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So today I was reading one of my favorite blogs, Google Operating System, and I saw an interesting development on the Google Docs front. Google Spreadsheets has a new feature that lets you create a form to accept data. When you go to the Share tab, there’s a new option to “invite people to fill out a form”. The form is very simple and can be customized by changing the order of entries, their labels and the type of answers. It’s also a nice way to get feedback people who wouldn’t normally collaborate on a spreadsheet. ...

Recently I have been working very hard on getting a new Web 2.0 initiative off the ground. With most new initiatives I like to start out by looking for software development patterns that will help me standardize my structure as well as make the programming experience common for any new members that are brought on the team. However I recently ran in to a structural “pattern” that seems like it is pretty simple and it addresses a common problem in software development. I researched as much as possible on all the common pattern websites that I visit and even went as far as posting on ASP.NET Forums to see if anybody could help me, give it a name. If this “pattern” hasn’t been named yet I am going to be shocked. ...

New Theme My first major change was the development of my own theme. My old theme was clunky and overall I didn’t like the feel that it gave to my reader base. I became greatly discouraged looking for a new theme as most are more of a testament to art and less on readability and functionality. So I decided to create my own that had a very simple layout. Optimization of Load Time One of the things I hated about my other blog was the fact that I didn’t have control over how the HTML and thus JavaScript was laid out. Especially the JavaScript because I had duplication where I didn’t need it. The script that Technorati gives you is hardly optimized for load time because of duplication of a supporting script file. ...

As you can see from the graph above everybody has helped make this a very successful year for Coder Journal. Some information that I have been able to compile is: Top 3 Posts: Setting up iTunes on Windows Vista 64-bit 5 Easy Steps To Get iTunes Working On Windows Vista x64 Remove Updater5 from My Documents Folder The majority of my daily readers use Internet Explorer with Firefox being a close second, and of that 87% are new users that have never visited my site before. The majority of people find my site via organic results through Google, but about 9% come from Digg.com and Direct links. ...

I didn’t know this until today, but ARPANET adopted TCP/IP as the official communication protocol between computers on January 1st, 1983. I found this break down of the two protocols which form TCP/IP. The IP protocol and the TCP protocol is explained below: IP IP ensures that packets are routed to the right place. You can think of a packet as a package of information, and on this package IP holds information about the address and sender (note: your IP address, a number that identifies your computer online is contained in the IP portion of the packet). ...

Happy New Year. In this new year I am planning on making big changes in Coder Journal, but still provide the same information that has proven so valuable to so many people over the past year.

It has been a long time coming, but AOL has decided to retire the once unstoppable Netscape Browser, think 1998. Netscape has had a long and good life, and is survived by it’s sibling Firefox. In the process of AOL trying to reinvent it self as a media company some less than successful projects needed to be axed as explained in a Netscape Blog Post: ...

My wife and I would like to say Merry Christmas to all of the daily readers that have made this blog so successful over the past year.

I previously talked about the importance of using the correct kind of redirect to optimize your website for search engines in an article titled. World Of HTTP/1.1 Status Codes. I just recently decided to create a C# Utility class to help me in this endeavor and to extended the far from complete HttpResponse.Redirect method. I am using a new C# 3.0 language extension called Extension Methods. Basically what the extension method does is, it allows you to, add methods to types that you don’t have the ability to modify, in my case the HttpResponse class. ...

When I saw this post over on the Windows PowerShell Developers Blog. It really occurred to me for the first time that Windows Developers don’t understand the simplicity, power, and elegance that comes from a command line window. Our *NIX brothers have been saying this for years and I just took it for granted that everybody universally understood how great the command line was. The following is an image of PowerShell Plus: ...