New Years Resolutions and Getting rid of deadwood
Sunday, January 25, 2009 1:37:01 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Have you made any New Year's resolutions this year? -That's a question I'm sure you've been asked a dozen times already this year. New Year's resolutions have always amused me, the thought that people wait around for months to make (often) big changes in their life has baffled me.
If you run a business you'll know that it's important to review, assess and action a huge number of factors pretty much on a daily basis, if you don't, your business is likely to be slow to react to changes within your market place and so struggle.
I think its human nature to have a point to focus on whether it's the beginning of a new year, a holiday, even the recession but why wait until the end of the week? Or even better when you identify a problem? Surely that would be better?
That said the New Year and the recession are giving companies (including The Site Doctor) the perfect opportunity to clean out the deadwood within their businesses and reassess everyone's roles.
What do you do? Do you review weekly, monthly or annually? At The Site Doctor we have weekly meetings to review the previous week's successes, failures, evaluate next week's goals and more importantly to identify areas that require attention. This doesn't need to take long but it allows you to react quickly to emerging issues and limit the impact it could have.
If you're being hit by the recession (my sympathies go out to you if they are affecting your business) then you should be asking yourself "If I had reviewed our current position sooner, would I have been able to spot any warning signs?". I rather suspect if you are on top of your business you would have been able to.
If I were you, I'd look to make my New Year's resolution this year to not need one next year because you action the issues as soon as they arise.
Umbraco tip of the day –sort your document types
Wednesday, January 21, 2009 7:59:39 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I thought I'd share this as it's something I've been thinking about trying for a while. Umbraco is great but sometimes you want the default document selected when creating a page to be one that isn't the alphabetically first one.
To work around this I tend to prefix the important Umbraco document types with a symbol (or you could use 1. etc I guess) but if instead you use a space (" ") before the name of your document type, Umbraco will place it at the top of the list for you.
The nice thing to note here is that they obviously trim the name first so it just appears as "Text Page" rather than " Text Page".
I found this out on our latest site which is just about to go live: www.nhshistopathology.net -check it out and let me know what you think.
Enjoy!
Feedstats dropped by half overnight?
Tuesday, January 20, 2009 1:22:45 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
This was an interesting one, I've had about 42 subscribers for months (or there abouts) and then suddenly on Friday I lost nearly half.
I know they're not big numbers but I wonder if Feedburner have noticed a glitch in their code.
Another Google feature
Monday, January 19, 2009 7:46:56 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
As I don't follow football I'm probably slow to pick this one up but thought I'd share it, when Googling "Newcastle" I got last/next fixture results so I thought I'd try it for West Brom:
Pretty neat. I wonder when it'll start showing results from the marathon canoeing ;)
ASP.Net Profiles - Value cannot be null.Parameter name: type
Sunday, January 18, 2009 6:49:53 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
This is the second time I've come across the error "Value cannot be null.Parameter name: type" when using ASP.Net Membership Profiles.
Profiles are great, they allow you to store little pieces of information e.g. their user id (an integer reference to your database) on the user against their User object. You can then use that as a property of the User which can get you out of a bind or two.
Since switching to Web Deployment projects to get around a few issues with multiple environment configuration switching however I started to get "Value cannot be null.Parameter name: type". After a little Googling around I found that it relates to the setting "Treat as library component (remove the App_Code.compiled file)" setting under the property pages.
Un-checking the box sorts all your woes :)
Friday Crazy Design
Friday, January 16, 2009 3:42:08 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I was looking for an adjustable 4 hole punch today so I thought I'd quickly pop onto Staples' website thinking they might have one I can buy and then I was faced with this monstrosity:
I know they've got a large product catalogue to share but why make it hard for me? Where's the search box I ask you! I actually had to think to find what I suspect is the most useful thing on their site.
Why make the user think? Make the search box BIG bright and bold so I don't need to think about where to find what I'm after.
New Google Feature
Sunday, December 28, 2008 5:59:09 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I've been sitting on this for a few weeks now -mainly due to my own laziness but I thought I'd finally pad it out a little. It would appear that Google have release a new method of ranking your own results for certain terms:
Once you've promoted a page you'll notice a little green arrow to the right of the title link and the results will come back in this order every time you search on that term while you're logged in.
At the moment I think it's just stored against your profile but I would imagine at some point in the future they'll start monitoring what everyone else is promoting and adjusting their results accordingly.
What I'm interested to know about is how it affects SEO, I can't imagine they'll add too much preference to the promotions otherwise we could be in for another Google Bomb situation where your competitors promote or demote your site.
Custom Visual Studio Build Events
Monday, December 15, 2008 6:21:37 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I thought I'd share some festive "fun" today. For quite some time now I've hooked into the build events within Visual Studio but I think this is just taking it too far...
Basically the script now increments the version number of the DLL (if relevant) automatically, times the time for the build and adds it to a total build time to date (stored in an external txt file) and finally prints out whether the build was a success or not -basically some of our projects are taking a while to build and I wanted something that was "clearer" ;)
I'm thinking about adding Christmas trees next, anyone know how to do them in ASCII?