Silverlight SEO
Sunday, March 16, 2008
So you’ve downloaded the SDK, and you finally installed Visual Studio 2008. You crack it open and get your “Hello World” project running. Now you are ready to dive head first into a complete Silverlight site. Getting buy-off from the various organizations will be your first hurdle. They are interested in how well the site will perform in the search engines. You don’t really care about that because you want to be able to have a stronger fidelity between what your designer has created and what you can deliver to the web.…
More on Silverlight SEO
Sunday, March 16, 2008
In my last post I described a method of building web sites that have the ability for search engines to crawl the site. This is important in Silverlight because traditionally all of the content within a Silverlight site is contained within the XAML. With the method described, all the content is still in the HTML. The question remains, though, why do I care? The first and most obvious answer is: if you don’t how will anyone ever find your content?…
Silverlight Centrally Managed Content
Sunday, March 16, 2008
In my previous posts about creating a Silverlight site that plays well with search engines I have only focused on SEO and SEA. There are a lot of other benefits to this model and I hope to map them out in a few posts. The difficulty is in finding out where to start. The main crux of this idea came from the Server Unleashed site that I was working on at the time has a separate HTML version of the site.…
Silverlight Accessibility and Portability
Sunday, March 16, 2008
What’s the big deal with having your content in a separate file anyway? Beyond SEO and the single responsibility principle there is what I consider to be the single most important reason: Accessibility. When I write about accessibility I really am talking about 508c compliance. If the person viewing your web site is hard of sight or cannot see at all then your site is worthless to them. I won’t go into the legal reason of why your sites should be accessible (search “Target accessibility web site” to know more about that).…
Localizable Silverlight
Sunday, March 16, 2008
In my previous post I discussed Silverlight SEO, and the strategy I’m using to enable search engines to crawl my sites. Even though most of my site is in Silverlight, search engines are able to crawl it because the content itself is actually in the HTML of the page. Then I transform it using some basic JavaScript. At McCann Worldgroup one of the most important tasks is making a site easy for subs to localize.…
We Know Job One, What is Job Two?
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
As a software developer the first thing you need to think about when writing new software is, “Why am I writing this code?” If, after popping the why stack, you don’t answer, “because it solves a customer story” then you are doing something wrong. I talk about this a bit in an old topic, “1, 0, 0 in x seconds”, and Coding Horror had a post entitled “Can your team pass the elevator test?…
The Little BR that Should Not
Friday, September 28, 2007
Last time I explained why you shouldn’t use <B> and <I> and alternatives that are semantically correct. Today I’d like to complain about the over-use of <BR /> in the web. <BR /> is a line break. Some people just type <BR> and they shouldn’t do that. You should always close your tags, even if they are empty. I’m happy that more than half of the BR’s that I see are closed, but at the end of the day they shouldn’t even be used.…
Death to B and I
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
In the first of what I am sure will be many posts regarding HTML, I would like to bid farewell to my old friends <B> and <I>. You may find them in various places on my current web sites, but from now on they will just be elements that I once ran with. The reason is that they hold no semantic value, and they really are just elements for styling the data.…
Paper Sometimes Wins
Thursday, August 2, 2007
John Guin writes a blog called OneNote Testing. Today he has a post titled, “Trying to use OneNote to go 100% paperless on a trip, and not hitting that goal ”. The interesting part of his story was not the thought of him trying to get the bar code reader to scan a bar code contained within OneNote, the interesting part of the story is the description of testing data that has a lifetime of 5-10 minutes.…
Forms Based Authentication in SharePoint
Friday, July 27, 2007
If you search the Internet you will find some very good instructions for setting up forms based authentication (FBA) in both Windows SharePoint Services v3 (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS2007). I won’t rehash all those instructions here. However I do want to make a couple of observations. One person actually posted about a missing step which involves ensuring that the user account that your SharePoint Application Pool runs under has permission in your SQL Server.…
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