Web Developer Resources

Venezuela with its seashore is always mistaken for some paradisaical Caribbean island. The fun part o this country is that it has disco pubs in Caracas that goes vibrant with rocking rhythms. However, even during this fun time, you can access your mails easily.
Hosted Microsoft Exchange server gives you this facility!

By configuring your wireless with hosted Microsoft Exchange, you can surf through your mails quickly that too on free Exchange hosting. However, prior to synchronization with Exchange email hosting, verify with your own country’s local providers regarding their support functionality with Exchange web hosting.

Venezuela has a population of over 26 million of which most of the populace speak Spanish. And since Hosted Exchange 2010 is available in multi-lingo pack which includes Spanish as well, the inhabitants of Venezuela can use the Exchange Hosted features in their own home tongue.

Thus, be a native or non-native of Venezuela, using Microsoft Exchange Hosting on your mobile device is the best for your mail access!

Being a freelance web developer is great, but it has its downsides. Even though the money may seem really good in the beginning, soon you’ll be taking on various small-sized projects that will be eating into your time and preventing you from getting any actual work done. To remedy this, as well as other factors that can influence your productivity, you should take some simple steps to ensure you’re making the most out of your time.

First, concerning those small tasks mentioned above – get rid of them. Or at least, get rid of as many as you can without harming your income too much. Free up some space for the big and really important projects, to ensure that you’re filling up your time with tasks that are actually worth it.

Also, don’t rediscover fire. That is to say, if you can base your design on a freely available element or template – do it. Of course, this has its limitations – don’t rip off other people’s works; only use them as a very simple base on which to work. As a general rule, if the original work can still be recognized in your finished product, you probably didn’t do that good of a job.

Find some way to manage your clients as well – all those conversations can pile up, so make sure you do your best to schedule those whenever you can, so that they don’t take up as much of your time and you can concentrate on working.

If you have to have a disciplined working environment, then managing and maintaining a record of time spent on each tasks is important, isn’t it? Timesheets help record the start and end time of tasks, or just the duration. It may contain a detailed breakdown of tasks accomplished throughout the project or program. This information may be used for payroll, client billing, and increasingly for project costing, estimation, tracking and management. Nonetheless, this is where Microsoft Project Server and its Timesheet Management feature has a role. This feature in MS Project Server helps you to create and keep a tab on the timesheet of your project, thus making it easier for you to manage the timesheet of your work smoothly. It enables you to easily track the time you spend on a project’s tasks, and the progress of those tasks towards completion. You can also enter time spent on administrative tasks, like vacation, travel, training, and sick leave. Read the rest of this entry »

What is Word Automation Services in SharePoint Server 2010?
Ever tried to transfer .docx files into PDF? Most of us try to perform server side conversions of Open XML files (.docx) into fixed formats (PDF and XPS) using the Word desktop application. Now this conversion can be done hassle-free with Word Automation Services.

As an element of SharePoint Server 2010, Word Automation Services allows you to perform file operations on the server that previously required automating desktop Word:
* Converting between documents formats (e.g. DOC to DOCX)
* Converting to fixed formats (e.g. PDF or XPS)
* Updating fields
* Importing “alternate format chunks”
Features of Word Automation Services

Features of Word Automation Services include the following:
o Reliability – Word Automation Service was built from the ground up to work in a server environment, which means that you no longer have to worry about issues like dialog boxes that bring the process to a halt, expecting a user to provide input; creating interactive user accounts under which to run the application to avoid running into permissions issues, etc.
o Speed – The service is optimized to perform server-side file operations, and in doing so provides performance significantly better than existing solutions.
o Scalability – The service can take advantage of the processing power available on typical server hardware (multiple processors, additional memory). For example, although a single instance of WINWORD.EXE can only utilize a single core of processing power, with Word Automation Services, you can specify the number of simultaneous conversions (and the # of processing cores) to use based on the available hardware.

What Word Automation Service doesn’t do in the SharePoint Server?
One of the most important things to understand about Word Automation service is what it doesn’t do. Word Automation Service is not intended to be a 1:1 replacement for the existing desktop object model. Instead, the server is one half of a replacement for the existing object model – the other half being the Open XML SDK.
o The SDK is designed to handle tasks that don’t require application logic, such as inserting or deleting content (paragraphs, tables, pictures), inserting data from other data sources, sanitizing content (removing content, accepting tracked changes), etc.
o The service is designed to handle those few tasks that do need application logic: reading the entire document formats that Word supports, converting to the entire output format that Word supports, recalculating dynamic fields, etc.

Word Automation Service is not featured in SharePoint Foundation 2010. Nevertheless, there is still life left in SharePoint family of products including Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 and WSS 3.0 that has free SharePoint templates for business use.

I’ve been continuously saying that SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation has been launched with some really great features and when saying that I cannot afford to forget its yet another cool feature Developer Dashboard. The Developer Dashboard allows you to monitor page load performance on SharePoint. Simply put, you can see how each element on the page loads! Now isn’t that really cool?

The Developer Dashboard in SharePoint Server displays diagnostic information gathered during the loading and rendering of the SharePoint content. The dashboard, in conjunction with FireBug or the IE Developer Toolbar, helps developers and designers identify issues in their custom projects. This can be set to always display or to only display on demand. The Developer Dashboard has three different states—On, OnDemand, or Off. When the Dashboard is set to On, it will always be shown on every page. Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform right now, and for good reason. The self-hosted version of WordPress is very flexible and very easy to use. But don’t let its simplicity fool you. WordPress is a powerful tool which you can use to build your CMS from.

As far as search engine optimisation goes, an out-of-the-box WordPress installation already has the basics taken care of. However, there are a few things WordPress needs to improve on, and fortunately for you, everyone’s favorite blogging platform makes it easy.

Prettify your permalinks
After installing WordPress, you’d see your posts’ permalinks have this URL format:

http://example.com/?p=123

Change this right away. That’s just a bunch of numbers appended to your blog’s URL – doesn’t say anything about the content, and it won’t provide search engines with search keywords. Go to your WordPress Dashboard and go to Settings > Permalinks and change it to something more search engine readable.

Search Engine-Friendly Post Titles
Some WordPress themes have search engine unfriendly titles. If you check out some WordPress blogs, you’d see that some of them have the “John’s Blog » Blog Archive » This is the title of my blog post” format. Search engines give importance to the first few words of a page’s title, and having a title with a format like that will just get ignored. WordPress 3.0 fixes that problem already, but older themes are still around. To fix this, just go to header.php and switch the elements of your title tag yourself.

Those are just a few ways to improve your WordPress blog’s search engine optimisation. You can also see if you want to keep the www prefix of your blog, or if you think installing more SEO plugins are going to be worth it. Either way, you can expect to see a huge spike in traffic if you’ve played your cards right. Good luck!

The internet was first designed with the machines developed for humans who had to adapt to standards that were more or less limited by the way machines were out together. The term micro-format is a revolutionary way of looking at the web which as we know has evolved a lot since it’s inception. The new way developers look at the internet/web is with the people who use them in from of the machines which we do our work making them more human-like and acceptable as technology for people. The web has been doing well, as far as serving us able to give us what we need and serving the many businesses who fund the infrastructure at which we work in, call it a win-win battle. But there is a very much important factor that has to evolve that has to do with our very human nature, we all differ from one to another in terms of preference. Read the rest of this entry »

Not all web pages have to be as serious as hell to get the attention of your customers and followers for there are a lot of funny ones that do make the cut by using rather unorthodox pages that whilst their bizarre forms still keep the customers rolling in as can be seen on this site. Call them guerrilla designs or rogue themed ones but they are interesting enough to get people interested to dig deeper and even get onto your services or whatever you may be marketing. Professional sites promote using professional themes and methods accepted and quite standardized in the industry. But for freelance works and sites that are for public consumption, the sky’s the limit when to comes to design. Read the rest of this entry »

With SEO comes self-promotion which is very much misunderstood and people tend to do this so heavily people are swayed from coming back. Links should be credible and must give credence to claims, linking to popular sites and giving due recognition for sources that need them as much as you do. For more professional sites you’d wish to quote or derive information from, a well prepared and courteous request for such an action would be in order, it also helps a lot with legalities should you be cited for plagiarism, a common occurrence in today’s blogging world. Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody who has worked with SEO knows that proper selection of your links, phrases and words for SEO purposes is one of the most effective way to promote your product, site or other services. Page ranking is done by the many search engine bots and selecting the most likely term,phrase or word that your prospective customers are to search for, the more likely they will be landing on your page. There is one important thing to consider when engaging in SEO, and that is you don;t only want more people to get into your site, but those visits should also translate to sales or profits because of the particular page they laded in. Read the rest of this entry »