Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

March 28, 2006

From Damn Interesting:

Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one happens upon some obscure piece of information– often an unfamiliar word or name– and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly. Anytime the phrase “That’s so weird, I just heard about that the other day” would be appropriate, the utterer is hip-deep in Baader-Meinhof.

This happens to me all the time. What’s funny is that it also usually happens in sets of three with me. If I encounter a new word or phrase and then run into it within a day or so, it almost always pops up a third time shortly thereafter. It’s been pretty frustrating experiencing this and not knowing what it is called. For some reason, I’m slightly excited about having a term to put to it.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | Leave a Comment 

Irony?

March 15, 2006

It’s somewhat ironic that the more time I spend developing and supporting MyHomePoint, our online family organizer, the more stuff I keep dropping the ball on.

Before MyHomePoint, my excuse was that I never looked at the wall calendar and that I needed something that I could access from work. In the early stages of MyHomePoint when my wife wasn’t using it regularly, my excuse was that it wasn’t in MyHomePoint. Now, I’ve gotten burned several times over the past couple of weeks where my wife added something and it snuck up on me despite the reminder emails and having the calendar right in front of me. She loves to rub it in.

Please don’t leave this article with the impression that MyHomePoint is not a valuable tool for organizing your family. It really is great and we’ve gotten lots of positive feedback. It’s just that sometimes I spend far too much time below the surface of the application to ever come up and see what is actually on the calendar.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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URL Rewriting with ASP.Net

March 15, 2006

I received the following question via email the other day. Brian said I should post my response since I hadn’t posted anything in a while. Hope it helps someone!

I need to intercept some URLs. All URLs to “/this/url” need to go to “this_page.aspx” no matter if they’re “/this/url/is/cool” or “/this/url/is/not”. In Apache world, I’d use a RewriteRule.

What do we do in .Net? I’ve found potential solutions in the Web.config — HttpHandlers and such.

But I don’t so much want to write a handler. I really just want to “catch” URLs and send them to a certain page.

What’s the best way?

You are getting into one of my personal pet peeves with asp.net. You would think that popularity, functionality, power and flexibility of mod_rewrite would have prompted MS to bring that same functionality over to ASP a long time ago. Especially considering how long it has been around. I think it is one of those things that they just don’t “get” - like why they shouldn’t mess with my HTML. I believe ASP.Net 2.0 has better built-in capabilities that I have not experienced first-hand, but I have heard that it still isn’t nearly as powerful as mod_rewrite.

If you own the server that you are deploying to, I would recommend Helicon Tech’s ISAPI_Rewrite. It implements the majority of the same functionality as mod_write but uses a slightly different syntax. It appears to just be one guy, but he’s been around a while (forum goes back to 2002) and he is good about responding in the threads. His pay product supports ISP functionality so that each account can have their own rules file, but if it is just you, you can manage a number of sites from one server with one rule file. That is what we do on our server that hosts FearlessDog / SwoofWare / ThinkFirst / etc. This solution is application independent too. The sites I just listed are all WordPress installs. I did a proof of concept a while back for MyHomePoint. We can’t move forward with clean urls for MyHomePoint though because our host doesn’t support it.

If you don’t own the server, then that presents a bit of a problem. As you mentioned, you can do a lot with handlers and there are some projects out there (CodeProject?) that take you the majority of the way there. However, you run into a variety of unseen issues (postbacks, resource files - images, styles, etc.). James Shaw had a brief post referencing several of the popular solutions. Of course, his conclusion was to not mess with it since there is no clean way to do it.

One of the biggest problems with the handler approach is that it is usually an all or nothing approach. In order for the handler to work, the request needs to get handled by the asp.net engine. To make that happen, you either need to intercept everything and then exclude stuff like images, stylesheets, scripts, etc. Or you put a .aspx extension on everything so that it is forced into the asp.net engine. In the asp.net world, these are clean urls:
- http://www.myhomepoint.com/forums/13/ShowForum.aspx
- http://www.myhomepoint.com/forums/thread/161.aspx
Those qualify as clean urls, right? Unfortunately, they aren’t platform agnostic which I believe is also one of the goals of url rewriting. Without the extension, it just assumes you are asking for a folder and then looks for a default.aspx file. If that isn’t found, then you are out of luck. Some solutions I’ve seen involve pre-defining your folder hierarchy and putting a default.aspx file in each folder. Needless to say, that approach has limitations.

You may consider looking at Community Server to see how they handle the problem with handlers. You can download the app and source. Looking at their code is probably a good thing to do regardless since you can get some good ideas on how to deal with other stuff.

While it is a lofty goal to achieve, my advice is that if you don’t own the server or have a host that supports the ISAPI_Rewrite component, then don’t try to implement it. You will burn far too many billable hours solving the inevitable quirks that pop up.

Hope that helps!

Popularity: 11% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under .Net, ASP.Net, Microsoft | 3 Comments 

SXSW: So close, yet so far

March 11, 2006

Welcome to Austin! How do you like our weather?

SXSW Interactive is happening just five miles down the road from my house right now. I’m a little bummed that I’m not there. Pretty much everyone that I read on a regular basis is in town. I’ve pretty much ignored SXSWi in the past but knew it would be awesome this year after reading all the buzz from last year. Unfortunately, I have a day job and it’s spring break and my wife wouldn’t be too thrilled with me checking out of the family life for the next 5 days. Payback on that would not be fun.

Of course, it sounds like there are several people having a hard time getting out and about with their little ones. That gives me an idea: Maybe I’ll just bring SXSW to my house. We’ve got a trampoline, playscape, enough toys to start a Toys-R-Us, and a bunch of alcohol. Why not? Drop me a line if there are any takers.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | Leave a Comment 

Google Calendar Screenshots

March 8, 2006

Techcrunch has leaked screenshots of Google Calendar (aka CL2):

It was only a matter of time before someone broke down and leaked these - as far as I know these screen shots are the first on the public web.

Definitely not good news for our MyHomePoint (our calendar app), but there hopefully there is a niche for everybody.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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