Michael Gibbs » Page 7

Author: Michael Gibbs

I'm a technologist at heart, assisting companies best utilize the Internet to market themselves and sell their products and services online. This includes organizations as large as Google and as small as one or two individuals.
At Over The Top and Exhibit A Communications, I've programmed solutions for Google as well as at least one other company that was later acquired by Google.

I've been CTO of an Internet SaaS company and spent my time pretty evenly between guiding the future technical strategy of the company, architecting software solutions for my dev teams, designing and running a data center to service our clients world-wide as well as being a technical evangalist/sales engineer to our media clients large and small.

I've also been Chief Photographer of the Daily Sun/Post newspaper back when it was a 5-day a week daily newspaper.

I also spent a great many years as a beach lifeguard for the City of San Clemente as well as Jr. Lifeguard instructor and then as it's program coordinator.
Bragging rights
Private Pilot with Instrument rating and proud husband of soon to be 25 years (and counting).

InfusionSoftDotNet library v1.0.1.0 Released Today

The latest version of InfusionSoftDotNet library to enable Dot Net applications and Asp.Net web applications access the InfusionSoft API was released this morning on CodePlex at http://infusionsoftdotnet.codeplex.com.

One of the biggest changes in this version of the code is the addition of _LastException property to the isdnAPI class to allow you to retrieve any exception thrown during an API call. (Thank cchubb!).

This release is available in full source or as binaries with a sample Asp.Net application. This version will work with Asp.net v2.0 and up.

If you have any thoughts or additions that you’d like to see in this library, please leave a note in the comments below or in the discussion area under this open source project’s CodePlex page.

Turning on Google+ for Google Apps, Finally!

Google has finally allowed Google Apps customers to take advantage of Google+

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They claimed that if you’ve got Enable New Apps by default turned on that Google+ would be turned on but that didn’t appear to be the case for the first Apps domains I tried this on. In both cases, they are set up to enable new apps by default but I still had to go in and turn it on. I’m guessing it is so they can get positive assent to the following screen (and to avoid a Buzz-type corporate privacy problem):

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Quickly Map Manufacturers to Store in ASPDNSF Multi-Store solution

image I’m sure you’ve been there before. You (or your customer) have gone in and added all your products and defined which products go with which stores but then decided after the fact that you want to have a manufacturer’s page (or menu) that shows all the manufacturers of products that  exist in a give store on your Multi-Store solution.

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Running Asp.Net 4.0 Application on IIS6 under Asp.Net 2.0 Parent App

Phew, that title sure is a mouthful… but it is kinda hard to describe the problem in so few words.

I had just finished the primary work on a new customer’s website (http://www.BuyMyBatteries.com) and was trying to hook up the latest and greatest build of BlogEngine.Net (2.5) underneath it for the corporate blog.

The challenge, as you might have guessed is that while BE.NET requires Asp.Net 4.0, the server was running IIS 6.0 and more importantly, the parent website is running ASP.NET v2.0. Resolving this took a number steps but it appears to be working quite nicely now

Step 1

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Stop YouTube Videos from Hiding Your Menus – Two Methods

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Has putting YouTube videos on your website embarrassed you by being so bold as to insist on being in front of other elements on your website? This is a common problem seen across the Internet daily. However, just ‘cause main people suffer from this ailment doesn’t mean that you have to. The resolution to this problem doesn’t rely on setting Z-Index or anything fancy, just making some small changes to the original code provided by YouTube to embed the video.

The preferred method these days for embedding a video appears to be to <iframe> in the video. This is clean, simple, and more importantly, won’t get stripped out like the embed code or javascript embeds by most WYSIWYG editors that people use online to edit their content. A normal IFrame call would look like this:

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Google Doc Discussions: Google Wave lite?

Discussions in Google Docs puts the comments functionality to shameI among many others, mourned the loss of Wave. While it had many fantastic features, I think it was exactly this broad feature-set that caused it’s early demise. One of the features in Wave that I thought was a killer app was the ability to easily hold group discussions while collaborating on documents.

Well today, Google Docs announced their new Discussion feature that will go a long way towards resolving this issue. Watch the video for more details and see me after the break…

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Time Killing with Chrome

imageThis Katamari game is a javascript implementation (interpretation?) of the Japanese video game Katamari Damacy which roughly translates to “clump spirit”.

The point of the game, if there is a point, is to roll a sticky ball around and the more objects you pick up , the bigger the ball becomes and the bigger the objects it can pick up. This version will load in your browser and you hold the control key and roll the ball around the screen picking up words and images off of the screen. I suppose the goal is to get the ball big enough that it goes super-nova.

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Using Webmaster Tools to Optimize Your Site for Google

This is a GREAT video that shows you how to use Webmaster Tools to do Search Engine Optimization on your own website. Watching this is probably the best 10 minutes that a website owner can spend. Learn about:

  • Signing up for message forwarding to get real-time emails from Google about your site
  • Check out Search Queries to see items that are already ranking
  • Use Keywords to understand how to better target content
  • Reduce duplicates through HTML suggestions and URL paramter handling
  • Diagnose crawl errors to capture 404 traffic and reduce visitor frustration
  • Prioritize content by comparing internal links
  • Verify access through Fetch as Googlebot
  • Use Site Performance to improve speed of the website.

 

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Google Apps is Changing

Google announced today the timing for what we consider to be a HUGE change for Google Apps customers (that we talked about on October 1st):  The consolidation of Google Apps accounts into the overall Google Accounts structure that control non-apps services (like Analytics, AdSense, Alerts, Reader, Earth, FeedBurner, Custom Search Engine, Checkout, Blogger). See the top integrated Google services by following link.

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