Thoughts on the web, web design and film photography…
General
Useful Web Design Links: Submitting to search engines, and picking colors/colours
0I just finished teaching “From Prints To Online: Creating Your Own Website” class at PCNW and we found a couple of useful links that I though I would share.
Getting listed on the major search engines:
Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
Search.MSN.Com: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/free/mobile/request
We were also searching for custom colours to use on your website, and when we searched for colors, we came across the Web Color Wheel. It’s a pretty neat little site that lets you move the mouse until you find a colour you like, then it gives you the appropriate HTML color codes that you can use to pick the colors.
IE7 Ships, and the Ajax Experience starts
0Wow, what a week it’s been. It’s funny, I remember when Keith moved upstairs to marketing, I watched him blog, and I watched the number of posts he made slowly taper off to where he posts a once a month or so. I said to myself, I wasn’t going to let that happen to me ever. I’d always find the time to blog. Well, I can safely say, that isn’t as easy as I’d thought! I’m way behind in my blogging these days, which irks me. Blogging about work stuff is a fun way for me to share, and help make Microsoft a more open, and transparent company. If you know what is coming, and can have some say in the way it comes, you will hopefully trust it more, and have a bit of ownership in it. Or at least, you’ll understand why we fixed one bug over another.
Last week we launched, which was awesome. I went down to San Francisco to meet with a bunch of pretty influential bloggers, and it was a very neat crowd. I learned a lot of interesting stuff, heard lots of feedback, and generally met some cool people. It was a little weird to me to see some bloggers writing down my comments for future writings, which freaked me out a little bit at first, but then when I thought about it, that’s my job. I speak about IE, and I listen to comments about IE. Most of the people there were developers, and all had gripes, but many said thanks, you’ve taken a step to make my life a bit easier. Oh, and when is IE.next coming out?
Everyone wants to hear us say, and I think we need to keep saying, we are committed to this. IE has come back, the “vacation” is over, we’re taking feedback for IE.next today. There isn’t a formal loop for feedback yet, but we’re working on it. At this point in the process, our big steps are not creating major feature scenarios, or anything like that, but to look at the simple feature requests, and start prioritizing those. What do people want IE to do? What do they want us to do better. We know there is a lot, and you’ve certainly told us there is a lot. Start thinking about a top 10 list of the 10 things you want to see happen in IE.next for the developer.
After getting home from San Francisco, I had two nights in my own bed before I took off to Boston for The Ajax Experience. I came out an extra day early so I could make sure all our packages arrived, set up our booth and so forth. Needless to say, it was a good thing I did. They lost my luggage on the flight, but thankfully I got that back at 7:30am this morning. Then, of the 8 or so boxes we had shipped here, we found the first four easily. Then I had to call down an enquire about the other 4. They managed to find 2 more, but couldn’t find the last two. CRAP! These last two are the major part of our display for the booth we’ve got. It took me until almost mid-day today to find the last two, it seems like they mis-labeled them, and put them in the wrong place. We’re staying at the Westin Boston Waterfront, and it’s a brand new hotel, and it is showing a few signs of that, for example, when I got to my room, some how, the bathroom had been used before I got there! There was a towel on the floor, the sink was dirty, and the there was a used soap bar in the sink! Eek! The internet connection has also been WAY spottier than it should be.
Our booth will be pretty sweet. We’ve got an XBOX 360 lounge set up, and at the end of the event, we’re doing a drawing for the XBOX (so I don’t have to carry it home). So if you’re at The Ajax Experience, there should be ballot in your bag, be sure to fill it in and drop it by our booth. On Wednesday we’ll be making a draw to see who gets to take the XBOX and toys home. Speaking of cool give away’s at the Ajax Experience, as part of the registration, everyone gets an Ajax Experience branded 512mb iPod Shuffle! How’s that for cool? For future events when we give away XBOX’s or anything like that, I really want to get them event branded, that’s kind of cool!
What else, OH YAH! I got my first blog post on the IE Blog! It’s pretty cool, but I got to announce the AddOn contest for IE. check out the post, but the short answer is if you submit an AddOn to the IE AddOns website between November 1st 2006 and February 9th 2007, we’ll pick a few of the best ones and send one winner to Mix07 and give them $2500. We’ve got some other cool prizes, including $2000, $1000, $500 and a couple of Zunes. Check out the announcement!
Anyways, I should get to bed, I need to set up the XBOX lounge around 7:30am tomorrow.
Do It With Confidence – Install Internet Explorer 7
0Wow, lots of stuff going on. It’s 12:20am, and I need some sleep here soon, but I’m back from the IE launch dinner where a bunch of really cool bloggers and other influentials got together to talk IE, the web, AJAX, media centers, photos and other cool things, and wow. It was pretty darn great. I need to get to bed as I’m exhausted, but as my earlier post said, IE7 is available now. You can download it at http://www.microsoft.com/ie and you can see the official announcement at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/10/18/internet-explorer-7-for-windows-xp-available-now.aspx.
For those of you who were there, thanks for the hard questions, you left me with plenty to think about, and plenty to help direct the IE team on stuff to work towards.
Great job IE team! I’m excited to help create what’s next! We’re not done, IE7 may have shipped, but IE.next is coming!
PEte
It’s Here – Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP
0I’ll update later tonight, but I want to get this out there now! Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP Available Now You can download it right now! I’m headed to a launch event, but I’ll fill you guys in when I get back!
The Bellagio Fountains of Diet Coke
0As I was doing some of my morning infosnacking, I came across this post on slashdot. A few guys seem to have figured out how to recreate the Bellagio Fountains using only 2L bottles of diet coke, and several menthos.
Check out the video at http://eepybird.com/dcm1.html
Hosted vs Home Grown
0May 31, 2006
I’m struggling with an interesting connumdrum right now. I take a lot of pictures. And I mean a lot of pictures, I’ve got 11,000+ digital photos, and more than 500 rolls of film that hasn’t been scanned. I love to share my photos with my friends, and in the past I’ve always done that via my own home grown site. For many years, I wrote my own, or just manually created the HTML and put the pictures online. Then a few years ago, I came across nGallery. I love(d) nGallery. It solved almost all of my problems, gave me the features that I wanted, and was fairly powerful.
Then, along comes Flickr. I played with it for a bit, and decided I didn’t like the UI, either the admin side, or the front end. I like the idea of the photo flo, but the sets aren’t as strong as galleries. For example, you can’t have a set within a a set in Flickr, but you can have a gallery within a gallery in nGallery. Flickr though does give you some fun and interesting additional support, such as the ability to use tags in photos, and is a well known photo sharing site that is indexed and works great for sharing things like Mix06 photos.
I also just found a great application for directly uploading Photos from my photo storage application directly to Flickr. That’s kind of hot, it provides me with a quick easy way to directly export my photos from the application directly online. If I want to upload my stuff to nGallery, I need to export the photos, then use an FTP client to FTP upload them, import them into nGallery, put them in a gallery, edit them and such. And there are no support for tags or anything like that. Plus, now it’s on it’s own site, and not going to get picked up by something like the tagging stuff in Flickr.
There are plenty of reasons that I’ve been considering the move from nGallery to Flickr. To give you an idea,with all the photos I have online, I almost have to have my own server, I can’t get a hosting package. I’ve got 3+ gigs of photos online right now. My favourite hosting group has said I can get 1 or 2 gigs, but 3+ is not going to happen. I really like them for two reasons, they’re free, and they’re free 
The idea of having a hosted service is great to me. I have my own box running, and I don’t like patching it, and keeping it up to date on a regular basis. I’ve moved my personal mail from my personal exchange mail server to running on a hosted web account, so if I keep moving this way, I may be able to get rid of my home “server” but at what cost?
nGallery has since been sucked into CommunityServer, which is way too big and bulky for what I want. I just want a simple, easy to use, light weight image gallery application, and CS no longer fits this unfortunatly, so I’m not up for using it. Rob and crew have done a great job on it, but they’ve also made it much more powerful and much more of a corporate application that I really want.
I have done some of my own work on nGallery, and the one that is running on my website is not the out of the box nGallery. I’ve added several features, such as RSS feeds, referral tracking and a few other things. But in the same stroke, I also broke a few other features that I want to be able to use that I can’t use right now 
So those need to get fixed.
I started work on moving nGallery to ASP.NET 2.0 and got a good ways into the project, but it didn’t get finished, and unfortunatly, I can’t release the sources and let someone else continue the project. But, I have heard rumblings from some of you out there want to do that. Since nGallery has stopped development, it may be something that someone could take the project and put it up on CodePlex and then those who are interested can work on it.
So, what do you do? Do you host your own, or let someone else do it?
personal: this side up.
0I figured I’d share this with both my personal and work blogs as it’s kind of funny and a little humbling. In my personal blog, I always write in smallcaps, so just ignore that fact, and hopefully you’ll get a laugh out of my morning.
my friend heath and i have been rowing every morning for the last 6 weeks. after seeing summer storm about two months ago, we both got the itch. i rowed for a summer in university (thats where the b&w pic of me comes from). i only did it one season, but i still had a good time.
well, we started at lake union crew in their learn to row class, and had a great time. thom, our coach was really patient, funny and entertaining. between heath, myself and a few others in the class, i think we kept the class interesting and lively for him too.
heath and i have since graduated from the learn to row class, and are now doing the sweep and skull program. 6:45am m/w/f mornings. let me tell you, it’s freaking early, but damn it’s fun. being out on the water, the weather has been great (for the most part), in fact today it was awesome. our new coach, has had heath and i in a boat called the marcy every morning. the marcy is a decent boat, its a 2 person skulling boat, great for beginners as it’s pretty wide and stable. we do okay in the marcy. we have a bit of a starbord strong pull, but we’ve been finding ways to combat it, and stay in a straight course (really funny using the words straight and heath and i in a boat).
so any ways, this morning, she puts heath and i in a new boat. the shimley. the shimley is a newer, narrower, faster boat. heath and i hop out into the water, and start going slowly, getting a feel for the new boat and such. one of the other rowers in another boat, asks us if we’ve “been in the drink yet?” we reply we haven’t and are planning on staying that way. (as if that isn’t foreshadowing) as we start to get comfortable, we start moving in this sucker. it freaking rocked. with no work, we kept it in a straight line, and we were just kicking ass and taking names (so to speak).
we got through the montlake cut, and we just finishing up a power 5, when both of us caught a crab on our starbord side… suddenly the port oars whipped out, and both of us lost our hands on the port oars. there is one golden rule in rowing: never let go of your oars or you’re going for a swim. anyone see where this is going?
yep, heath and i went for a swim in lake washington this morning. the water was not as cold as i was expecting, but it did take my breath away for a second. after treading water for about 30 seconds, we pulled ourselves onto the boat (which didn’t capsize, just leaned far enough for us to get out of the boat). we quickly realized that we were going to be able to get back and, and with a little work, we got back in even before our coach made it over to us. she handed us a pump and we pumped ourselves out and we’re ready to go again.
she was expecting us to be cold and wanting to go back in, luckily we were both wearing enough synthetics that we just took the cotton off (okay, it was only me and it was only my shirt). within a few minutes, i was dry again (my shirt wasn’t) and we were able to finish the practice. when we got back to the boat house, thom gave me a hard time about rowing without a shirt, until we explained the reason for my shirtlessness…
good times!
Overriding "Activating" ActiveX Controls
0I’m in the midst of a DHTML test pass right now (this is a separate issue from the one I previously blogged about), and I came across a rather frustrating change. In response to the patent lawsuit between Microsoft and Eolas, we released an update for IE that requires that ActiveX controls get “activated”. If you’ve seen the dreaded
Hiring & Ship Stuff
0I’ve got a good entry coming tomorrow, where I’m going to talk about the DHTML control and some changes coming in the Vista time frame. I mentioned a few weeks ago that we’re pulling it from Vista, and I’ll fill you in with complete details then. But in the mean time, I figured I’d post a few other things.
Our team is still looking for some well qualified people for our team. The PM and Dev team is fully staffed, but we’ve still got openings on our test team. We need people who have test experience, and some decent coding experience. We’ve had a bunch of great candidates, but unfortunately, they were either missing the test skills or the coding skills. Our interviews are pretty technical, we ask coding questions that include things like coding link lists, sorting routines and such. The job is super fun, and the interviews are harder than the job, but we like to make sure our team is really technical. In fact, I would venture to say our team is one of the more technical, and fun teams at Microsoft, but likely, I’m a bit biased.
CSS Reboot!
0Darn, I found out about this a little too late for this go round, but I’m going to do it for next time. Honest!
Have you heard about CSS Reboot? The idea is that twice a year, participating websites redo their CSS pages and come up with new, fun, exciting, and stylish layouts, and there are prizes given out for the best ranked website.
Today was the day, though it last happened on November 1st, so it sounds like it’s a twice a year thing. I found out about it by reading Matt Brett’s blog. He’s the guy who I linked to in my last post about the RSS feeds. He created the RSS feed icon website and is hosting that. So, next fall, I’ll be sure to post about it with a little more notice, and hell, maybe I’ll toss in some prizes and do my own CSS reboot!