To make it a little bit clearer, I have added highlights – Ads are in yellow, In-site navigation is in green, and the content is in blue. The content occupies a tiny strip down the center of the page (maybe 30-40% of the total width of the page). This is surrounded on all sides several layers:

1. The first layer has a set of Ads (Yellow – all advertising the same thing) and goes around the entire perimeter, switching vertical alignment to fit the ad into a narrow width going up each side (not to mention the completely irrelevant ad for investing in Brazilian agriculture – what is that about?). These are loud and completely distract the user’s attention.
2. The next layer is a mixture of ads (Yellow) and navigation links (Blue). The ads here are either irrelevant AdSense style ads, or ads from the Jerusalem Post advertising your ability to advertise on jpost.com (I wonder what the ROI is on that).
3. The worst part though are the strips of internal navigation links going up and down either side of the page. They all relate to different subcontent areas of the site (things other than news) and each one has a very similar looking graphics. The overall affect is that the graphics make it hard to tell the difference between the different sections, and I am completely turned off from clicking here.

Though these ads may add a bit of revenue in the short-term, in the long term the poor usability and design of this page will probably lead to lower traffic, shorter visits by users (in terms of both number of pages visited and overall time spent on the site) and fewer repeat visitors. It also reflects rather poorly on the professionalism of the site (and I would think that conveying an air of professionalism would be quite important in the online news-delivery market space).

Fixing these problems would require:

1. Rethinking the ad strategy for the site:
• Do you really need those vertically aligned ads surrounding the whole page? What is that Brazil ad doing all the way out there? Are those AdSense style ads actually getting clicks? The ads should not distract users from the main purpose of the site. Doing so will not get you clicks, they will only end up annoying users.
2. Smarter Navigation:
• The navigation links that I would find the most useful (links to other news sections) are the least pronounced and emphasized links on the whole page. Make these easier to use.
• Where are the tags? Links to similar articles? Links to most popular articles and most emailed articles? If I saw these, I might spend more time on your site?
• Those ads going up and down each side of the content are totally useless. How about using a well designed expanding menu that can include links to all of these areas without taking up so much room and without being such an eyesore? And if you really have to see all of those links at once, do something about the graphics.
3. Standards-Based Design:
• Looking at the source for the site, it is a big mess. Definitely not built using web standards. Lots of table-based design. I imagine that this is very hard to maintain and does not play nicely on some or all mobile platforms. And that is not even starting with accessibility.
• I have a fast Internet connection and I presumably located very close to the servers. Fully loading the page took about 25 seconds, and includes 37 HTML Get/Post requests, 20 separate CSS files, 104 different JS files, 119 different images – a total of around 290 separate requests. Total downloaded off of a fresh load: 2.5MB (imaging this on a slower connection). Reloading the page still took 240 requests and 19 seconds. This is just not acceptable. It is really bad.

(To anyone at jpost.com who is reading this – I have nothing personal against you guys, and I do enjoy reading some of your content. But your site design is so poor, getting to the content is just too hard and too much of a strain on my eyes).

When posting code for others to see, I prefer using SyntaxHighlighter. This javascript-based formatting tool by Alex Gorbatchev allows you to put the code to be displayed into a Pre or TextArea tag, formats based on the code language, and allows for good degradation in case of NoScript.

I have previously posted on how to get SyntaxHighlighter to play nicely with the built-in text editor inside WordPress (TinyMCE). Now for the first time I needed to set it up on another platform (Telligent Community Server). Here are my recommendations on what to use to achieve optimal setup (this can work on any platform):

Problem 1: Need Friendlier Way to Input Code – The default method for adding code to be formatted woudl be to open up HTML mode in TinyMCE, type in the Pre or TextArea tag with specially formatted attributes, and put in the code. This is ok for myself (this is what I use in WordPress), but when designing a site for others, a friendlier interface is preferable. I found a plugin for TinyMCE: SyntaxHL by Richard Grundy. After installing this (download and copy files to tinymce/plugins directory, and add plugin and button to TinyMCE.Init), a new button is added to TinyMCE that loads a popup which allows easy entry of the code to be formatted and customization of language and display options, without the need to enter html mode. (I would prefer something that could load up highlighted text when the button is pressed, but I will settle on this one for now)

Problem 2: TinyMCE adds BR Tags within PRE – When opening up TinyMCE it performs some cleanup of the Html that is input. Part of this cleanup involves (by default) substituting <BR /> tags instead of New Lines in the source text. For code that has already been saved, this presents a problem. When editing a post with code formatted in a <PRE> tag, instead of preserving the new lines, <BR />’s are inserted, completely messing up the formatting. This has been noted by others, and has even been reported in the TinyMCE forums, but so far the bug is still in there. To the rescue, another plugin for TinyMCE: PreElementFix by T Andersen. After installing the files and adding the plugin to TinyMCE.Init, PRE acts as it should: no more insertion of <BR /> tags, and the tab key adds a Tab to the text, rather than advancing to the next field.

After a bit of searching, I found this site: AjaxLoad.Info. This is a nice, simple site that generates 37 different “loading” animated gifs, allowing you to customize the style, foreground and background colors, and transparency. Definitely a good site to know about.

1. CodeSmith – Number one in Code Generation. I have spent less than a week of total time setting up my templates, and over the last three months alone have generated 386,403 lines of C# and TSQL code using this tool. I cannot see how I could work without it. Well-worth the investment.
2. Visual Assist X ($149) – (My review here). I have been using this for about 2 years now. It works very well with both VS 2003 and 2005. The main features that really save me time are the much improved intellisense over the standard offering from MS, which includes basically any variable name that I could use based on the context that I am in (including private variables that were just created, properties available from inherited objects, etc). It also acts “intelligently” – if I type in something like myObject.Controls.Add(…); and then go to another line, when I start typing it will offer me this sequence as an option to autopopulate through intellisense. Very useful. Also allows you to use acronyms or type in the leading capital letters from Pascal/Camel case to find a function or property name. Additionally, VAssist X offers handy features for finding functions, and more (including a small but useful one which works as follows – when you type “functionName(“, the closing “)” will automatically appear. If you type “)” now, as I often do just out of habit, it will not insert an additional “)” character – rather, it will advance beyond the closing parentheses that was automatically added
3. Krypton Toolkit (free) and Navigator ($50) from Component Factory – Although I had been reading Phil’s blog for some time before I started getting into Windows Forms, now that I am doing some WF work, I am finding this collection of components to be indispensible in extending the controls that are provided by MS in VS 2005 (and in the Navigator control providing several pieces of functionality in my current app that we would have had to invest weeks or months in to produce form scratch or come up with some alternative), and allowing me to give a universal, comprehensive look-and-feel to my application that would have been very difficult or impossible otherwise.
4. VG Dot Net – Have a need for Vector Graphics in your Windows Forms or ASP.net application? Want to be able to manipulate the different components of the VG objects and images directly in your code (no COM please!)? Look no further.
5. Free SlickEdit Gadgets – Some useful add-ins, including an easy-to-use Line of Code counter, Data Object analyzer (tells you what data items are inserted into the clipboard when different data object are copied in – an essential tool if you want to do anything more complicated than straight text copy/pasting from the clipboard, and a File Explorer add-in that basically gives you a Windows Explorer window in your code-view (Found via vidmar)
6. MS Visual Studio 2005 IDE Enhancements (free) – This package with the uninspired name offered by Microsoft includes a useful code outliner (very useful in complement with some of the Visual Assist X offerings, IDE event viewer, Diff Utility and improvements to the Find engine.
7. Code Rush with Rafactor! PRO ($249) – I tried it for a month and found that it was interfering with my workflow more than helping it (though this is almost certainly because I am used to the way that Visual Assist X works). However, some people find it to be very helpful. To each his own.
8. Although I do not have anything installed from here right now, I would be remiss if I did not mention the ever-growing collection of Visual Studio Add-ins at the Code Project. As always with items from CP, use at your own risk…though you may find some gems here as well

Am I missing anything?

I am coding in Dreamweaver and am really missing Visual Studio, intellisense, robust debugging, design-time compile, being told right away when I make syntax mistakes and intelligent error messages. Since I have to upload to the test server before trying anything out, I have had to spend too much of my time trying to figure out why errors are occuring, backtracking, commenting out lines, upload and try again.

To save myself some googling in the future, and perhaps to help others in the same quandry, below are some of the most common error messages (or lack thereof) that I experienced during development, along with what they actually mean (since the words themselves rarely tell you what you need to know). If anyone has more to add, put them in the comments and I will add them below.

Parse error: parse error, unexpected $ – You forgot to close all of your brackets. (Or maybe you wrote an open-bracket sign – { – instead of a close-bracket sign)

Completely Blank Screen – This one is the worst. It happens when you mess up php syntax. Note: the syntax error may be on the referenced page, or it may be on some page that you included, or that was included by an include (etc). The best part about it is you have no way of knowing where the error originated since the blank screen conveniently forgets to provide you with any error message. Here are the different things that caused this one to appear for me:

• Forgot a semi-colon at the end of a line. (This one is the most frustrating, because it is sometimes very hard to find, and because if I was using VS, I would find out about it when I was compiling my site, and not when I was trying to test)
• Include the word var in a function declaration. For example, the following caused me a few hours of searching to find the cause of my blank screen: “function (var $id) { …” (error is in bold).
• Include a dollar sign when you aren’t suppossed to. For example: “$name = $account->$Name” causes an error.
• Not including a dollar sign when you are suppossed to. For example: “for ($i=0; i<count($myArray); $i++) { …” causes an error (missing a dollar sign before the middle i)
• Forgot a bracket (same as above, sometimes results in error message, sometimes in blank screen)
• Entered <?php at the beginning of a document instead of <?PHP (stupid case-sensitivity…)

Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_ELSE – In writing an if/else structure, you forgot to include the closing bracket } between the end of if and the beginning of else

Parse error: parse error, unexpected ‘=’ – You forgot to include a $ in front of a variable when making a value assignment. For example: “i = 5;” instead of “$i = 5;”

WindowsITPro has a great solution posted for retrieving the username and password information for IUSR.

Just in case that link ever goes down, here is the solution: Take the following code, save it in NotePad as a .vbs file and run it.

Worked like a charm

• Troubleshooting Database Login Errors using Crystal Reports with .NET – Page 3
• Automagically Display Crystal Parameters: Part III
• Specifying the Database Name Dynamically
• Dissecting the “Logon Failed” Error in Crystal Reports .NET

Overview:

1. Export report to printer-ready format (like pdf, rtf), let the client-side application for this format handle printing.
2. Print the report directly to a printer connected to the server (obviously wont work for a publicly accessible web-app…but if the application is only used within one network, this can help you to avoid forcing users to open 3 of 4 windows on-screen in order to print one report)
3. Print client-side from within web browser (not as pretty as pdf or rtf, but if you want to provide a printing method that 100% of your users can take advantage of, you need to consider this

Some vb.net code samples are included in the white paper.