IIS vs Apache

The Microsoft whitepaper (Word document) "Comparing IIS and Apache: Questions and Answers" published in March 2009 has interesting counter arguments on the long raging debate on which of the two is better. It answers the following questions -

1. Does IIS offer the performance and scalability I need?
2. Is IIS as secure as Apache?
3. Is IIS harder to manage than Apache?
4. Is IIS as reliable as Apache?
5. Is IIS really as modular as Apache?
6. Apache is an innovative platform. What about IIS?
7. Troubleshooting Web applications can be complicated. What does IIS offer to simplify troubleshooting?
8. I depend on a wide variety of Web architectures. Can I run them on IIS?
9. Yes, PHP applications can run on IIS, but is it really a good idea?
10. Will IIS be more expensive than Apache?

Also check Bill Staples' views on this topic.

Based on a survey of 205+ million sites, Netcraft reports that Apache has a 54% share in July 2010 while IIS has 26%. As a poster on Channel9 says, this may not be the true measure of popularity as it counts sites & not servers. The results could be skewed because domain registration & hosting sites park thousands of sites on one instance of Apache.

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Free C#, XNA, Windows Phone 7 learning resources from Rob Miles

Two books by Microsoft Press author Rob Miles are available for free download -

• C# Yellow Book (197 pages)
• Introduction to Programming Through Game Development Using Microsoft XNA Game Studio (400 pages)

He co-presented Windows Phone 7 Jump Start sessions. The recorded sessions of 12 hours duration are also available for download.
 
Also see:
Free E-Book - CSharp for Sharp Kids

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Aids for comparative analysis of software tools/products

If you are asked to recommend the best software tool or product for a particular requirement, a good way to start researching is to check Wikipedia. There are articles specifically devoted to comparative analysis of products under various categories. These articles typically start with the title "Comparison of". Wikipedia's search box supports auto-suggestion, so typing those words first followed by the category can lead you to the required article faster.

The topic of Project Management software came up in a discussion on the LinkedIn Groups (requires free subscription) & I learnt from there & the Comparison of project management software that while Microsoft Project is a commonly used tool, the most expensive tool in the class is Primavera (now owned by Oracle) while CA's Open Workbench & Serena OpenProj are open source alternatives.

LinkedIn Answers and StackOverflow are some other sites where you can find justifiable opinions on competing products.

Also see:
Crowdsource your supplemental learning with Stack Overflow
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HOW TO prevent Google from indexing or caching a specific page

Did you know, you can prevent Google from indexing & caching specific pages of your website by just adding a META tag to those pages?

As explained on the Google blog.....

In addition to the robots.txt file -- which allows you to concisely specify instructions for a large number of files on your web site -- you can use the robots META tag for fine-grain control over individual pages on your site. To implement this, simply add specific META tags to HTML pages to control how each individual page is indexed. Together, robots.txt and META tags give you the flexibility to express complex access policies relatively easily.

To prevent a webpage from showing up in the search results, you can insert this line within HEAD tags:
<meta content="NOINDEX" name="GOOGLEBOT">

Add the NOARCHIVE tag to a web page and Google won't cache copy of a web page in search results :
<meta content="NOARCHIVE" name="GOOGLEBOT">
As a result of the above line, that web-page will appear in a search result but the Cached link that typically appears in a search result will not be shown.

Also see:
HOW TO find "dofollow" blogs/websites
rel="nofollow" - one non-standard HTML attribute value that the Big 3 search engines support

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View clutter-free web pages with TidyRead, Safari Reader

Safari Reader is a great new feature introduced in Safari v5 that removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles. I recently found that there are other bookmarklets & add-ons like TidyRead that can do the same job as Safari Reader in other browsers as well.

A typical page on NY Times

How the same page looks with TidyRead.  

I liked the way TidyRead automates the "next page". When scrolling near the end of the page, TidyRead detects and renders the next page, so you need not to click the next page anymore.

The image above (click to enlarge) shows how TidyRead automatically displays the content of the consecutive page of a 3-part article

Looking at Safari Reader, it seems when browser add-ons grow up, they become native features in future browser versions.
 
Also see:
The Joy of Bookmarklets

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HOW TO find why your competitor has better search engine rankings

This question appeared on Webmasters.StackExchange.com, a new Q&A Forum (currently in beta) for pro webmasters from the makers of Stack Overflow.

One suggested answer was to study the competitor's backlinks using SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer, a link popularity checker & back-link analysis tool.

The comparision chart below (click to enlarge) shows how two of India's popular websites Rediff & IndiaTimes fare against each other.

Related:
Tools to monitor your website

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HOW TO remove thumbnail preview of sites you have visited in Chrome, Safari

Some folks may like the browser feature (called Top Sites in Safari) that lists frequently visited Web addresses as a thumbnail preview or text link for each site. But those who are on a shared computer or are concerned about their privacy may not want others to see their  frequently visited websites displayed so prominently.

Disabling this feature involves a few simple steps.

In Chrome, click on the Wrench menu on the top right corner, select Options. In the dialog box that opens up, go to the Home Page panel & select the radio button that says Open this page: & set its value to about:blank

In Safari on Windows, select Preferences from the Edit menu. In the dialog box that opens, in the General tab set the value of the dropdown New tabs open with: to Empty page

After you make this setting, the thumbnail preview feature will be disabled when you start Chrome or Safari & when you open new tabs within them.

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CSS Attribute selector input[type="checkbox"] works inconsistently

A web developer posted a question on the ASP.NET Forums wanting to know why a CSS style setting involving the attribute selector input[type="checkbox"] wouldn’t work.

As per the Quirksmode browser compatibility table, attribute selectors should work on popular browsers except on IE versions older than 7 but the selector input[type="checkbox"] seems to be an exception.

I created a test page by adapting a sample from W3Schools, adding a CSS attribute selector style setting to be applied to all checkboxes on a web page.



I found that the style  involving that attribute selector was applied only in IE version 7, 8 & Opera ( I tested in Opera 9.64). It failed in Safari, Firefox & Chrome.

While the style setting for input[type="text"] in the example appears correctly on all browsers, it was surprising that the style defined with the selector input[type="checkbox"] is not recognized by some browsers.

Also see:
HOW TO access a HTML Label tag's text programmatically
Conditional comments & CSS child selector

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Web Metrics from a Google Study

A Google study based on "a sample of several billions of pages" reveals interesting statistics about the size, number of resources and other such metrics of pages on the world wide web.

Highlights:

• The average web page takes up 320 KB on the wire.
• Only two-thirds of the compressible material on a page is actually compressed.
• In 80% of pages, 10 or more resources are loaded from a single host.
• The most popular sites could eliminate more than 8 HTTP requests per page if they combined all scripts on the same host into one and all stylesheets on the same host into one.

It comes with some caveats. Thanks Annie Sullivan

There are simple tricks & free Web Performance Analysis & Optimization tools to overcome these speed barriers & make the web overall faster


Also see:

Web Security Tutorials from Google & MS
Google Browser Security Handbook

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HTML5 features emerging in popular web apps

• GMail now supports dragging & dropping attachments & images in HTML5 compatible browsers
• All popped out windows from GMail will will continue to work after you close your main window. This includes GMail Tasks - the TO-DO list tool built into GMail
• If you are concerned about the security issues with Flash or don't like plugins, you can try the YouTube HTML5 Video Player
• Apple iPhone, iPad and Android support HTML5

Work in progress...

Related:
Get ready for HTML5

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Free eBook - jQuery: Novice to Ninja

The SitePoint website has been running a promotion celebrating the Football World Cup. Each country that entered the quarter finals has been assigned a SitePoint book. The price of each book was determined by the outcome of real soccer games. The book mapped to the team winning the Cup is being given out free.

Spain was mapped to jQuery: Novice to Ninja & this ebook is available for free if you download it before the next 24 hours.

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Free Web-based TO-DO list tools/Task Managers

If you need a free web-based TO-DO list tool/Task Manager to stay organized, there are a bunch to choose from -

• Ta-da List
• Todoist
• Voo2do
• Remember the Milk
• Toodledo
• Producteev
• Good Todo
• Checkvist
• Paprika
• Springpad
• Todo.ly   
• GMail Tasks

The Toodledo site has a nice features comparison chart that explains typical functionalities offered by these tools. Knowing about these can help you find the best-fit for your needs.

I've been using the Tasks feature within GMail for quite sometime as a seperate account is not required. I only recently noticed that a new GMail Tasks entry can be created for an email by clicking the "More Actions" button in the Inbox header and selecting the "Add to tasks" option for an email that needs to be tracked as a task.

Also see:
Free OCR Tools
Free ASP.NET based CMS

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HOW TO reduce the file size of images

Now that Google slightly rewards lighter web-pages (of course relevance of a page matters most) with a better ranking, it helps to trim down the file size of images within it without reducing their quality so that the  page loads faster.

There are numerous ways & tools to reduce the file size but the one that I found most useful is the free image editor Paint.NET's dynamic file resizing feature.

Whenever you save a new image in Paint.NET as a Bitmap, GIF, JPEG or PNG, it shows you a preview of that image alongwith the file size before it actually saves the file & lets you change image settings to modify the file size or quality.

You can also open an existing image within Paint.NET & control image settings from the File > Save As step.

You can not just control file size but also image dimensions easily with the Image > Resize (Ctrl + R) menu option.

Also see:
HOW TO implement online cropping feature for uploaded Images

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Web Applications - Tips & Tricks

Did you know, you can append +any-word to a GMail address & use that word to filter emails or distinctly identify where the mail has come from? For instance, any email sent to the following email address: example+webapps@gmail.com will be recieved by example@gmail.com because gmail ignores the "+" and anything after it. In fact, you can also have multiple full-stops or dots WITHIN the actual address as GMail won't recognize them. This literally means you can have unlimited email addresses based on your primary GMail email address & they will all reach a single inbox.

This is a tip from WebApps.StackExchange.com, a new Q&A Forum (currently in beta) for power users of web applications from the makers of Stack Overflow. There are lots of other interesting tips & tricks there related to commonly used websites and if you have some pesky problems you can post yours as well.

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New features of WebPageTest

WebPageTest.org is a free online version of AOL's open source performance analysis & optimization tool PageTest (which you can deploy on your own server).

The new features of WebPageTest were demo'ed at Velocity 2010 Lightning Demos session.

One distinct feature in PageTest is Visual Performance comparision. A Waterfall chart is what most web performance analysis tools show. With PageTest you can see how your web page actually looked like at small intervals while it was still loading. You can choose between a Film-strip view & Full-motion video to know what your site visitors see when they access a web page on your website.

WebPageTest now offers more test locations, custom bandwidth configuration, browser resource utilization info (CPU & Network bandwidth) and support for HAR (HTTP Archive Specification)

HAR is an open format for archiving & exchange performance results between web performance analysis tools. The current list of tools that support HAR is here.

Related:
HOW TO measure page load times across continents for free

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HTTP Traffic Export options in Fiddler

I've been taking notes from Eric Lawrence's recorded presentation at MIX10 on Fiddler for future reference. This is the fourth part, check the earlier three tips if you haven't already read them -

• Track HTTP traffic in Firefox with FiddlerHook
• FiddlerCap makes HTTP Traffic Capture easier
• 6 ways to filter HTTP traffic with Fiddler

To share HTTP traffic debugging information, Fiddler offers 10 ways to export HTTP traffic -

1. Copy sessions to the clipboard - right-click & copy headers, URL or entire session info
2. Store as a plain-text file
3. Extract binary response bodies
4. Archive to a database
5. Export a Visual Studio .WebTest file - Visual Studio Web Test is a Visual Studio Team System feature that allows playback
6. Write your own - fully scriptable, so you can write your own exporters
7. Fiddler's native "Session Archive ZIP" (SAZ) format
8. HTTP Archive JSON (v1.1 & v1.2) - The two HTTP Archive JSON formats (*.har) are supported by a growing list of open-source and commercial tools and web services.
9. WCAT Load Test Script - Microsoft Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT) can simulate thousands of concurrent users making requests to a single web site or multiple web sites. A script exported from Fiddler can be loaded in WCAT & previously-captured requests can be replayed for functional-testing and load-testing purposes.
10. Raw Files - this export format allows you to easily dump captured response files to a folder on disk; this allows you to easily collect audio, video, or image files for instance.

The last 3 “out of the box” options in the above list were mentioned by Eric in a recent blog post.

The introduction of HTTP Archive spec (*.har) support means than you can run an archive file generated by Fiddler in Firebug or similar tools like HTTPWatch,  and vice versa. As Steve Souders says,

With the adoption of HAR ..., we’re moving to having a record of the page load experience that can be saved and shared, and performance analysis that is consistent regardless of what browser and development environment you work in.

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The Joy of Bookmarklets

A Bookmarklet is a small JavaScript program that can be hosted on the browser's bookmarks bar and used to simplify a multi-step or repetitive activity by automating it. For instance, upon clicking the Snipshot bookmarklet, it will extract all the images in a web page that you have opened, display them for you to select & open them directly with the Snipshot image editing site. This feature can be helpful when you want to quickly edit images you find online.

There are quite a lot of such bookmarklets that can enhance your browsing experience.

As they are cross-browser, they work in all popular browsers unlike Extensions (in Firefox & Chrome) and Accelerators & Web Slices (in IE8).

WPO (Web Performance Optimization) guru Steve Souders says:  I use bookmarklets frequently to enhance web sites. I build tools as bookmarklets as a first choice - that way they can run on all browsers. If I can't do what I want using a bookmarklet, I'll next try Greasemonkey, and finally as a browser plug-in, typically a Firefox add-on. 

I've developed a fascination for Bookmarklets. My bookmarks bar is now full. To add new ones and view them all directly, I'll probably have to buy a bigger monitor.

After getting to know that commenting on "dofollow" blogs/sites can have some value, I wondered if there was an easy way of identifying such sites. I though writing a bookmarklet to highlight "nofollow" links could be one way. I was thrilled to find that such a bookmarklet has already been written a couple of years ago by a Googler. I tweaked it a little to make it work in IE8 as well.

Dear reader, what are the bookmarklets that you find useful?

Also see:
Bookmarklet to continuously refresh any web-page
Google Docs Viewer bookmarklet
HOW TO create your own IE8 Accelerator

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