Articles Related to Technology

Search Using ASP.Net and Lucene

Getting Started Getting Lucene to work on your asp.net website isn't hard but there are a few tricks that help. We decided to use the Lucene.Net 2.1.0 release because it made updating the Lucene index easier via a new method on the IndexWriter object called UpdateDocument. This method deletes the specified document and then adds the new copy into the index. You can't download the Lucene.net 2.1.0 binary. Instead you will need to download the source via their subversion repository and then compile it. Don't worry this is an easy step. Using your subversion client - I recommend TortiseSvn get the source by doing a checkout from this url: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/lucene.net/tags/Lucene.Net_2_1_0/ Next go into the directory:

Published On: 3/10/2008

Filled under: Technical things, lucene, search

1175 Views

Be Careful With Page.PreviousPage

I found something interesting while testing the website tonight. The new search we implemented was not working on the pages that display house plans. I thought that it was some kind of routing error that could be attributed to the url rewriting. However, closer examination showed that this is the error: 'Page.PreviousPage' threw an exception of type 'System.Threading.ThreadAbortException' For some reason ASP.Net doesn't like certain nested master pages and will throw this error. My solution was to remove the Page.PreviousPage reference and key off of a parameter value - in this case the value contained in the search box. All that I can figure is that the PreviousPage reference attempts to actually load the page which can result in errors and thus the exception. I haven't had

Published On: 3/4/2008

Filled under: Technical things, exceptions

487 Views

XML Encoding Problems - Hexadecimal Value 0x1A, is an Invalid Character

Recently I started noticing exceptions in my log files that stated "hexadecimal value 0x1A, is an invalid character". I did some searching and a lot of other people have had the same problem. It occurs when someone pastes in text that contains specific unicode characters that are invalid in XML. From what I gather this frequently happens when someone copies in text from Microsoft Word. The trick was to find out which characters are invalid and then use a regular expression to remove them. You can look at the specs for all the details: http://www.w3.org/TR/xml11/#charsets http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#charsets http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UCD.html But it is probably easier to just get the code: /// <summary> /// This removes

Published On: 3/3/2008

Filled under: xml, encoding

747 Views

Updated Forums

We recently updated our forums. This was a big move as it required retiring our old forum software and migrating all the old posts to our new custom forums. We feel that the change will provide a better experience for everyone using the site. If you have any questions or would like to make a comment feel free to post to the forum and let us know what you think! One quick tip. If you paste a link to a house plan in the forum like this: http://www.theplancollection.com/house-plans/home-plan-9218 the software will automatically add in the image of the house plan and create a working

Published On: 2/25/2008

Filled under: forums

347 Views

The Forums are Broken

The forums are busted at the moment. Sorry about that. We are currently using a piece of software called community server that we purchased so we didn't have to write our own. It has been nothing but trouble so now we are moving away from it to a simpler system. We are writing it so it will take a bit longer to finish, but you can expect to see it running within the week. The debate between whether to write your own software or to find something that exists is always a tough one. It is always nice to let someone else do the work for you, but over time it can actually be more cost effective to develop your own solution if: What you need is only a small subset of the off the shelf software and you want to simplify the experience for your users. You need a highly customized

Published On: 2/14/2008

Filled under: Technical things

350 Views

Why Asp.net Sucks (Tonight)

I have noticed a slight slow down on a few of the pages on the website so I figured that it was time to get in there and turn on some caching. Asp.net, the technology we use, is supposed to make this very simple. All you have to do is something like this: Then magic happens and your page is magically stored in memory and millions of people can view it at the same time. The problem is that every page on The Plan Collection contains a login control. It is the little piece of code in the upper right. If you turn on caching guess what happens. The first person to login and view a page gets their user account broadcast to everyone else that sees that page. That's right the designers of the LoginView Asp.net control were so short sighted that they didn't realize that that

Published On: 2/1/2008

Filled under: aspnet, caching, web development

569 Views

Ping Feedburner, Ping-o-Matic, Google, Technorati and All the Other Cool Kids Using ASP.NET and Some Magic

It has been a long time coming, but we have finally managed to migrate away from Community Server to our own custom blog software that is integrated directly into the web site. The reasons for the change are numerous including the need to customize the look and navigation of our blogging software and our desire to provide readers a more streamlined experience. The final part of the migration to this new system was released tonight. This final piece being the ability to ping the various providers that watch new blog posts. The code required to do this is not difficult to write. I am posting it below in case anyone is interested in how it is done. Ironically enough this post will be the first one to actually use the ping service. Here's a link that helped me figure out how to do

Published On: 1/30/2008

Filled under: asp net, ping, ping-o-matic, blogs

750 Views

Fixed The Main House Plan Pages

The other update I made last night was with the main landing pages. Some of the pages - luxury house plans, country house plans, and arts and crafts house plans looked fine because we had edited those pages by hand. However, many of our other pages like cape code style house plans page and our colonial style house plans page looked terrible. I was able to use our existing page processing system and create a template for our landing pages that is loaded dynamically and then sent through the processor. The template contains place holders that are replaced with values specific to the style. Those values are replaced on the fly and then the page is generated. The result is a much better looking page that the guys in the office don't have to maintain by

Published On: 1/29/2008

Filled under: house plans, updates

419 Views

Updated Image Processing

Working on a website in the middle of the night as I usually do is always an interesting and lonely experience. The benefit is that you get a lot done because no one bothers you. The downside is that waking up the next day is never fun. This evening I managed to image processing code for our site. Every image - hundreds of thousands of them are passed through that code. It is fun to watch on the server because you can see the images being generated and then cached on the fly. Hundreds of them are generated every second. Pretty cool eh? The uncool part was that it has had a few problems this last week. We recently received some images from our designers that were in a new format. (Who would have thought that there are so many formats for gif and jpg). At any rate the image

Published On: 1/29/2008

Filled under: image processing, landing pages

360 Views

Updated The Article System

I updated the way we handle articles this evening. We used to use Commmunity Server from telligent systems for blogging, but I found that it was too cumbersome and way too difficult to update. The themes are terrible to maintain so I build a system that meets our specific needs. Our new system is divided into topics that I hope our visitors will find relevant. Most of our main content will end up in the 'House Plans'. However, we hope to venture out a bit and include relevant content in the business section where we will talk about how we manage ThePlanCollection.com and our technology in this section. In addition, we have added a green building section where we hope to highlight methods of responsible

Published On: 1/25/2008

Filled under: ThePlanCollection

314 Views

New Technology Section

As part of our efforts to become more interesting and more transparent we have added a couple of new sections to ThePlanCollection.com. This section will focus on the technology we use, updates to the website and other technical issues that we find are interesting or relevant. Hopefully everyone finds this

Published On: 1/25/2008

Filled under: Technical things,

403 Views

The Plan Collection is on Facebook

When you are a small business and don't have an enormous development team you have to be careful about technology decisions. Most of our time is spent ensuring that our application is secure and running properly. Some of our time is spent adding new features including making changes to the design of the interface so that the website looks nicer. Then there is time that we spend working on search engine optimization (SEO). We prefer to spend our time trying to get organic traffic because one, it is the best traffic and two it is free if you dont count all the time we spend on SEO. Of course my justification for not counting SEO as a direct marketing expense is that it usually makes our site better when done right. Every once in a while we have a moment to breathe and we do

Published On: 1/14/2008

Filled under: ThePlanCollection, Facebook, small businesses, marketing, applications

631 Views

Need a Building? Just Add Water

I thought this article was worth sharing with you. Need a Building? Just Add Water As an emergency shelter alternative to tents, which provide poor protection, and prefabricated buildings that are expensive to transport, two engineers working on their master’s degrees at the Royal College of Art in London have come up with a “building in a bag.” Erecting the “Concrete Canvas” structure entails adding water to a sack of cement-impregnated fabric and inflating it with air. The volume of the sack controls the water-to-cement ratio, eliminating the need for water measurement. The Nissen hut-shaped shelter is dry and ready to use in about 12 hours. The inventors said they thought of the approach after hearing about inflatable structures that are built around

Published On: 3/22/2005

Filled under: Technology

1379 Views

Apologies in advance

I haven't been posting very often latetly - again. We are currently working on a new version of software for The Plan Collection and it is taking up quite a bit of my time. Hopefully the new version will better meet the needs of everyone who visits. If you have any suggestions or features that you desire go ahead and post them in the comments and we'll do what we can to add

Published On: 11/23/2004

Filled under: Technical things

1334 Views

Thanks for coming

As a software engineer there is nothing more gratifying then having people actually use the software you have created. Over the years as I have met new people, it is interesting to find how many have visited The Plan Collection. We receive many visitors each day from all around the world. When we moved our hosting services to a new provider this year our provider was shocked to see the amount of visitors that come each day. Whether you are looking for a home plan or just browsing for ideas thanks for

Published On: 7/2/2004

Filled under: Technical things,

1057 Views

About a blog

When you are a geek and spend ninety percent of you time in a virtual world you forget that the rest of the world spends their time doing things like going outside or actually talking to people. Not everyone has run across the "blog" phenomenon before. Blog is a shortened version of the phrase web log. Blogs are website where individuals may record their daily observations about various topics. They are a great way to disseminate information on a more personal level. In addition, you will find that most blogs include a link to an RSS or an Atom feed. These links are usually orange buttons, but may not always be so conspicuous. If you click one of these links you will get a page of text that is difficult to read. The text on the resulting pages is intended for

Published On: 6/29/2004

Filled under: Technical things, The Plan Collection Bloggers,

834 Views