eCommerce Tools and Custom Programming Solutions
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).
Invites, we don’t need no stinkin’ Invites!Well, Google Voice has FINALLY launched to the general public! No longer will my friends and family be begging me for invites to this great program. And you won’t either ‘cause if you jump over to http://voice.google.com/ right now, you’ll be able to sign in with your Google Account and get your very own One Number To Rule Them All!
If you’ve followed the directions that we posted in our previous posting on Sitemaps for Google Sites and you find that the sitemap is empty (not missing but actually empty) then you’ll need to follow these steps to get your sitemap completed:
So you’ve got a Google Sites website and you want to submit a sitemap to your Google (and other site engines) but how do you do it? Sure, with static sites you can go ahead and use a 3rd party system that will crawl the site and create an xml file for you but if you do that, how do place that file into your Google Sites site?
Well, you could upload it to a file cabinet page but Google comes to the rescue, as you can imagine, in that there is an automated sitemap that stays sync’ed with your website that you can submit to tools but it can kind of confusing to find it.
If you are using AspDotNetStorefront, as well as possibly many other web applications, you may have noticed lately a number of errors showing up in your Google Webmaster Tools account. The error status indicates “Your Sitemap or Sitemap index file doesn’t properly declare the namespace.” or simply “Incorrect namespace” in the urlset tag.
A while ago, I wrote about how to decide which of the various versions of AspDotNetStorefront were right for your application. I think the guidelines in that article still hold true but now that there are more versions of the software available, it should be updated. Thankfully, the fine folks at AspDotNetStorefront have already done so in their blog. Here are some of the updated deciders (my comments on each of their points are added in blue italics):
The newly launched AspDotNetStorefront blog launched with a bang recently. In addition to taking advantage of the opportunity to introduce the world to some of their unsung heroes in the Sales and Support department, their first programming tip is something that proved to be quite timely to one of our clients who was experiencing a particular problem with the internal full-text search.
Well, I received my “free” Motorola Droid phone from Google for attending Google I/O this year. Or more accurately, for having the intention to attend Google I/O 2010. Last year, in an attempt to help drive Android development, they gave every attendee of Google I/O 2009 with a Google ION phone (which is a branded version of the T-Mobile MyTouch). Since I use T-Mobile I was stoked to be able to upgrade from the G1 I was using to the MyTouch. It was a great phone and one that I’ll be using simultaneously with the Motorola Droid since I’m not ready to drop my T-Mobile coverage in favor of Verizon. You see the Droid is a CDMA device while T-Mobile’s network is the more world-friendly GSM technology.
However, the initial OOB (out of box) experience has led me to believe that I probably would jump ship given the chance. Of course it will take a while to get used to the location of buttons on this new beast but to me it can be summed up in two words: Speed and Eclair (or now Flan). Let’s jump into the latter first.
Our customer WTI (in association with Over The Top) has successfully re-launched their website using AspDotNetStorefront technology. WTI (aka Western Telematics, Incorporated) is a leading vendor of console servers and remote reboot devices. They pride themselves on providing “Industrial Strength Networking Hardware”.
It is most odd. Had a client just totally fall off the map (Google-wise) the other day. They think it is in reference to a number of 404 pages their CMS threw for the following (and many more) URLs:
I recently upgraded my development laptop from Vista (with a failing hard drive) to Windows 7 with a smoking fast Hitatchi 500Gb 7200k drive. I’ve been totally stoked with the perfomance increase (especially boot speeds) so far.
I’ve working through a number of issues getting IIS and VisualStudio playing nice together when I ran into a couple of problems that I didn’t find resolutions for easily online so I figured I should blog them out.