I have been invited to speak at November's User Group in Sydney (link).
I will be talking about some of the techniques and tools I employed when tuning the performance of the Harris Technology website (link).
This will include Caching, Coverage Profiler, Load Testing etc
If anyone has any specifics they would like to know about, drop me an email or leave a comment and I'll see if I can include it.
I was asked last night about what software we use at Quids to test the performance and load capabilities of our websites.
Years ago I started using a tool called WAPT (link) which is a commercial product and has given me no problems. It does the basic "record a script and play it back" functionality and has some nice graphs and stats.
Since then Microsoft have updated their tools in this area, but I have not really tried them out sadly.
I have spent the last few days setting up an internal wiki for the office.
I started with a fairly simple and clean looking wiki I found on sourceforge called ProntoWiki
It is written in ASP.NET, C# and SQL Express 2005, so its a great little app to have a play with these new (for me atleast) technologies and get out of FoxPro for a moment.
Saturday was spent adding the ability to give pages a title that would show instead of the CamelCase key for the page, and writing a Flickr inspired control so we can just click the heading to edit it.
Now I need to go add a few more functions to the parsing routines, I just can't help but fiddle with new toys.
I have stated in public before my love of Textpad for developing HTML/CSS. It is small, clean, fast and has served me well for a long time.
I have trialed some other tools, such as Dreamweaver and Visual Web Developer Express, but they have all lacked, in my limited explorations at least, one feature that would really make them useful to me.
I was recently working on creating RSS feeds dynamically from a product database, and kept finding they would not validate due to invalid characters being used for UTF-8 encoding.
I found a quick one liner that seems to tidy this up, albeit in a way i'm somewhat less than comfortable with (I never did exhaustive tests to be sure it didnt mess with the valid data in some way). Anyway here is my code
cStr= strconv(strconv(m.cStr,11),9)
Has anyone done a similar thing before and have a better solution? Or better yet put my mind at ease that I have no reason to dislike this one.