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- February 24, 2010
World Domination 101.6: Experts, Arts and Crafts
February 24, 2010Read more
SUMMARY: In our recent Collective meeting, I gained insight into the difference between Art and Craft, which helped me to understand how to separate my passion from what I need to sell. It’s a slightly-different model than “follow your bliss” or “do what your passion is” in that it seems more implementable.
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- February 23, 2010
Tuesday Evening Staff Meeting
February 23, 2010Read moreThere hasn’t been much going on at Agenceum this week, though I am spending more time looking at C# and the .NET framework on an unrelated programming project.
One very cool new development, however, is that producing new web templates is much faster than before. This is due to having a fairly strong grasp on how to effectively use CSS to create the kinds of cross-browser compatible layouts that I typically need. As a result, I am feeling pretty comfortable with what I can make work. My rough CSS notes, collected over several months, have helped me grok what’s going on with the simple layouts I am using. At some point I will revisit them and reformat them into a cheat sheet / howto guide.
Current Push
There are a few areas that I can work on:
- Creating the simple low-cost packages
- Designing simple templates for specific kinds of entrepreneurs and artists
- Distributing information about the packages to organizations that have members crying out for promotional websites.
This is all marketing. I am feeling the need to collect all these strands of effort into one tracking system that uses a simple formula to manage dozens of different marketing channels. I can feel the shape of it in my mind.
- February 21, 2010
World Domination 101.5: Trudging through the Desert
February 21, 2010Read moreSUMMARY: I thought I didn’t get anything done last week, but after listing everything that happened it’s apparent that I’m actually pretty active. What creates the feeling of non-productivity is not the general lack of continuity, but the lack of measurable distance traveled on the metric that is most on my mind: funding all the things that I do every week that make the journey interesting and exciting. In this article, I lay out the services that I think are viable offerings for 2010 and how they relate to my mission. (more…)
- February 20, 2010
Playing with ASP.NET
February 20, 2010Read moreThis isn’t related to low-cost websites, but it IS related to development. So I’m leaving some notes here. My friend Robert is visiting from out of town so we can have an intense ASP.NET bootcamp this week. I hardly know anything about ASP.NET and web development with it, but I figure it won’t hurt to learn some basics about it.
Getting Set Up
Microsoft provides some free development tools for getting started with it; while they don’t do everything their professional-level tools can do, they do a whole heap of a lot when it comes to just learning the environment. Plus, it is based on their terrific Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). Yay!
Getting a free version of the tools was as simple as going to Microsoft’s ASP.NET website to download the Microsoft Free Web Platform Installer (WEB PI). The installer pulls the files it needs to install from the Internet, so it takes a bit of time to complete. It also installs SQL Server 2008 Express, the developer version of Microsoft’s database. In my case, it was about 160MB of data.
Splashing in the Kiddie Pool
After getting set up, I ran the newly-installed Microsoft Web Developer 2008 Express and blinked at the IDE. I dimly remembered something about it from having done a Flex vs PHP vs ASP analysis for Adobe via another company, so I just created a new Web Project and ran it from the Build menu. The IDE has a built-in web server, so I didn’t have to install Internet Information Server (IIS), the Windows web server, which is nice. I was rewarded with a nice blank page. The first successful compilation!
I recalled what I knew of the ASP.Net development process:
- You code your HTML files in aspx files. This is similar to creating PHP files.
- You can switch to “Design View” and you can drag and drop various controls on the page. This changes are reflected in the aspx file as special widgets that are executed on the server.
- When you drop a control on the page that has associated events, they appear in a “partial class” that implements the handlers.
As for how to architect an actually application, I currently have no sense of what the best practices are. So I will start with my basic understanding of how a web app works this week, watch a few tutorial videos from the asp.net website, and see where that goes. There’s a LOT to learn!
- February 17, 2010
Working on International Shipping for Emergent Task Planner Pads
February 17, 2010Read moreSUMMARY: If you’re interested in ordering an Emergent Task Planner Pad from outside the United States, read this post and help me understand what you need. (more…)
