I finally received a bounce back message that stated: The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 5.7.1 Message rejected due to content restrictions (state 17).

In my signature I had links to my website, my twitter page and my linkedIn page. I removed these and now it goes through fine. This have proven to work with a few people who complained of not getting my emails.

If you’re email isn’t getting through, trying removing links.

Hope this helps someone else.

I was doing this in a SiteCore solution so I needed to add my ListView to the typesThatShouldNotBeExpanded element in the web.config

Once I added this it worked as expected.

Thanks goes to Mark Cassidy over at Into the core – http://intothecore.cassidy.dk/2009/01/typesthatshouldnotbeexpanded.html

Today I signed a new contract where I will be consulting remotely for a company that requires me to use their hardware for security purposes. 

Since I also have my own laptop that I spend a lot of time on, I wanted to find a way to share my dual displays, keyboard and mouse between the two laptops.  I ended up getting a KVM switch from Best Buy.  It was a very inexpensive solution that covered most of my needs.  I ended up sharing the keyboard and pen tablet and then having one display that was shared between the two laptops.  Not bad for only $25.

I know I could share the dual displays between the two laptops with a better KVM, but that also is a bigger investment.  The switch is about $160 that supports this and I would need to get a docking station for my HP. 

For now I am liking what I achieved for the cost.

On your Business Page, under the logo, click Edit page.  On the left of the screen, select Applications.  You will now see the Static FBML application listed.  Click “Go to Application”.  This will take you to a simple page that has a Box Title and FBML box.

The Box Title is the name of the tab (“Welcome, Menu, Shop” or whatever you want).  In the FBML box you can use HTML or FBML.  For the work I’ve done with this application, I just used HTML. When you are done, click Save Changes and your tab should now be on your Business Page.

Note: You must be an Administrator of your Business Page to use this feature.
You can only use this application once for each Business Page.

Here is a helpful link: Click Here

For example I have a ListView that I include a RadioButton with the ID of “rbMorning”.   3 ListItems are dynamically created with a rendered output name of:

name="ctl00$cphMain$lvMorningSessions$ctrl0$rbMorning"

name="ctl00$cphMain$lvMorningSessions$ctrl1$rbMorning"

and

name="ctl00$cphMain$lvMorningSessions$ctrl2$rbMorning"

In this case a user would be allowed to select all 3 RadioButtons, defeating the purpose of using a RadioButton control.

Solution: Update the names with jQuery.  You will notice that that each name ends with the id of the RadioButton that you set in the ListView.  So I basically search for that and update the name to a name that all radio buttons will share.

Just a few lines of code to do this.  It all is included right here.  I am assuming you need to add jQuery to the page here as well.

    <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js"></script>
    <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
        $(document).ready(function () {
            $('input[name$="rbMorning"]').attr('name', 'rbMorning');
        });
    </script>

That’s it. I hope this helps someone. I am really surprised this is still an issue in asp.net 4.0 even.

When the above book was suggested to me, I was less than thrilled. Jumping to the conclusion that this was going to be dry reading; I was more than surprised to say that I was completely wrong!

This isn’t your typical text book. Subramaniam and Hunt have written a great book that introduces what agile development is and how to implement it successfully. Introducing real life situations and how to respond in an agile way, gives the reader a way to connect with the concepts being delivered. This book keeps your attention by throwing in a little programmer humor, too.

Focusing on more than the way programmers should act, these authors shed light on the little devil inside us. Giving us responses that either we’ve done or know someone that has responded in a negative way. This book puts an immediate stop to the little devil inside us and explains the benefit of responding in agile and positive way.

At times, I felt the book touched on “duh” points like “Listening to Users” or “Keep it Simple”. Revisiting these basic concepts was a great reminder that from time to time I have found myself guilty of breaking these rules. Losing sight of these basics can put a cramp in your teamwork skills.

Other than hitting the basics, this book also touches on working with others, writing bug free code, and conducting quick and effect meetings. Giving you actual tips to perform at work and how to implement these tactics even if you’re not in a leadership role, is another great feature enclosed in this book. It’s not just theory.

After reading this book we started using Agile in our two person web development shop. I plan to follow this post up with others on how we are using agile and what is or isn’t working for us. I may be a beginner to agile development, but I can’t wait to encourage and show others how to effectively use this great tool.

I’ve been told this is one of those books every developer should read. Have you read it? What are your thoughts?

Plug-ins are what I call enhancements to WordPress. They are like extra tools to make your site better, custom and SEO friendly.  Only two plugins come with a standard installation and even these plugins can be removed if you don’t want or need them.  Plugins are completely up to you. In this blog entry I’m going to discuss the four “must have” plugins.

The first plugin I recommend is Askimet. This plugin comes standard with every WordPress installation. Askimet works to block spam comments on your blog. Activating this tool is pretty straight forward. In the plugins section, click Activate under Askimet. Then go HERE for your key (this does require you to signup).  Keys for Personal Blogs are free and non-personal keys are between $5-$15 per year. After submitting basic information for your type of blog an email is sent to you with the key.  Back in WordPress there will be a red box at the top t of the page asking for the key. Enter the information and you’re done. Your blog is now protected from spam comments.

The rest of the plugins I’m going to refer to do not come pre-installed on WordPress. You must find them and install them manually. Don’t worry this process is easier than it sounds.  There are two options for installing plugins.

1.       In the WordPress plugin page, there is a search for additional plugins box. Type in the name of the plugin you want, click search and select install on the plugin you were looking for.

2.       Outside of the WordPress admin console, locate and download the plugin you want. Then FTP the unzipped files to yoursite.com/web/content/wp-theme/plugins. Login to the WordPress Admin Console, navigate to the Plugins page and there is your plugin.

The Social Networking plugin that I recommend installing is AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button. This plugin adds a button to your blog posts that allows readers to share the posts on multiple Social Networking sites (like, twitter, facebook, etc) It’s a great way to let users help you get your blog noticed.

There are two SEO plugins that I would suggest to every blog user; Meta SEO and Google Sitemap Generator. Meta SEO helps you manage and add meta tags to your blog posts. After activating this plugin you’ll notice a new category in the left navigation of the WordPress Admin Console “Meta SEO”. This is where you manage your tags. To add tags to posts, either add a new post or edit an existing post. Scroll down beneath the content area of the post and you’ll see new features called Meta Keywords, Meta Tags, and Meta Descriptions, which is where specific post SEO information goes.

The other plugin, Google Sitemap Generator, does just that; it appends new posts information to an existing sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.zip file. Before this plugin is activated, you need to create a blank sitemap.xml and a blank sitemap.xml.zip files to upload to your site. Place these files here: yoursite.com/web/content/. Activate the plugin and submit this xml file to Google Webmaster tools.

I have recommended four basic and very helpful plugins that every WordPress site should have; Askimet, AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button, Meta SEO, and Google Sitemap Generator. Although there are thousands of plugin out there, from my experience these four are the foundation to improving your blog.

Do you use any plugins similar to these? What are your core plugins?

Related posts: Search Engine Optimization Starter Tools, How to manage a blog – tutorial

Could not load file or assembly ‘AjaxControlToolkit’ or one of its dependencies. The parameter is incorrect. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80070057 (E_INVALIDARG))

Solution:
Clear out the temporary framework files for your project in:
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\

Windows 7 users:
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files\

For 64 bit systems with ‘Framework’ in the path the full path is:
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\

All credit for this solution goes to SolutionCottage.com, http://www.solutioncottage.com/ShowSolution.aspx?solID=59

Search Engine Optimization also known as SEO; sounds scary but there is nothing to be afraid of.  All SEO is a process of optimizing your content for search engines.  Keywords, organization, and linking all support the improvement of SEO. There are many ways to use SEO, but this topic requires its own blog post(s).

So, what does SEO have to do with writing a blog post?  Everything!  Every blog post requires a title but before you just type in a title, stop and think about it.  Having a blog title made up of common, everyday words will make the blog harder to find on search engines.  For example, if you’re looking for a blog about arranging wedding roses, you wouldn’t search for “arrange flowers”.  Instead you’d type in “Arrange wedding roses” which will produce more accurate results.  The second title specifies the type of flower and the type of arrangement. These are keywords.  Having keywords in the will help place the blog higher than blog posts without keywords in the title.

Now that we have keywords in the blog title, let’s cover the use of categories.  Blog categories were once explained to me as drawers in a file cabinet.  Each blog needs to be filed away and there are only so many drawers, so each drawer needs to cover a general topic.  The above simile uses the drawers as categories and the file cabinet is a website.  The main points to take away from the example is each blog needs to be assigned to a general category, there should be a limited number of categories, and categories help organize your posts.  So if you have a category labeled “Fitness” and I find one blog in this category I can easily navigate to the Fitness category to view the rest of the Fitness blogs.

Tags are a place to enter keywords that deal with the topic of the blog.  We can think of Tags as the folders in the file cabinet drawers.  These would be keywords that are (or wouldn’t fit) in the title.  Back to my Fitness Category; if I wanted to see more specifically blogs about Running, a tag would take me to that “file” with all Fitness blogs that deal with Running. When thinking of tags, it’s suggested to have a handful (or two) and reuse as the tags over and over again.  Having too many tags can overwhelm end users. How do you enter a tag? Most blogging sites follow this format: health,medical center,technology.  Where a comma separates the words and spaces are only allowed between phrases, like “medical center”.

Now that we’ve gone over how to organize your blogs, the next step forward is end-user interaction.  This section will cover comments, trackbacks, social networking, and RSS feeds.

Each blogger has their own opinion about enabling comments on blogs.  The purpose of comments is to allow readers to share knowledge, ask questions, and give their “two-cents” on the topic.  You might even get comments from readers requesting more blogs about the topic at hand. Without comments, it’s just your opinion/view out there.  No discussion, no feedback. Not having reader’s comments makes for a pretty lonely blog out there on the web.   Now, I do want to mention briefly that having comments enabled on your blog not only leaves the door open for readers to interact with the blog, it also can lead to some spam.  There are tools available to help alleviate spam and some bloggers just turn off comments on old blog posts.

Every now and again, you may write an excellent blog that completely inspires someone.  This end-user would like to write more than a comment; that’s where trackbacks come into use.  Trackbacks are a way of telling another blogger that you have found their post useful, and have made a post of your own which continues the discussion. This feature must be enabled on your blog site and enabled on the other person’s blog site to work.  When a reader uses a trackback that was set on your site, you will receive notification.  Now you can see what they wrote and post your comments.  You can look at trackbacks as a way to “link” common blog posts together and generate more conversation.

With the explosion of Social Networking websites, it is an excellent SEO strategy to use plugins on your blog site that enable readers to easily place a link to your blog on their social networking site (facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc.)  This is the electronic “word of mouth” advertising that every successful blog uses.  Using this feature as a plugin, takes little time to setup and can be one of the best features on your blog.

Living in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, Many people don’t always have time to sit down to go through all the of the blog sites they want to.  This is where RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds come to the rescue.

Every blog should have an RSS feed URL.  This allows potential subscribers to use an RSS Reader, which requires this URL.  A RSS reader aggregates all of the end user’s favorite blogs and RSS feeds into one central location; allowing the user to simply check the RSS reader to view the latest updates from their selected blogs and RSS feeds.  A RSS reader can be a stand-alone desktop application like NewsGator or many homepages like Google allow you to add widgets that will serve as an RSS reader.

*** Suggested Tip: Use Google’s Feedbuner to publicize your RSS feed.  The advantage of Feedburner is it allows you to change where your blog is hosted without changing the RSS feed URL that viewers have subscribed to. Subscribers that are linked to RSS feed’s that are run through Feedburner won’t even notice that your blog location has changed which prevents loosing subscribers.  If you move your blog without Feedburner, then users will have to re-subscribe to your RSS feed which can lead to loosing subscribers.  For more information on what feedburner can do check out their help section.

In conclusion, successful blogs harness Search Engine Optimization which leads to more readers.  Keeping your blog organized and encouraging viewers to interact with your blog are the fundamental steps to building something great. There have been many steps covered here and I hope every topic gives you a better understanding on how each part builds to the next part.

Do you have any experience with blogging? If you have, what has helped you? If you haven’t, did this article help get you started?