I needed to do. Once you download the plugin all you need to do is go to the settings page and check a box that enables the feature. By doing this your entire blog is protected via login. So far this has worked well, and WordPress is doing it’s normal good job.