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 -Does IIS offer the performance and scalability I need? Is IIS as secure as Apache? Is IIS harder to manage than Apache? Is IIS as reliable as Apache? Is IIS really as modular as Apache? Apache is an innovative platform. What about IIS? Troubleshooting Web applications can be complicated. What...
Friday, 30 July 2010
Thursday, 29 July 2010
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...
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
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...
Monday, 19 July 2010
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...
Sunday, 18 July 2010
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 TimesHow the same page looks with TidyRead. I liked the way TidyRead automates the "next page". When scrolling near the end...
Saturday, 17 July 2010
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...
Thursday, 15 July 2010
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...
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...
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
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...
Monday, 12 July 2010
GMail now supports dragging & dropping attachments & images in HTML5 compatible browsersAll 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 GMailIf 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 HTML5Work in progress...Related:Get ready for HT...
Sunday, 11 July 2010
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.20...
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 ListTodoistVoo2doRemember the MilkToodledoProducteev Good Todo Checkvist Paprika Springpad Todo.ly GMail TasksThe 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...
Friday, 9 July 2010
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...
Thursday, 8 July 2010
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...
Wednesday, 7 July 2010
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...
Tuesday, 6 July 2010
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 FiddlerHookFiddlerCap makes HTTP Traffic Capture easier6 ways to filter HTTP traffic with FiddlerTo share HTTP traffic debugging information, Fiddler offers 10 ways to export HTTP traffic - Copy sessions to the clipboard - right-click & copy headers, URL or entire session infoStore as a plain-text fileExtract...
Friday, 2 July 2010
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...
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