Ever since the oauth-calypse back in August, I’ve been really missing my this plugin for Windows Live Writer. WLW is, in my mind, the best way to manage and compose your blog posts regardless of the platform you are working on (WordPress, BlogEngine.Net, SubText, etc) however the Microsoft-built plugin that I relied upon on every post, called Twitter Notify, stopped working abruptly when Twitter dropped support for basic authentication.
Category: Headline
Managing Transition From Google Apps Accounts to Google Accounts
There has always been a challenge associated with differentiating between Google Apps Accounts and Google Accounts. One of the big challenges is that Google doesn’t recognize Google Apps Accounts as Google Accounts for most of their services. Back in May, Google announced plans to change all that.
In the fall of 2010, Google is planning on moving all existing Google Apps accounts (all editions too, not just Premium and Educational versions) over to this new system that will allow users to sign in for the majority of Google services using their Google Apps account. Of course, since this will be accessing the directory information for your Google Apps account, your domain administrator will be able to choose which Google Services people can use their Google Apps login to access.
Previously, the plan was to launch this with a select grouping of applications but the most recent update to the Google Apps Admin Help page about the Google Apps Account Changes indicates
How To Extend ASPDNSF Product Name Field
On of the nice features of AspDotNetStorefront is that it supports multiple languages right out of the box. It does this by storing the multiple locale phrases as XML fragments inside the particular field. So, in the case of a product name, this means stuffing each of the multi-lingual product names into the Name field in the Product table. It also needs to be properly defined in this field with the XML code so a sample, multiple language name field could contain something similar to the following:
<ml>
<locale name=”de-DE”>CMS-6R4</locale>
<locale name=”en-US”>CMS-6R4</locale>
<locale name=”fr-FR”>CMS-6R4</locale>
<locale name=”ja-JP”>CMS-6R4</locale>
</ml>
AspDotNetStorefront Acquired by Vortx
Wow, just when you think certainly areas of your life are pretty stable… Vortx, a leading integrator of AspDotNetStorefront software in Ashland, OR, announced yesterday that they had acquired the Ohio-based ecommerce company.
One interesting tidbit that can be found on the press release is that they are planning a marketplace of plug-ins. Hopefully this will be more along the lines of the Android app and Google Apps marketplaces than the iPhone app marketplace, if you get my drift.
Not surprisingly, AspDotnetStorefront website has no press release up about this acquisition.
More details to follow as it is released.
Google Voice For Everyone… In the US
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!
Incorrect Namespace Error in Google Webmaster Tools
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.
Motorola Droid courtesy of Google – First Impressions
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.
IIS 7.5 on x64 with 32bit applications
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.
Google Personalized Search Results Got You Down?
So, you’ve spent all this time, money and effort on optimizing your site so that it gets the exposure it deserves in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. And then Google announces that personalized search results are really the wave of the future. You see from first hand-experience that no only are search engine results being tailored to your search patterns when you are logged into Google, but you are also seeing that your anonymous Google Searches are being similarly affected. How do I optimize against the 6.8 billion "search engines" (individual Internet users who’s results are being manipulated to put them in control of what they see)?
Google Sites to include Templates features
Google Sites, a member of the Google Apps family as well as a stand-alone feature, has added site template to the feature list of this great product. Now, instead of the relatively lame themes you now have complete site templates that include not only the overall theme of the site but also suggested content, structure and gadgets that take full advantage of the platform.
Now don’t get me wrong, the themes were nice for personal sites in a GeoCities/FrontPage kind of way but there is so much you can do with Templates. Admittedly, many of the initial templates that are available are still a little "blocky", there are a number that one would be hard pressed to tell weren’t custom sites if it weren’t for the