So I thought the name of the site was called CodingHorror not I-Am-A-CodingHorror. Assuming you haven't been living under a rock the codinghorror.com site is totally down with this message.

Seeing as attwood blamed CrystalTech I was curious what their response was so I had this online conversation with them:

Content from this chat session may be automatically translated using Google Translate. This is an automated translation, and results may vary.

Mr Chimp: So I heard coding horror went down and you lost all the backups. Are you guys like chimps over there or something :D

John B.: Hello, You have reached Technical Support. My name is John B. Please stand by, I will be ready to assist you in a moment. While you wait, please take a moment to visit http://newtekbusinessservices.com to take advantage of our money saving services. Thank you for your patience, I will be with you shortly.

John B.: Mr. Chimp, how can I assist you today?

Mr Chimp: So did you lose all the backups to codinghorror.com?

Mr Chimp: because that is the rumor

John B.: Mr. Chimp, I have never heard of this rumor. Do you have a customer ID number for this account; I'll be happy to research this if you do.

Mr Chimp: sure

Mr Chimp: codinghorror.com

John B.: Mr. Chimp, that is a domain name, not a customer ID. I will have to verify your customer ID and account password in order to provide information.

Mr Chimp: Oh its not my my domain, I just happen to visit this domain recently and noticed that right on the website they are blaming you for screwing everything up.

Mr Chimp: That must be pretty bad considering the site gets about 10k visitors a day

Mr Chimp: it might even make it on slashdot, and then your company will get a reputation for being a disaster

Mr Chimp: are you looking for new work, there is a call center near here always looking for good people?

John B.: Mr. Chimp, we're often hiring; send a resume to hr@crystaltech.com.

Suprise Suprise, their tech support really does have no clue what they are talking about. Nice tip attwood but you may think about using a backup service.

After scouring the internt for help on the 404 issues being caused by my MVC application I finally came up with the solution myself. I created a virtual directory called Sas.Mvc and it turned out that when I removed the period from the virtual directory it worked like a champ. IIS must be confused by the period resulting in the problem.

I just finished off presnting Enterprise MVC Development lecture and here is my follow up post on some of the topics i covered.

 First the Demo Project that you saw can be donwloaded here:

Demo.zip (4.37 mb)

Now I know some of you were salivating over using Google as a CDN. The link is below but in the static project you will have to modify the YAML file with your applications name that you seutp in google app engine. You may also have to modify the bat file to point to the folder that you have python and google app engine at. Read Nick's blog posting for specific details.

 Nick Berardi's Post on using Google App Engine

 For logging into the project the login is Admin@site.com and the password is 123456 . If you want notification to work correctly you are going to have to put in your gmail acocunt in the web.config. Enjoy!

So you've decided to use javascript to do everything now and you are discovering the dark side of things. That your process takes awhile and it creates a choppy user experience on the UI end. You want the user to know something is happening but your javascript will run whatever it wants in whatever order it wants. This makes making a modal popup difficult unless you have just the right code.

 For starters let me just say I tried the off the shelf solutions and found them to be either too heavy or worthless. So I wrote my own few lines of code that deal with the issue. You will need jQuery for this to work:

 First make a hidden div in your html you want to popup to show to the user something is happening. Mine looks like this:

<div id="loading" class="hide"><img src="/content/images/animation.gif" alt="Loading Image" border="0" /><br />Data is Loading...</div>

You can obviously replace the image to whatever you want. If you are ambition you can use javascript to dynamically load the content. The css to get this div to appear in the center looks like this:

Again you can change what you want here but this gets it to appear in the center of the screen. Now for the good part, the javascript that makes the magic happen:

The ajaxstart and stop functions were built for purposes like this. It makes sure to fire off the script before the process starts and after. You can drop this code snippet right into your long running function and it should work like a charm. Just make sure to load jQuery first or else you will get errors.

As you know on the web there are about three major ways that you can make money:

1. Sell a Product or Service
2. Accept Donations
3. Place Advertisements in your Content

Most of the web is attempting to sell a product or service to people. There are a few open source projects that take donations along with some other sites. And lastly in the blog sphere we operate mostly on advertising. Because I blog mostly to contribute to the community and not to make money I leave those pesky advertisements out of my blog. However if I was going to advertise I would definately do it with Amazons affilitiate program.

Basically with their affiliate program you are given a choice of serveral widgets you can place on your website or blog. If your visitor clicks on it and makes a purchase of anything on amazons website you get a cut. The percentages are broken down like this:

Some products on amazon are actually not sold by amazon, with those you get a flat 4%. There are some caps on this program though such as $25 cap on personal computers and downloadable digital media is capped at $1.50 each.

The application process takes about five minutes and is pretty painless, you can apply here. Now that you are an affliate you will notice when you go to amazons regular website a grey toolbar will appear at the top of the page. You can use this toolbar to track your sales and create product specific widgets. In my case I would want to advertise my book so I go to that page on amazon and then hit the "Link to this page" button to create a custom widget that looks like this:

This widget can have its colors and boardering adjusted to better fit your website or blogs theme. A lot of bloggers I know actually write book reports on books and then use these widgets to entice people to purchase. I'll do an update later on how well this particular widget does :).

Lastly they have some great pre built widgets for amazon searches, and popular products that might be useful. There is also an api to create dynamic widgets to adapt the product offering to the article you are presenting. Lots of people are reporting better results with the amazon widget than with even google adsense, especially when the product is closely associated with the website content. Good Luck.