Today I received an invite to Google Ad Planner.  As I was playing around with this new tool, I was really blown away by how much information Google has collected on specific websites.  So much so that I wanted to share this tool with my readers, but I couldn’t come up with an interesting way to demonstrate the capabilities.  Until I started looking up some of my favorite bloggers and saw the almost embarrassing balance between females and males.

So today I am going to analyze

• Scott Hanselman
• Phil Haack
• Jeff Atwood
• Joel Spolsky

with Google Ad Planner, to find out who is more popular with the ladies, Scott, Phil, Jeff, or Joel.  I know this is one of those questions that has been hotly debated by nobody, but I thought it was a good mechanism to demonstrate what kind of information Google Ad Planner can show.

Please note that I wanted to also analyze, Rob Conery and Jon Galloway too, but their data was yielding results that I don’t think was accurate.  Possibly because Google didn’t have enough information to classify them yet.

What is Google Ad Planner?

Google Ad Planner is a free media planning tool that can help you identify websites your audience is likely to visit so you can make better-informed advertising decisions.

With Google Ad Planner, you can:

• Define audiences by demographics and interests.
• Search for websites relevant to your audience.
• Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
• Create lists of websites where you’d like to advertise and store them in a media plan.
• Generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan.

Get to it already, which blogger is it?

According to Google Ad Planner, from least likable by the ladies to most likable by ladies…  drum roll please… is…

3rd Place - Jeff Attwood

2nd Place - Joel Spolsky and Scott Hanselman

1st Place - Phil Haack

I am not sure how Google Calculates these metrics, but if I had to do an analysis, purely on speculation of why Phil Haack won.  I would conclude the following:

1. Phil has a very nice and ascetically pleasing website, where the other 3 candidates have more of a utilitarian design.  (much like mine)
2. Phil and Scott had pictures of them self on their frontpage and seemed to do better than Jeff and Joel who didn’t.  By a pure numbers game, Jeff and Joel should have been leading the pack because, they had a broader reach, and thus higher page ranks.
3. The last one, which I think is most important for attracting the ladies to your blog is: Phil was the only blogger to post a picture of himself with his son, on the front page.

Hope you enjoyed this preview of Google Ad Planner, it has some really nice analytical features that will help anybody doing a high level comparison of demographics for different websites.

Note: I didn’t include my self in this analysis, because Google Ad Planner didn’t actually have an info sheet compiled for coderjournal.com.

Tags: Google, Google Ad Planner, Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, Phil Haack, Scott Hanselman

Posted in Programming, Review | | | View blog reactions | 14 Comments »

Since my last release of the MVC toolkit some major changes have taken place in the MVC Framework. I am going to do a quick run through of how they changed the MVC CAPTCHA for the better.

Originally in MVC Preview Release 1 for the MVC CAPTCHA many of you remember that the indicator for a valid CAPTCHA was passed through the parameters of the action method like so:

[ControllerAction]
[CaptchaValidation("captcha")]
public void Register(bool captchaValid, string otherParameters)
{
    // do stuff
}

However when Preview Release 2 came out the ability to pass the parameter through the action method was broken. So I had to create a hack around this:

[CaptchaValidation("captcha")]
public void Register(string otherParameters)
{
    bool captchaValid = (bool)RouteData.Values["captchaValid"];
    // do stuff
}

Apparently without realizing it in Preview Release 1, I had discovered a major feature that everybody that I explained it to saw great potential in. So I submitted a feature request and waited for the ASP.NET Team to get back to me. With the release of Preview Release 3, they finally answered my prayers and added the parameter injection feature back in to the framework.

So now this code works again in the Preview Release 3 version of the MVC CAPTCHA control.

[CaptchaValidation("captcha")]
public void Register(bool captchaValid, string otherParameters)
{
    // do stuff
}

This works because of a new property called ActionParameterson the ActionExecutingContext. It can be used to test and change any of the action methods parameters before the action method has been executed. For the purpose of the MVC CAPTCHA control it allows me to inject a true or false value in to a parameter called captchaValid, so that the action method knows that the CAPTCHA validation passed or failed.

public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
{
	// make sure no values are getting sent in from the outside
	if (filterContext.ActionParameters.ContainsKey("captchaValid"))
		filterContext.ActionParameters["captchaValid"] = null;

	// get the guid from the post back
	string guid = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.Form["captcha-guid"];

	// check for the guid because it is required from the rest of the opperation
	if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(guid))
	{
		filterContext.RouteData.Values.Add("captchaValid", false);
		return;
	}

	// get values
	CaptchaImage image = CaptchaImage.GetCachedCaptcha(guid);
	string actualValue = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.Form[Field];
	string expectedValue = image == null ? String.Empty : image.Text;

	// removes the captch from cache so it cannot be used again
	filterContext.HttpContext.Cache.Remove(guid);

	// validate the captch
	filterContext.ActionParameters["captchaValid"] =
		!String.IsNullOrEmpty(actualValue)
		&& !String.IsNullOrEmpty(expectedValue)
		&& String.Equals(actualValue, expectedValue, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase);
}

Notice in the code above all the filterContext.ActionParameters references, that is the CAPTCHA validation checking for the parameter in the method parameters list and adding the value of the CATPCHA validation to the list. Note that in order for this to work you must already have the captchaValid attribute present in your method, these actions merely fill in the value of the captchaValid placeholder.

For anybody who hasn’t used my MVC CAPTCHA control before, you only need to do two things:

1. You need to register the CAPTCHA image handler.

<httpHandlers>
    <add verb="GET" path="captcha.ashx" validate="false" type="ManagedFusion.Web.Handlers.CaptchaImageHandler, ManagedFusion" />
</httpHandlers>

2. Add the following to the View that you want the CAPTCHA to show in. Note the extension, CaptchaTextBox in HtmlHelper, generates a text box with autocomplete=”off” so that the CAPTCHA box will not have an auto-complete show up.

<label for="captcha">Enter <%= Html.CaptchaImage(50, 180) %> Below</label><br />
<%= Html.CaptchaTextBox("captcha") %>

Which generates the following.

If you would like to download the latest copy of the MVC CAPTCHA it is available in my MVC Toolkit.

Download: Coder Journal MVC Toolkit
Source: Coder Journal MVC Toolkit

Tags: CAPTCHA, MVC, MVC Toolkit

Posted in ASP.NET, C#, How To | | | View blog reactions | 10 Comments »

Firefox 3.0 is going to be released today at 1:00 PM EST and 10:00 AM PST, other times can be found here. This is going to be a huge release where the Mozilla team is going for the Guiness World Record for the most software downloads in one day.

I have included a schedule below of the events for today leading up to the actual release. When the even is completed it will be marked as such on the official Firefox 3.0 Release Wiki.

I for one can’t wait. I have been purposely not downloading the Release Candidate versions so I could be surprised by the massive upgrade that Firefox 3.0 is suppose to be. My wish list includes:

1. Less crashes through better memory management
2. Better bookmark management
3. And a less clunky interface

I will update this post through out the day so visit back to get my reaction to FF3, and some screen shots.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Firefox, Mozilla, Release Day

Posted in News | | | View blog reactions | 3 Comments »

As anybody who has run a growing website or blog knows, response time is going to get worse with the more users you have visiting your site. The users come from all angles, RSS feeds, homepage visits, search engine visits, people sealing your static files that you host, and pretty much anything else that can be served over HTTP. The solution to this problem is to off load your static content on to a Content Delivery Network or CDN. CDN providers cost a lot of money though, so it is nothing for us mere mortals with one server can afford.

But thanks to Google anyone can now run their own CDN for free on Googles servers. Lucky for you and me Google has made the process really painless and you can even have the CDN under you own domain name. In my case static.coderjournal.com.

What Is A Content Delivery Network?

According to Wikipedia:

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers networked together across the Internet that cooperate transparently to deliver content most often for the purpose of improving performance, scalability, and cost efficiency, to end users. The first web content based CDNs were Speedera, Sandpiper, Mirror Image and Skycache, followed by Akamai and Digital Island.

Basically it is a network of computers around the world that serves your content to the end user closest to one of those many servers around the world. This method of delivery cuts down on server overload, DNS hops, and delivery time.

When sites like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, or Amazon delivery content they use Content Delivery Networks (CDN’s) to host most of their content, especially static files such as images, stylesheets, downloads and anything else you can think of. The reason they do this is to reduce load on their application servers, that serve dynamic content, such as PHP or ASP.NET pages.

What Is Google App Engine?

So you may ask what is Google App Engine:

Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it’s ready to serve your users.

You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain. You can share your application with the world, or limit access to members of your organization.

App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account, and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see, at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.

Google has also announced a very very affordable price plan that any mere mortal can afford. They are not ready to start charging people yet, but here are the details:

• $0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
• $0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
• $0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
• $0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

How do I setup my own CDN using Google App Engine?

To use Google App Engine you need to do a couple things that readies you computer to publish your static content to Google. Please take note that my setup is for Windows, but you can easily modify the process for any other OS.

Setup

1. You need to download and install Python on your computer. You may already have it if you are using a Unix environment (i.e. Linux or Mac OS X). If you need to download it or would just like to check to see if it is up to date, please visit http://www.python.org/download/ and download the correct version for you operating system.
2. Install Python to c:\Program Files\ (all my scripts that I have designed to make the publishing to Google are going to be using this path).
3. You will also need Google App Engine SDK which is available at http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html. Download the version that is for you OS. Note that the SDK will check for the Python install, so make sure you install it before the SDK.
4. Sign up for Google App Engine at http://appengine.google.com/, you will need a valid Google account. I suggest you sign up for a Google Apps account and use that as your Google account. Why I suggest this will become apparent later on.
5. Once you are done with the setup process you need to create an application. Click the “Create an Application” and give your application a name (called “application identifier”). This is a unique name for all Google App Engine applications. For example I set my application identifier to “coderjournal”. Click though to the next part of the application, if this is your first time registering an application you need to specify your cell phone number and confirm your account with a SMS code that Google sends you.

Publish To Your CDN

1. Download my publishing files, hosted on my CDN, at http://static.coderjournal.com/downloads/coderjournal-cdn.zip
2. Create a directory on your computer specifically for you CDN files. My directory is c:\websites\static.coderjournal.com. Fill this directory with all your static files you want hosted on your CDN. Fill it full of all your css, downloads, flash, images, javascripts, videos, and anything else you want hosted.
3. Unzip the files I provided to you in step 1 into the directory you created in step 2.
4. Next we need to edit the YAML configuration file. Open the app.yaml file in your favorite text editor and change application: coderjournal to application: {your application identifier}.
5. Next go down and edit your static directories, in mine I have css, downloads, flash, images, and js. You can create your own by just modifying the ones I put in the file.
6. If you installed the Google App Engine SDK in the default directory and Python in c:\Program Files\ then skip to step 7. The next part is also required if you are using the x64 version of Windows, because Google App Engine SDK installs in c:\Program Files (x86)\. So change the paths in publish-cdn-coderjournal.bat to your actual paths.
7. Now double click on publish-cdn-coderjournal.bat and a command window will display. Fill in your Google account and password that you used to sign up for the Google App Engine account. And you content will start to publish.
8. You now have you own private CDN that can be accessed at http://application-identifier.appspot.com.

Using Your Own Domain (Optional)

1. If you created your own Google App as suggested up in Setup step 4, you can create your own custom domain for your CDN. If you didn’t, don’t worry just create one, and follow the steps below.
2. Go to the dashboard of your Google Apps and click “Add more services”.
3. Under other services you will see Google App Engine and a place to enter your application identifier. Enter you application identifier and click “Add It Now”.
4. It will take you to the next page where you enter in the domain you want for your CDN, I suggest something simple like static.yoursite.com.
5. Then you just need to follow the steps for adding a CNAME to your DNS and you are ready to go with you custom domain.

How do I use my own CDN?

Well this is the cool part! You just use the absolute path to your files. For example if you wanted to host the image to your right you would just use the following in your HTML:

Potential Gotcha: I forgot to mention that currently the files hosted statically are case-sensitive. I have reported this issue to Google, hopefully they will correct it soon. http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=466

<img src="http://static.coderjournal.com/images/ideapipe-logo.png" />

It is really that simple. Now comes the cool part that I need your help with, and proof that this is really a true CDN. I would like to see how many different IP Addresses my CDN points to. So far I was able to find the following IP addresses:

1. 72.14.207.121
2. 64.233.179.121
3. 66.249.91.121

That point to:

static.coderjournal.com

To see what IP Address you get on your local machine just pull up the command prompt and type:

ping static.coderjournal.com

Please report your findings in the comments below. I am sure everybody would love to see how big Google’s CDN really is.

Tags: CDN, Content Delivery Network, Google App Engine, Google Apps

Posted in ASP.NET, How To, JavaScript, Programming, SEO | | | View blog reactions | 35 Comments »

Just recently I started experimenting with the ASP.NET MVC Framework and the Facebook Development Platform, it has been a very bumpy road, but I have ironed out some major issues that I would like to share with you today. I will start with a little history of what I am trying to do. For about a month and a half I have had one of my IdeaPipe interns, Dimitry, experimenting with creating a FBML (Facebook Meta Language) Application with MVC. MVC is an ideal platform for FBML because with MVC you have total control over your markup which is needed to have a lean FBML application. I am not going to go in to the differences of developing an FBML vs IFrame Facebook Application, because that information is easily found with a Google Search. What I am going to talk about is the hurdles I overcame and the custom software I had to develop to get MVC working smoothly with Facebook.

In my last post on the subject I was using the Facebook Developer Toolkit, however because of various implementation problems that were at the foundation of the software when working with MVC, I moved to Facebook.NET which is a object based model for implementing the Facebook Session instead of an inheritance model. What you will need in order to get started is:

• Facebook Developers
• Facebook Developers Wiki
• Facebook.NET Source Code (the source code is important because we need to modify one external interface from internal to public)

One of the problems I ran into was creating a Facebook Session from my Action Method. To remedy this issue I created a FacebookAttribute that is an ActionFilterAttribute and a FacebookWebSession based off of the work done on Facebook.NET.

FacebookAttribute

The FacebookAttribute is added to your Action Methods and will look like the following:

[Facebook(ApplicationName = "IdeaPipe")]
public ActionResult SomeAction(FacebookService facebookService, FacebookSession facebookSession, int myOtherVariables)
{ ... }

As you can see the FacebookAttribute just attaches to the Action Method and you just have to specify your ApplicationName that you want to instantiate. The FacebookAttribute also passes in a FacebookService and FacebookSession object for use in your method. The other keys get set in your Web.Config as any standard Facebook.NET application would.

<facebook>
    <application name="IdeaPipe" apiKey="1234" secret="5678" type="GlobalApplication" />
</facebook>

The magic behind this attribute is pretty simple.

public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
{
	FacebookApplicationSettings settings = FacebookSection.GetApplication(ApplicationName);

	ApplicationKey = ApplicationKey ?? settings.ApiKey;
	Secret = Secret ?? settings.Secret;

	FacebookWebSession session = new FacebookWebSession(ApplicationKey, Secret);
	session.Initialize(HttpContext.Current);

	FacebookService service = new FacebookService(session);

	if (filterContext.ActionParameters.ContainsKey(ActionParameterFacebookSession))
		filterContext.ActionParameters[ActionParameterFacebookSession] = session;

	if (filterContext.ActionParameters.ContainsKey(ActionParameterFacebookService))
		filterContext.ActionParameters[ActionParameterFacebookService] = service;
}

Download: FacebookAttribute.cs

FacebookWebSession

The FacebookWebSession was developed out of necessity because the only other FacebookSession objects in Facebook.NET are strongly tied to a WebForms Control that couldn’t be created as easily as I did in the FacebookAttribute. I am going to fore go the source code since much of this is a copy, paste, and rearrange from the Facebook.NET source. Plus much of it is just boring if-then-else statements that go on for awhile and just do a technical setup from the query string fields.

Download: FacebookWebSession.cs

FacebookSection

This is the file that I had to change the one method from internal to public so that I could get the information contained in the Web.Config configuration for my application. Note this file will not be necessary in the future if my changes get accepted in to the Facebook.NET source tree.

This file replaces the \Web\Configuration\FacebookSection.cs of the Facebook.NET source.

Download: FacebookSection.cs
Download: Facebook.NET Binaries For MVC

So that is all that you should need in order to start working with Facebook Applications in MVC. Note that it is still a good idea to include the FacebookApplication control on your pages because it is still needed. The primary goal of the source code above was to allow the use the the FacebookSession in the Action methods. If you have any questions please post them below.

Tags: Facebook, IdeaPipe, MVC

Posted in ASP.NET, C#, How To, Programming | | | View blog reactions | 6 Comments »

Scaling ASP.NET Application just got easier with a new technology that Microsoft has just released that they have dubbed codename “Velocity”. This product is still in the early stages of development, but it is meant as a direct competitor against memcached. If you are not familiar with memcached, here is how it is described in Wikipedia:

memcached (pronunciation: mem-cache-dee) is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that was originally developed by Danga Interactive for LiveJournal, but is now used by many other sites. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in memory to reduce the number of times the database must be read. Memcached is distributed under a permissive free software license.

So basically it allows you to create a distributed memory cache across your server farm, that allows any computer in the server farm to access the data in the cache. So there is no more issues with storing session data on server farms, or worrying about setting up common SQL stores of temporary data. This is also very practical for reducing database stress on Web 2.0 sites, many of the top Web 2.0 sites use this to reduce reads on the database.   The biggest user of memcached to date is Facebook.  This diagram below gives a basic idea of how distributed caching works.

There have been many Open Source projects for getting memcached working on C#, and most have been pretty successful, but because memcached was designed for the UNIX environment, porting memcached to a Windows Service has always lagged behind the actual releases of the required libraries to get memcached working. Enter Velocity, as the Velocity team describes:

Velocity is intended to provide distributed caching (in memory) for all .NET applications – from enterprise scale to web-scale. We believe that there are many applications that need a distributed caching mechanism, and that there is, therefore, a need for distributed caching as a core part of the .NET platform. We expect to have more integrated support for this functionality with other parts of the .NET platform in our upcoming releases.

There is also a pretty nice Velocity writeup on MSDN that goes in depth about how Velocity works as well as providing some basic code examples on how to get data into and out of your Velocity Cache. The current set of features looks pretty nice, and I can’t wait for Velocity to become more stable so I can introduce it in to the IdeaPipe mix.

Here is a breif overview of the Current Features:

1. Support for different cache types, partitioned and local
2. Support for different client types, simple and routing
3. Load Balancing & Dynamic Scaling
4. ASP.Net Integration, currently there is only a Session Provider
5. Key and Tag based Access

And Beyond

1. Availability - support for Failover when machines go down
2. Replicated Cache - another cache type
3. Embedded Topology - run the cache embedded within you application instead of as a cache service
4. Notifications - Get notified when a object in the cache is updated
5. Consistency Models - Support for both weak and strong consistency when doing reads/writes
6. Native client access to the cache service (E.g - PHP, C++ etc)
7. Manageability & Administration

Tags: .NET, ASP.NET, C#, Distributed Cache, IdeaPipe, memcached, Velocity

Posted in ASP.NET, C#, Review | | | View blog reactions | 6 Comments »