One of my clients business is audio sales via cd-burning and downloading through retail kiosks as well as remote fulfillment via web orders (phew – say that four times fast). It is an interesting business that I’ve been working with for 4.5 years. Besides the content role I’ve had that included CDN management, transcoding, SAN management, audio ingestion, database strategies and what not I’ve recently inherited an ASP.NET site. The site is receiving more business support and our team is working to add features, do a redesign and I’m also doing little tweaks that will help spruce up its performance.
The first item on my list was to implement compression on the site. The web server hasn’t been upgraded to IIS7 yet and I’ve long forgotten how to use compression with IIS6. The best resource I found was Scott Forsyth’s post on it (IIS Compression in IIS6.0 – Scott Forsyth’s Blog – thanks Scott). One item I didn’t do on the first implementation was add js and css files into the static file list so I’ll be doing that as well.
Up next is introducing URL rerouting to deal with dynamic content. I just have a hunch that using domain.com/artist/beyonce will be better than domain.com/artist.aspx?artistguid=dkfjdsfkjf. That obviously relates to SEO and after the URL rerouting is in place we’ll go through the results of a IIS SEO Toolkit examination as well as combing through the YSlow results.
A redesign is coming as well and I wish I there was a reason to convert it to a MVC app but it just doesn’t seem prudent.
This spring I hit up a Microsoft event over in Bloomington, MN hosted by Jeff Brand and I’m glad I did as it offers me a chance to learn material without reading or sitting at my desk which I do enough of and there is always the hope that you’ll see someone you know, get to meet some new, or by chance find CLIENTS. Dev events and conferences share something in common with my vacations…they don’t bring in revenue! Self-employed code ninjas like me don’t bill when we do these kinda things. Taking vacations don’t eat me up too much but sometimes these events can as can’t be sure if the content is worth your time. This one was.
Jeff posted the slides a ways back (Build Your Skills Content) and they’ve been in draft status waiting for me to publish…whoops.
I caught the first three speakers which were all good:
Profiling – Scott Colestock
Loosely Coupled Applications – Shannon Braun
Exceptions – Jason Bock
Missed these ones:
Intro to Unit Testing – Kirstin Juhl
Advanced Unit Testing – Raymond Lewellan
Today I came across a .Net developer survey put on by Matt Berseth. Matt’s survey is focused on developers’ usage of social networking which has me interested to see the results. I’d love to see a lot of responses on this one so if you are a .Net developer do a data pledge!
Matt Berseth: .Net Developer Survey.
I’m a huge fan of Charlie Rose! I am constantly amazed by his breadth of guests and the quality of his interviews. A world class interviewer like Charlie Rose and Terry Gross can provide a view into windows typically shielded from software thinkers in freshly snowed-in Minneapolis.
Some of my favorite interviews by Mr. Rose are when he covers start-up culture or Silicon Valley and his recent interview with Marc Andreessen is no exception.
Charlie Rose – A conversation with entrepreneur and software engineer Marc Andreessen.
Check this out about iPhone Apps. iPhone AppStore Secrets – Pinch Media.
Shares some secrets, some tips, throws out some user usage stats and briefly talks turkey about an ad based revenue model. I’m working on a iPhone app for a little venture I’m working on and this will help.
