November 22, 2006 | In Development | No Comments
I have a sister site to this over at christianbridge.co.uk. Currently it contains an ASP.NET Starter Kit implementation as it was my sandbox site to play with some of the new features of the ASP.NET 2.0 implementation.
I’ve been thinking of what I can do with it and have come up with a few ideas of interesting development projects to try out with it. It is not yet live, but I’m intending to have some AJAX enabled todo lists. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. If I have ideas or things occur to me while at work, I want to be reminded by the time I get home, or vice versa. So rather than using scraps of paper, I thought this would be an ideal case for a web application.
It is kind of based on one of the online videos at http://www.asp.net, but I pretty much discarded all of that code. I’m also implementing an RSS consumer for the site to take this diary and display it over there. I;m looking at RSSFeed for that.
November 14, 2006 | In Development | 1 Comment
Visual Studio 2005 has it’s own built-in web server. This is great for us developers of many sites as it saves having to mess about with IIS.
The only down side is that VS does not run the site at “root” level, which makes its difficult to fully qualify static documents like CSS files and images. The best solution (I think) is provided on Scott Guthrie’s blog here.
Essentially you launch the built-in web server process separately on a localhost port such as 8080 (i.e. http://localhost:8080/), then set your website to launch on this server by default from the site options. Full details are on his blog.
Kind of obvious when you think about it :)
November 10, 2006 | In Development | No Comments
I’ve just read an interesting piece on the BBC News website. A survey found that the average time a user will wait for an online shopping site to load is now 4 seconds. We always worked to the 8 second rule, so that has halved it.
Apparantly they also found that a third of the respondents would form a bad opinion of the company as well. Rather harsh I think.
I have some sympathy here though, as I too will turn away from a site that takes too long to load. It is a fine line I think between providing an interesting media rich experience, and not having the site take forever to load. I suspect the increasing take-up of broadband is fueling this drop in waiting times, and it presents the designers and developers with some interesting problems.