GuruStop.NET

Just a hour ago, I got an interesting question via the contacts page in this blog, about search engine optimization, and I wanted to share the answer with you…

The question is:

I’m a software engineer and SE Optimizer. I’m currently assigned a project that needs general information of the mini sites and blogs regarding their SEO strategy and daily revenue. I read your blog a lot in my .net related problems and thought of finding the details about your blog.
I found out that there are daily ~900 page views of your blog and your page rank is 3.

Mohamed what I wanna know is that whether you have employed any SEO strategy on your blog or this is just the good will traffic that comes to view your blog.

Also what is the daily ads revenue of your blog and what kinda ads you have deployed on your blog.

Although my Google Analytics statistics tell me slightly better results than mentioned in this message,, this is an interesting question I’d love an answer indeed. Scott Hanselman taught us though it’s better to reply to those in public and share the benefit with everyone, let’s see:…

SitePoint, a well-known publisher of nice easy-but-deep books in web design and web related stuff, has celebrated the end of the world cup (and the fact that Spain has won) by putting an ebook of one of their titles for FREE (“jQuery: Novice to Ninja”, 407 pages) – only for 24 hours (which I don’t know starting what hour, so, go quick!)

Get the book by putting your email here (you receive the PDF link by email):
http://sale.sitepoint.com/

Thanks Scott Hanselman (@SHanselman) for spreading on twitter, hence getting me to know about the book!

Have fun,

My first DotNetwork Cairo Code Camp in 2009 was a great experience, because it was one of the biggest events I’ve spoken at (in terms of audience count, similar to SilverKey Demo Day II). However, Cairo Code Camp `10 had a much different taste!

Not just that I met Scott Hanselman, one of the most popular Microsoft guys, and hold him down as you see in the picture (which I’ll never forget), the great person and popular guru…

Not just that I met so many great other speakers, many of them are my friends and some of my friends talking for the first time in such event or after long pause…

But also because we all (speakers and organizers – both volunteers) met so many great attendees. Some of them were interesting people I’ve followed on Twitter for some time and haven’t seen them yet. Some of them were old lovely faces that we meet very rarely (especially I no longer work  in Egypt). Some of them were totally new faces, bringing a lot of ideas and very useful discussions….

A great VIDEO series on all the nice effects (and functionality) you can achieve with jQuery JavaScript library for those who know NOTHING about it.

jQuery is a very powerful library. One of the first things I do when creating new project is to include the library in it. Microsoft is going to include it by default in ASP.NET web projects (All ASP.Net projects, not just MVC) starting Visual Studio 2010.

Here are some few examples of what you can do with it (VIDEO):

http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/web-roundups/jquery-for-absolute-beginners-video-series/?awesm=fbshare.me_EIez#

Have fun jQuerying…

If you heard about Microsoft Oxite CMS, this is the new one, created as a different project to avoid previous developer comments.:

From Press:

Microsoft’s open-source CMS platform is (re)born | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=4506

Project Homepage:

http://orchard.codeplex.com

Quote From Press:

The guesses (by me and others) look like they were on target. The “Orchard Project,” which is getting its debut on November 11 at Tech Ed Europe is, indeed, the successor to the Microsoft Oxite content-management system (CMS).

Microsoft made available the first the open-source Oxite CMS bits at the end of 2008. Like Oxite, Orchard will be a free, open-source CMS platform — plus a set of shared components for building ASP.Net applications and extensions. The Orchard code is licensed under an OSI-approved New BSD license.

From the Orchard page on the Microsoft CodePlex code-repository site:

“(T)his core (Orchard) team will use their experience working with ASP.NET and Oxite to deliver a fundamentally new architecture that is the Orchard CMS. We have deliberately chosen to start development, with the guidance and contribution from the community. Over time we expect this project to become a viable successor to Oxite v1 and we know that providing a migration path for users of that existing application will be a high priority.”

Microsoft has released a new Facebook SDK Version 3.0 (other than their old not-so-great one) and it looks to have not just updated APIs but also wide range of features supported in many application types.

Quoting a related blog post from c|net “The web services report” blog:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10393823-26.html

Microsoft on Monday released a software development kit for Facebook that allows developers to create Facebook applications for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation. This should expand the reach of Facebook in third-party applications as well as make Silverlight and WPF more viable platforms for developers looking to build social applications.

A screenshot showing off the NewsFeed control for WPF.

(Credit: The Silverlight Team Blog)

The SDK comes complete with samples and tools to develop Facebook applications in ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, and WinForms. It also features the source code for the API, components, controls, and samples.

There are currently other libraries available that allow Facebook developers to develop with other technologies, such as JavaScript, PHP, ActionScript, and the iPhone. There are a variety of others as well, which can be seen here, but these are the ones that Facebook officially provides support for.

Yesterday I changed my twitter username from @Mohamed_Meligy to just @Meligy.

Why?

I have been thinking about this step for a long time, as my tweets are relatively long, and when I want to to allow people to re-tweet. With my old username, I used to have to write at max 120 characters per tweet to allow re-tweet (leaving 20 characters out of the real 140 characters limit to “RT @Mohamed_Meligy: ”). With my new twitter username I can use up to 128 characters (leaving 12 for “RT @Meligy: ”). I know I ‘m a person who can make nice use of those 8 extra characters, but is this worth doing? For sometime I thought: No.

My old username has some nice features. First, it includes my full name, so, that’s nice for people who don’t know me very well. Second, it has been around for over a year and over ~2390 tweets! That’s something!! People got used to using this twitter username when replying to me (mentioning me) and I did my best to put it everywhere in my Google and Facebook profile and blog and everywhere, and also used it with many twitter applications that require entering username/password.

Some of you who use Firefox (FF) might know about a Firefox plug-in called “IE Tab” which allows you to view a page/tab using the Internet Explorer (IE) rendering engine INSIDE Firefox (so, if some page displays better in IE, you don’t have to leave FF and go open an IE window).

Now, Google is doing something similar, but the other way around!

Google has recently released “Google Chrome Frame”, a plug-in for IE that allows you to view a page/tab using the Google Browser “Google Chrome” rendering engine INSIDE Internet Explorer.

This is interesting in two ways, first, it may decrease IE problems with crashes and such, and second, that Google maybe later will drop support for IE rendering engine in its products (like Google Mail, Reader, Video, Youtube, etc..), so that you have to use Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome (or Google chrome Frame) to use these applications.

Interesting enough, this is the case already with one of Google’s new products, called Google Wave!

They say the reason is supporting IE6!! They did much effort to get it to work with it but it didn’t. Of course the Chrome Frame plug-in is supported under IE 6, so, is supposedly solves their problem!

Yet another internal .NET Team email in my current company, Injazat Data Systems, that I sent yesterday, and am sharing with you as well.

jQuery:

· Simplify calling ASP.NET AJAX services from jQuery

· Use jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX to build a client side Repeater

· Reordering invoice lines using jqGrid and TableDND extension

· LA.NET jQuery Posts/Articles

Agile

· Implementing Scrum

ASP.NET

· Web Development With ASP.NET Learning Material (Course – Source: MSDN Ramp up Learning Program)

· ASP.NET Articles on CodeGain (Many Articles)

WCF

· Posting Twitter Tweets from ASP.NET using the WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2

WF

· Migration Guidance for the WF Developer

o Part 1

o Part 2

Office Open XML

· Embedding Any File Type, Like PDF, in an Open XML File

Fun

· YoutTube: Windows Live Messenger 10th Anniversary Celebration Video

· 99 Amazing Widescreen Wallpapers To Spice Up Your Desktop

As usual, those and others are all originally shared on my Google Reader Shared Items:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/08221036579558509505

Regards,

Happy weekend,

The reason I’m writing this is because every other day I see someone twitter statuses like: “TweetDeck does not support Arabic”, “Cannot view Arabic tweets in TweetDeck” or similar notes, so that I can just guide people to this post rather than write the same tweet reply!

TweetDeck supports Arabic and other complex script languages. I guess any Unicode language. It’s just not enabled by default.

A picture is worth 2¹⁰ words. Here is what you need to enable it:

Yet, one thing I don’t understand is: why it’s not the default in TweetDeck ???

N.B.

If you wonder why I care so much; this is because I believe TweetDeck is the best twitter client ever.