Don Box posted an excellent summary of the REST vs SOAP decision tree.

Back in the day when I ran WeddingAgent.com (don't click!) one of the features I planned to add was the ability for users (engaged couples) to have a nice interface for pre-arranging guests at tables. I never got around to implementing it, but ran into a program today that claims to do just that. The screenshots look on target. http://www.perfecttableplan.com/

Last week Google unleashed another innovative service onto the world in the form of Google Pages (*cough* Geocities *cough* 1999 *cough*). Now anyone can easily put together a nice looking web site. Google supplies a whole bunch of professional looking templates, script is not allowed, editing is WYSIWYG, and there are no popups. In a word, brilliant. Except for one little tiny thing: your website address is .googlepages.com, which just happens to correspond to your GMail address @gmail.com. Now I am willing to bet there are already multiple trivial spiders running around looking for links to *.googlepages.com, assembling the lists. I won't jump and...

In a first for this blog, my rant on arrogant web designers got dugg. The interesting thing to me is that at the time of this writing, there is only one commenter that agreed with me and four who didn't get my point at all and ranted back about IE's poor standards support. Oh well, I just hope they are a vocal minoroty. :)

If you are the person responsible for BlogLines, you are. Before I get into my rant, let me classify site designs into three buckets: Arrogant: common among Mac and Linux people. They discount windows and Internet Explorer on religious grounds, code up page layouts to look good in their favorite browser (FireFox, Safari) and assume that because their browser of choice is known to be fairly standards compliant, their work is therefore standards compliant. There are two fallacies with this approach: first, just because browser X renders something one way, it does not necessarily mean that that is the right way (either due...

I got a chuckle out of this: all a matter of language.

A few days ago I wrote about an issue with Google's new sitemaps robots.txt checker. I am happy to report they've appeared to address the problem. I suspect a possible catalyst for the fix was my comment on Matt Cutts' blog reporting this issue (of course I am assuming I was the only one to notice this!). The odd thing is that Matt had since deleted my comment, but as long as the fix is in I'm not complaining.

The .Net framework version 2.0 includes some new base classes that make creating custom ASP.Net controls much easier. Among them is the CompositeDataBoundControl class intended to aid in the development of custom databound controls that are made up of other Controls. Under most circumstances, all the control author has to do is override the CreateChildControls method. The exact method signature is: protected abstract int CreateChildControls ( IEnumerable dataSource, bool dataBinding) Note the int return value -- this should be the number of data items in the data source that your control acted on when processing the data source. This should become clear in a minute. The...

I just couldn't resist: best blond joke ever!

[Update 2/14/06: checked again today and problem appears fixed. Score one for Google.] Last week, Google released an update to Google Sitemaps that added a robots.txt checker tool. I started experimenting with it today and found a rather odd behavior: the tool reports access allowed for terms that clearly should not be. I think I've got this boiled down to the simplest case, which appears to have to do with terms starting with “Web” (”W” has to be capitalized). I don't know whether this is domain specific, so I'd love to hear back whether you are able to reproduce this or not....

So, naturally the idea of using the new Google toolbar for SEO is not unique. Here are some more buttons from Aaron Wall of the SEO Book fame. I will say though that where applicable my buttons are better because they work both on the selected text and the page domain if no text is selected. But, no doubt Aaron will fix that in no time. ;-)

I posted previously that Google Toolbar 4 is worth a try. I've since added a couple of custom buttons that I think would be of interest to SEO's. Grab them here: Yahoo! Site Explorer ButtonInternet Archive Button  Also be sure to grab Matt's Whois Button USAGE: - select the domain name in question on the web page you are viewing and hit the button- just hit the button to analyze the domain of the page you are viewing   What custom buttons have you added? Drop me a line.

A few weeks ago, we went to the Gocart Racer as an after work company outing. It was a lot of fun, highly recommended! In any case, beside us there was a group from Microsoft, and I could have sworn I recognized Troy from Season 1 of The Apprentice among them. I was surprised to see Troy there since I remembered that Troy's roots were in real estate not software, but then again, The Apprentice has been a great boost for some people. Maybe he's doing something with sales? Today I figured I'd put this to rest and found both that I...