Crappy Mesh

Oops!
There are problems with Mesh.com if you want to synchronize your web sites. Everything was fine until I played with Expression Web and started using templates. This feature requires the metadata to be stored for each web site. Turning this on (similar to previous FrontPage behavior) causes the folder containing the web site to disappear from a shared Mesh folder.
Since I have a whole bunch of changes on the web pages and templates now, I need to find a way to store them back online and synchronize with the laptop. Hopefully this can be solved by sharing each of the web site folders separately instead of sharing their root folder, which contains all my web sites.
Well, let's give it a go...

...

This seems to have fixed it. Phew! Now I can keep web sites set up for the usage of templates AND synchronize them. Good, back to work.

Chasers - War on Everything - Americans

MySpaceTV Videos: Chasers War On Everything - Americans by hiphop eX equipo

Since the video on YouTube was removed, here's the link to another one online.
This show is phenomenal. This is something everyone should see. :))

Expression Web Templates

This is great thing! I've been playing with Google Pages in order to extract pieces of information from my main web site and move it to a separate web site. In order to reduce time needed to migrate the pages, I decided not to copy and paste the common code in pages but only to copy the important bits - the content. An issue that popped up and had to be handled manually was the CSS style sheets.
To avoid having poorly styled pages, I used readily available design templates on the pages web site. Unfortunately, I was not too happy with these so I decided to look if something has been improved in the template area in the previous years.
And - yes! Similar to the concept of Master Pages in ASP.Net, Expression Web supports a concept of Dynamic Web Template pages. These have exactly the same role as the design templates in Google Pages. You define the common areas on the template and editable areas that each page will utilize and that's it.
Now, I should start updating my old web sites because the code there is copied and spread around on the pages. It was a pain when I had to update some common elements and it often resulted in only some pages being updated. I had no patience to go through every page and change some details. Lately I wanted to add Google Analytics along with PageCounter to see the stats available there. This was a pain so I added it only to a few pages. Adding AdSense also resulted in only a few pages being updated. Etc.
Dynamic Web Templates (DWT) will enable me to still keep the contents of the pages offline. I prefer that because I use those pages as text documents containing valuable information and I like them to be searchable on my laptop, not only online. The templates will enable me to do that.
This makes me happier than if I went to the pub with Greg. :) I must be such a nerd, I know.

Google Adsense, Web Activity, etc.

Making Money Online Series

Mm, tapping (finally) into the world of online marketing. Got an email from Google Adsense this morning so I went to their site again, after a few years. I was amazed to find $0.45 on the account there. From what I remember, I had set up AdSense only once, long time ago. Then I place ads on my blog and web page to see how it works. It may have been online for a day or two. Then I got pissed off and annoyed by the ads because I hate looking at them on other people's pages and I removed them.
Now I don't know when was the money generated but apparently there were only 2 or 3 clicks. On average it was $0.20 per click. It is not much, of course, but taken into a different context it could be just enough. I used to see people saying how they use their AdSense revenue to pay for their web hosting. With hosting prices being affordable nowadays, even this small revenue from advertising could be just enough to support site hosting.
Well, anyway, I'm going to try it and see what happens in the next few days/weeks. An amazing thing happened the other day. I was working with WebHTTPBinding for Windows Communication Foundation service and was looking for some answers online as I couldn't figure out if some things were possible and whether they worked the way I expected. As I found something useful, I'd post it here on the blog to keep a reference as I usually do. After short time, searching the same topic on Google, I would get my blog page within the first 10 results on Google. Wow, it was funny as the first thing that came to my mind was to call myself and ask these questions I had. :D
I see a lot of people visiting my pages coming from everywhere. Wondering if there are CPM ads that might proove to be an incentive to be a bit more proactive on the web, refreshing the content of the site and post to the blogs more often. The site has not been updated for a long time as the blog technologies seem much easier to use, post, search, etc.
Finally I also added the new custom search for the site and the site is back to googlepages. I used to host it in my Dropbox folder but I changed my minds after Dropbox was offline for a few times. So, instead of being lazy, I will now trade page uploads for a more reliable hosting service.
The ads I added to pages are unobtrusive for me. They are at the bottom of the pages so probably noone will ever click them. :) But that's what I want to see.

The point of the post was to add to the introduction and me being amazed that there is a lot of marketing hype around AdSense. People find high-paying words, there are ads of generating dozens of thousands of dollars in online advertising, etc. I'd just repeat the old saying - "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

Microsoft Event

Hm, now that I keep two blogs I run into a situation where sometimes posts fall into both contexts. For example, I attended the event at Microsoft Australia yesterday. This is interesting from software development perspective as it's one of the rare times I had an opportunity to actually see presentations from people working for Microsoft and ask questions.
On the other hand, it's related to Australia as I did not attend many of these when I was overseas. So, in order not to repeat the text, here are the links to Australian blog posts. :)

See here - MS Event, Microsoft Event

Entity Framework

Getting started with ADO.NET Entity Framework. Part I: Mapping entities

A nice and easy way to start with Entity Framework. Once you have it installed, that is. I've spent a couple of hours downloading and installing all the Service Packs (beta) for Visual Studio 2008, dotNet Framework 3.5, TFS & co.

webHttp

WebHttpBinding Class (System.ServiceModel)

A binding used to configure endpoints for Windows Communication
Foundation (WCF) Web services that are exposed through HTTP requests
instead of SOAP messages.

This is why clients can't connect to a webHttp endpoint.

WCF: webHttpBinding & authentication

WCF, WebHttp Binding, and Authentication « Infovark Underground

I spent the day coming to the same conclusion. Couldn't figure out how to make webHttpBinding work with some sort of authentication.

Dvorak shortcuts for Cut/Copy/Paste

Alternate Shortcuts to cut-copy-paste at ibn Mas’ud

Hm... there are alternative shortcuts for Cut/Copy/Paste which may prove useful to standard Ctrl+C, V, X on a Dvorak keyboard. They are a bit confusing and not that easy to reach on my laptop.
Unless I find some software to remap shortcuts on the keyboard I may try to use these.

Action	Shortcut	Alternate Shortcut
Cut	Ctrl+X	Shift+Del
Copy	Ctrl+C	Ctrl+Insert
Paste	Ctrl+V	Shift+Insert

Cut & Paste are handy, while Copy is highly disruptive. Hope I get used to them. :S

WCF Service and Error Handling

Implementing Error Handling in Window Communication Foundation - SQL Server Expert

Apart from error handling, there are instructions on how to quickly set up a WCF service hosted in IIS.