Blogged thoughts, is our web blog. Expect views, opinion, rants and tirades about everything and anything 

Just installed a neat little plugin for Wordpress called Sociable which outputs image based social bookmarking links on various Wordpress pages to allow my blog readers (all two of them :-)) to quickly bookmark and share interesting posts. A tonne of social bookmarking sites are supported as shown by the following partial screenshot of the options interface, click the image to view a full size version.

You’ll see that at the moment I’m outputting links to about 20 social bookmarking sites (out of a total of about 60) which is more than enough really. I’m really conscious of not having excess flair on my blog by having too many widgets and icons cluttering up the place. Jeff Atwood on his excellent Coding Horror blog lists excess flair as #4 on his list of thirteen blog clichés so I certainly want to avoid that, in saying that though I want to make sure I’m linking to all the most popular social bookmarking sites. Since I’m a complete social bookmarking notice perhaps you guys could tell me if I missed any of the big players in the SB market.

As usual with Wordpress plugins the install is a piece of cake which everyone should be able to handle, anyhow if your in the market for a social bookmarking plugin for Wordpress I definitely recommend you check Sociable out.

Since I’m still suffering from last nights work social to get drunk with my now ex boss one last time before he left our ICT team and since I’m off to the fight tomorrow (no not in the Swiss Cottage - in the point depot!) and hopefully the big Dublin & Kerry game in Croker on Sunday I’m just going to take it ham & cheesy tonight and relax with a few beats and update my blog.

For this update and in true Richard Hearne style (see Unison & Continuum) I’m going to ‘out’ someone for not playing by the rules. The unfortunate ’so and so’ on this occasion is popular Dublin based radio station Spin 103.8 who appears to be conducting some good old fashioned meta jacking on their offical website located at http://www.spin1038.com/. Meta Jacking is the process of putting your competitors names in your meta keywords and or meta description tags in the hope that if someone searches for your competitors name your website would come up in the results too. Spin have done this by including the names of rival radio stations such as 98FM, FM104, Today FM and some others in their meta keywords tag, similar stuff is being done with their meta description tag too. Although I’m not a lawyer I believe I’m right when I say that this is a form of trademark infringement and could potentially result in a day in court for the Spin 103.8 legal eagles. The meta keywords tag as lifted directly from their home page is below:

I’m wondering who does their search engine optimisation because even putting aside the legal issues this sort of technique doesn’t even work. It may have worked somewhat years ago but these days meta tags aren’t given much value at all by the search engines so it’s actually a complete waste of time. Your thoughts are welcome, additionally I wouldn’t mind a couple of trackbacks :-)…

Everyone knows the benefits of using a blog and blogging for marketing reasons. Blogging is simply one of the best ways to get yourself or your company known as an expert in your industry and perhaps more importantly to get in touch with potential clients. Blogging as a recruitment tool though? This is something I’m currently pondering the merits of. I suppose it like other things has pros and cons, I’ve noticed that the iQ Content guys seem to be giving it a bash anyhow. They’re looking for a project manager and have already got some ’press’ from many of Ireland’s leading bloggers. The following URLs show this:

http://www.mneylon.com/blog/archives/2007/08/14/project-manager-required-chez-iq-content/
http://www.mulley.net/2007/08/20/fluffy-links-monday-august-20th-2007/
http://www.redcardinal.ie/general/14-08-2007/iqcontent-project-manager/

I’m going to keep an eye on this to see how they get on but seemingly they already have had applications from people who learnt about the job on other peoples blogs. It’s an interesting approach and sure as hell beats paying sites like Monster & IrishJobs to advertise vacant positions. Good job from iQ Content - pun intended. Your thoughts are as always welcome.

Recently while looking for a list of countries to populate a country dropdown box I required I came across a real gem which provided me with exactly what I was looking for. An easy to work with comma separated file (CSV) of 273 countries and territories is available from http://www.andrewpatton.com/countrylist.html. The figure of 273 is based on what various international organizations count as countries.

The data contains not just your basic name column but many other columns too such as 2 letter code, 3 letter code (letter codes are useful for the value property of dropdown/select boxes), TLD, capital, currency code, currency name, telephone code and two or three others as well. Budding software and web developers should find this handy, I know it saved me a good bit of time anyhow. Incidentally the chap that maintains the list has the goal of visiting 50 countries before he’s 50, now that’s a goal.

The ASP.Net repeater control has over the last while become one of my favourite controls due to the fact it can be highly customised because it’s a templated control. Two shortcomings with the current implementation of the repeater control however are its lack of paging and sorting capabiltites. Of these I believe paging is perhaps the more desirable feature and thus I will now provide an outline of how to implement paging with a repeater using an SqlDataSource. I’ve chosen to work with an SqlDataSource as this I imagine is the most common underlying data source used with repeaters. 

PagedDataSource class
The most popular way ASP.Net developers enable repeaters to page through large amounts of results is with the help of the PagedDataSource class. This is a class which

Encapsulates the paging-related properties of a data-bound control (such as DataGrid, GridView, DetailsView, and FormView) that allow it to perform paging and is used by control developers when providing paging support to a custom data-bound control.

Since this class can be used to provide paging support to custom data-bound controls it can of course be used by built in data-bound controls such Repeaters and DataLists to provide the same support. If you look on the MSDN page which I have linked to above you’ll notice however that the class implements the ICollection interface. This means that any underlying source you want to feed into the PagedDataSource class (which in turns feeds into the repeater itself) must also implement ICollection. The SqlDataSource class does not implement this interface and thus we must put the data into some class that does implement ICollection, in this case we are using a DataView. OK lets look the c# code behind.

All the important paging related code is encapsulated in the Page_with_Repeater() function, it’s all commented so I won’t repeat myself here. As far as what the code does, well it displays 5 rows of data at a time from the underlying datasource (in this case SqlDataSource1) in a repeater. LinkButtons are dynamically created and then added to the repeater to display page numbers as links to allow the user to select a specific result page. Often interfaces allow the user to select a specific page (as in this example) and to use previous and next buttons for working his or her way through data, on that note a good example of using buttons for repeater paging is given on the 4guysfromrolla.com website. 

The corresponding .aspx markup for the c# code is very simple and contains a repeater (named ‘repeater1′) with an embedded panel (named ‘placeLinks’) and an SqlDataSource (named ‘SqlDataSource1′) which specifies an event hander for the ’selected’ event in order for us to create the correct amount of paging links.

Incidentally you may notice in the C# code above that I have used a custom function called FindControlRecursive to enable me to add the dynamically created placeholder (which contains all the page number linkbuttons) to the statically created panel within the repeater. This is a handy function I came across recently and which I often use in conjunction with repeater controls (and many other controls too). It accepts a root control and an id of the target control to look for. It works in a similar way to the standard FindControl method except it searches all controls (including child controls) in a control tree hierachy whereas FindControl will only search the specific control you pass it without examining any child controls.

That’s it - paging with a repeater using an SqlDataSource is implemented. As you can see it is not too difficult. If you have any questions please feel free to ask.  

Was doing a search earlier today for a Dublin based company called Sureskills who provide a variety of IT Services & Training. Logically my first step was to search for ‘sureskills‘ on Google as I wasn’t sure of the exact URL. Google being Google returned their site #1, however I noticed that one of Sureskills competitors namely New Horizons Ireland was running an Adword ad triggered by the keyword ’sureskills’. This is obviously an attempt by New Horizons Ireland at taking business directly from their competitors and is completely allowed under the terms and conditions of Google Adwords. If however a competitor of Sureskills tried to plug the term ’sureskills’ into their actual ad text well that’s something that can find its way into court quite quickly.

I found another example when I searched for ’Webtrade‘. Webtrade are a web dev/design company (who I actually interviewed for a couple of years ago) based in Rathfarnham, Dublin. In this case however not one but two competitors are bidding on Webtrades’ name. Not quite sure where I stand in regards to the question of ethics in relation to bidding on competitors names, the more striking question for me however would be the value (or lack of value) of bidding on competitors names. If someone is searching for a specific company, for example Sureskills, is it likely that they will click through to a website that isn’t that of Sureskills? Perhaps it’s useful for a competitor to simply get their URL/ad seen anyhow just in case the searcher might visit them after being on the Sureskills website?

Incidentally you may also notice a lot of companies actually bid on their own names. Examples of companies which I’ve spotted doing this recently include Vodafone, PaddyPower & Clearscape. These companies are doing this perhaps as a counter-measure to anyone else bidding on their name. Whatever the reason the technique of bidding on your own name is advocated by one of Irelands leading PPC experts and thus may be worth some consideration.