Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a web site for my cousin. This was a ground up redesign of his company web to replace the old SEO unfriendly Flash site.

Normally as the developer I only get someone else's completed design; I just do the implementation but I wanted to see if any of my recent photography and image editing skills were transferrable.

The site was first designed in Illustrator/Photoshop with a fair number of round trips to agree the final design. Implementation was done in Expression Web using HTML, CSS and some JQuery for interactivity. There are no <tables> anywhere on the site; it is a pure CSS layout. I also used Expression Web "Dynamic Web Templates" for the master page layout as the server where it is currently hosted does not support .NET.

Some things I've learned from doing this:

• JQuery makes life easy and Glimmer makes it even easier
• IE8 standards support is fantastic but way to many still use IE6/7 to use it
• You need to have an idea of what is possible in HTML before letting loose in Photoshop
• background-image is your friend

As it is all pretty static at the moment there are plans to move to a site that supports .NET so I can add some more features, in particular a blog and news feed. I would like to try this in ASP.MVC to get some experience there.

So go to RJR Consulting and have a look around (especially if you need telemarketing, telesales or similar services).

If you are a developer and tasked with making sure the corporate rollout of Internet Explorer 8 goes without issues, you will find the following links of use.

The main page of interest to you is the IE Developer Centre where you will find all the information and links collected together.

Also:

• Internet Explorer Compatibility (a page with lots of links to useful app compat stuff)
• Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit
• Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 (see IEBlog for more information)
• Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility Test Guide
• Differences between IE8 Compatibility View and IE7 (because compatibility view may still not be perfect)
• Introducing Compatibility View (includes details of IE=EmulateIE8 tag for when you have fixed the page)
• asp:menu fix for IE8 problem available (Patch for a rendering issue with asp:menu)
• Report a Webpage Problem Internet Explorer 8 Add-On (for when the problem isn't your web page)
• Internet Explorer 7 'Tips and Tricks' (Lots of useful stuff even for IE8 upgrades)

I've been having a quick look at Google's Open Social... They really need to get better documentation so I'm not exactly sure about the fine detail. There are a few bits on developing widgets but nothing at all on hosting them which is a big chunk to be missing in my opinion. Maybe they are holding off publishing to stop a proliferation of social sites popping up and competing with their "launch partners"?

Some other random thoughts:

• You need to implement your widgets as Google gadgets
• All the samples are based on Orkut so it's not clear if a Google account is required - if it is then that's bad
• There doesn't seem to be any sort of download available, probably as the JavaScript is hosted by the Google gadget system

They have been quite clever calling it "Open" Social instead of "Google" Social but it still sounds like a lock-in to the Google gadget system.

The API is really about building widgets to host in existing social web sites - in all not that exciting. What I would prefer to see is a system that allows me to access my social data from anywhere in applications I write - e.g. my blog, Outlook and my phone...

[Edit: having read around a little, Dare Obasanjo says much the same thing but slightly more coherently.]

It's been a few weeks since my last post and I've been busy with customers and Outlook add-ins. Last week, however, I was at Microsoft's internal conference. It's like a TechEd proving ground where presenters get to try out their talks on an internal audience. There is some amazing stuff coming down the line in Windows Server, Visual Studio and SQL Server. I'm really pleased about the data warehousing enhancements across the SQL Server product line.

Way back in 2004 I went to TechEd and blogged a series of articles about new features that would arrive in SQL Server 2005. I plan to do a similar series for SQL Server 2008 but since a lot of stuff we saw last week is still internal I'll only blog about bits in publicly released CTP's.

Finally, the Popfly mashup site is now allowing invitations so the first five people to leave a comment telling me what you plan to do with your mashup gets an invite. You need to leave me your e-mail address as well.

I've spent this evening working on the web pages for the GolfWeb application. Compared to the code I'm finding it somewhat difficult. Probably because web design is not one of my strong points. To make it doubly hard I've decided to complete the task without using any of the traditional table style layouts.

There are plenty of CSS resources on the web to help with the layout and effect you want but to tell the truth it's like learning a new language. The syntax is easy to pick up but, unless you know the language idioms, things don't flow and everything becomes disjoint. I guess the only way to learn is by doing so I'll have to persevere until things get easier. I don't suppose there's a CSS Cookbook available?

So I haven't had time to blog much. There are, however, a number of links on my desktop that I've collected and meant to take a look at. So I can tidy up I'll list them here instead.

• The Fallacy of Cheap Programmers
• Skinning Gmail with a Custom Stylesheet via Nick Bradbury
• Mount St. Helens Volcano Cam
• Moving Past Fear via Heather
• Creating multilingual web sites
• The Daily Database Build
• Microsoft ASP.NET ValidatePath Module (to fix this)
• Hacker Handle Generator via Gnome-Girl (James Snape = Zen Dead, I might even use it)
• NASA's WorldWind (free download) via Steve Makofsky
• UI Patterns and Techniques via Duncan Mackenzie
• Cooking for Engineers via Raymond Chen

Plus some useful articles on MSDN:

• CRUD, Only When You Can Afford It
• Using HTTP Modules and Handlers to Create Pluggable ASP.NET Components
• Windows Forms Development Series of Webcasts

(*) The title is based on a quote by Jesse from the Fast Show. Spoken in a West Country accent.

I've just been asked by a customer if we could display the text in column headings vertically (i.e. rotated by 90 degrees). After some digging I found a CSS style that works in Internet Explorer 5.5 and above - layout-flow: vertical-ideographic. This way we can get more columns on screen as the headings are usually the widest part. It's not standard CSS but all our clients use IE. The output looks something like: