As most of you know, I've had a disposition with Social Networks for roughly three years. In the past, I have quit Myspace twice and have accused Social Networks for the advancement of social retardation, shallow friendships and a whole heck of a lot of incriminating photos. You can honestly know everything about everyone at all times and ironically, nobody really cares about this and actually, in turn, wholeheartedly accepts it.

Well, despite these things, I have decided to run a few experiments. I am going to try and create more of business like image of myself on Facebook, and if that works, eventually MySpace (though low priority). In all reality it can't be too bad of an idea. Eventually everyone my age will be in the work force and yet, still on these networks. I'd only assume for a lot of my "era", Facebook will be a fairly tangible harbor of potential business. All the needed information is there. You can basically make your facebook page a portfolio containing information such as where you went to school, where you worked, what your skill set is, examples of your work and a list of references. Mix that in with a little interaction and you could probably find yourself with a couple new business partners and a handful of clients. Unfortunately, however, if you were a little wild in your college years, you may have to do a little cleanup in order to look presentable.

Lets think about it a little more. Microsoft paid $240 million in order to get a simple 1.6 percent stake in the $15 billion dollar company, Facebook. Don't tell me Social Networks are useless if Microsoft is dropping the top dollar for a little bite. There must be some form of money in there and doggonit, I wanna find it.

So take it as it is. I'm going to try for a more "professional" venture and see who I can meet from there.

   A client of mine had made a request to take the total of a column from the MS DataGrid and in turn, spit it out into a TextBox. Alright... So my first reaction was to loop through each individual record in the grid. It would have worked, but it would not have been pretty, nor speedy by any means. Then I got to wondering if the DataGrid itself had means of calculating the total of a column. I did some quick research on the subject and alas, I could not find a total for the DataGrid. From there I got to thinking, "Well, if the grid is really just an interpretation of it's DataSource, maybe I should be looking at the DataTable?"

Bingo.

textBox1.Text = "$" + dtPurchases.Compute("SUM(Amount)", string.Empty).ToString();

textBox1.Text = "$" + dtPurchases.Compute("SUM(OrigEquityAmt)", "UserName = 'Billy'").ToString();

 

w00t! Zune just released their 2.0 firmware. So far it's got a lot of sweet additions that I will be dure to take advantage of. First off, they caught on to the podcast movement, which (to me) is a very fresh experience that I will have to take advantage of. They also sort of revamped their "Social" aspect, allowing the Zune user to share music from Zune-to-Zune, but also off their new social network (don't quote me, I'm still running off of excitement). it kind of appears their social network is similar to that of last.fm in regards that it displays your last play. Anyway, check out my Zune card:

http://social.zune.net/member/nickcdavis

At first, this project of converting my links sounded very tedious. Initially I was thinking I'd have to write some elaborate routine on publishing an HTML page after writing a blog, similar to how blogger does it. Not only would I have to make an HTML page for each blog, but I would have to update the extra content (such as "last 10 blogs") in case I wanted to archive them, keep tabs on a main page, rss feed, etc etc etc. Didn't sound appetising at all.

Dissapointed and overcome by this method, I set on a search to find a nice and easy route. Lo' and behold, Microsoft never ceases to amaze me. URLmappings totally made my life easier. They allow you to set a sort of virtual path to your page, yet, still taking in querystring information.

For example, the link to my recent blog, "Lucky Man". It's original (and working) path is:

The after effect of URLMappings is as follows:

Sweet, huh? All I had to do was create an XML file that is referencable to my web.config file. For example, I have a file called URLMapping.xml. This contains all my URL Maps. Example:

Now, I reference URLMapping.xml from the Web.Config file of my website:

That's all there is to it! So now when I save a blog, it opens the URLMapping.xml into a Dataset, quick add the links and save it back. Couldn't be easier.

Alright, lately I've been feeling the need to get into some serious SEO. Lately, over at Dream In Code, it seems as though there is a spark of interest with optimising sites for search engines. I'm trying to keep up, but man alive, these kids know how to do it. So here's what I have done... an experiment, have you. I have basically started fresh with my site structure (which goes unnoticed by the average viewer) in an attempt to climb in the Google search queries. But before I can climb with such drastic changes, I must fall at the foot of Google. Here's a few steps I have taken so far:

• I moved my entire blogs from Blogger.com and Myspace to a home-brew blogging system I have periodically been working on with my free time. I also resurected blogs between 2002-2004 from old home-brew systems I have made. The MSN Spaces era in my life is all that's left. My Blogger account is slowly diminishing in google (when searching for "Nick Davis")
• I have decided to stick with the domain of  http://www.nicholasdavis.info. For the most part, I was sick of the ".org" look. It's funny and all, having the organization domain, but alas, I'm not an organization. I figured .info was alright, as it is information on me. Unfortunately, I believe it kind of puts me at a disadvantage compared to it's .com and .net brothers.
• I changed all my page titles to something a little easier for google eat up. On Analytics, people do more searches for "Nick Davis" than "Nicholas Davis". I took that knowlege and figured "Nick Davis" was probably better in the title, especially if I want to tackle those keywords more.
• I created an RSS feed for the mass populace to consume, of which I have created a modified version for Google to eat up, using Google Webmaster Tools.
• I submitted my site to Google.
• I reconstructed my blog template so that it will be easier for search engines to pick up on. Technorati seemed to enjoy it a lot.

So far, my Google presence seems to be improving a little since last week. Searching for "Nick Davis", my blog page shows up at the very bottom. I'm hoping the next couple days, it will be my home page and a couple notches higher than the bottom of the first page. I suppose I also need to work on blogging about things that are interesting.

This blog is my personal experience and for the most part very speculative. So if you have any information or tips, please let me know! I'd love to hear from you.

The night before, I read an interesting article written by the editor in the latest Communication Arts magazine we got in the mail a few days ago. From what I understood of the article, the gist of it was about user-end functionality in the ever-evolving career in web design. The editor wrote a couple paragraphs explaining how it is important to not only design the site with the client in mind, but also the end-user that will be interacting with the website. The site could have all of the latest and greatest in web design and look sleek, shiny and new. Or it could be tailored to the client, exactly how they wanted it. However, if it is not easily readable or learned by the user, the user will quickly give up and look at the next search result on Google because they couldn't easily and enjoyably find the information they were looking for on the website.

There's a lot of sweet, innovative ideas out there right now. O'Reilly coins it as "Web 2.0", I simply see it as the natural progression of the Internet. Within the last two years, AJAX, RSS syndication, streamlined video and the blog, have evolved into something amazing (despite all the baby talk). A lot of the technology and ideas behind a handful of the Web 2.0 movement is actually pretty cool and exciting to be a part of. I mean, we are one step closer to 100% interactive websites. With all of this great, revamped functionality, the average web designer has the potential to create  very powerful and interactive websites. It gets me excited and very interested in what's coming up next.

With all the new and awesome technology, however, the very core basics of a website is often lost. When a user goes to a website, they are looking for a product. It could be a physical shelf product, a piece of software, an article, an idea; if they can not easily identify the product on the website, then the site just lost a consumer. It's possible that the product pertained to them, but since it was difficult (or sometimes near impossible) to grasp what the website was trying to portray, they are going to high-tail out of there.

In my eyes, this has always been an issue since the beginning of the Internet. The Internet itself, is a new technology and is still in development. There's no true standards yet. This gives the designer a ton of flexibility, which can be used and abused. It's a fine line, balancing the cutting edge of technology and pursuing an intuitive design. New technology is very important as it expands the functional boundaries of the Internet. Intuitive design is also very important, as it gives the end-user a clear direction on where you want them to go. The bottom line is, the goal of a functional website is to give the consumer the information they anticipated and expect to receive.