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 don’t 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 something that is fun and interesting and that will hopefully lead to new opportunities. To this end we have created a Facebook application that lets users save house plans and then share them with friends. Users can also add comments to house plans and then watch what others are doing/saying.

We realize that Facebook applications are no longer bleeding edge, but this is a chance to see if any sort of meaningful interaction will take place in our application and discover if Facebook can provide benefits to small business. We currently have around 1300 users which is nothing compared to the most popular applications, but given that our application is very niche specific and our target audience is smaller it is a great start. Many Facebook users are in college or right out of college. As they get get ready to purchase their first home our hope is that they will use their social network to get ideas and they will find us there.

If you want to try out the application you will need a Facebook account. Then all you need to do is click here to install our house plans application.

How beneficial social networks will be to businesses like ours is yet to be determined. Creating an application might just burn up more of our server resources and bandwidth or it might bring users who buy something. It might be a great, free marketing resource or it might just give a bunch of kids a place to post vulgarities. Whatever the outcome we’ll keep posting to let you know what happens in this emerging space.

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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 useful.

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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 homebuilding.

Enjoy!

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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 processor was choking on some of some of the unsupported formats, throwing an exception, and then spewing out the 'Image Not Found' thumbnail that it likes to spit out when it gets lost.

This of course drove everyone in the office crazy because, well the image was there but the computer was telling then it wasn't.

Its fixed now.

In case you wonder what made the difference here it is:

This was the exception:
A Graphics object cannot be created from an image that has an indexed pixel format.

Here's the documentation from Microsoft

and here is the code I used to deal with the issue:

        private Bitmap GetTempImage(int width, int height)
        {
            Bitmap tempImage;
            if(_CurrentImage.PixelFormat == PixelFormat.Undefined ||
               _CurrentImage.PixelFormat == PixelFormat.DontCare ||
               _CurrentImage.PixelFormat == PixelFormat.Format1bppIndexed ||
               _CurrentImage.PixelFormat == PixelFormat.Format4bppIndexed ||
               _CurrentImage.PixelFormat == PixelFormat.Format8bppIndexed ||
               _CurrentImage.PixelFormat == PixelFormat.Format16bppGrayScale ||
               _CurrentImage.PixelFormat == PixelFormat.Format16bppArgb1555)
            {
                // None of the above types are support so 
                //just create a bitmap that uses the default pixel format
                tempImage = new Bitmap(width, height);
            }
            else
            {
                tempImage = new Bitmap(width, height, _CurrentImage.PixelFormat);
            }
            return tempImage;
        }

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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 hand.

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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 the ping and here's the code:

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml;
using ThePlanCollectionCore.Utils;

namespace ThePlanCollectionCore.DataFeeds
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Wrapper for xml rpc service
    /// that can ping ping-o-matic and other services
    /// when your blog is updated.
    /// </summary>
    static public class Ping
    {
        // List of services that accept an xml rpc ping.
        // If you surf around the net you will find many other
        // services but many of them are offline or 
        // appear to be junk.  Stick with the main ones.
        static private string [] _Services = {
            "http://rpc.pingomatic.com",
            "http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2",
            "http://www.blogsnow.com/ping",
            "http://www.wasalive.com/ping/"
            };


        /// <summary>
        /// Sends a ping to the above services using the given website name 
        /// and url
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="websiteName">The name of the website or blog
        /// that has been updated.</param>
        /// <param name="websiteUrl">The url of the website or blog
        /// that has been updated.  This should be an absolute root url
        /// not a direct link to the individual page that has been updated.</param>
        public static void Send(string websiteName, string websiteUrl)
        {
            for (int i = 0; i < _Services.Length; i++)
            {
                try
                {
                    HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(_Services[i]);
                    request.Method = "POST";
                    request.ContentType = "text/xml";
                    request.Timeout = 3000;

                    // Add in the updated page
                    BuildRequest(request, websiteName, websiteUrl);

                    // Send off the request
                    request.GetResponse();
                }
                catch (Exception ex)
                {
                    // Log the error.
                    Error err = new Error();
                    err.Title = "Ping Request Failure";
                    err.Body = "Ping to " + _Services[i] + " failed with error: " + ex.Message;
                    err.Save();
                }
            }
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Adds the requred xml to the request.  This includes the website name and url
        /// along with the method name 'ping' that will tell the remote servers that
        /// and update has been made
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="request">A http webrequest generated by the method 'Send' above.</param>
        /// <param name="websiteName">The name of the website or blog
        /// that has been updated.</param>
        /// <param name="websiteUrl">The url of the website or blog
        /// that has been updated.  This should be an absolute root url
        /// not a direct link to the individual page that has been updated.</param>
        private static void BuildRequest(HttpWebRequest request, string websiteName, string websiteUrl)
        {
            Stream stream = request.GetRequestStream();
            using (XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(stream, Encoding.ASCII))
            {
                writer.WriteStartDocument();
                writer.WriteStartElement("methodCall");
                writer.WriteElementString("methodName", "ping");
                writer.WriteStartElement("params");
                writer.WriteStartElement("param");
                
                // Add the name of your website here
                writer.WriteElementString("value", websiteName);
                writer.WriteEndElement();
                writer.WriteStartElement("param");

                // The absolute URL of your website - not the updated or new page
                writer.WriteElementString("value", websiteUrl);
                writer.WriteEndElement();
                writer.WriteEndElement();
                writer.WriteEndElement();
            }
        }
    }
}

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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 control should NEVER be cached.

There are other problems with caching in asp.net as well including a lovely problem with the varybycustom parameter when you do cross page posting. The fun part of that is that if you set the parameter in page one then post to page two where a second varybycustom parameter is set the framework coughs, sputters and throws an exception letting you know that the parameter has already been set. How about this guys. Instead of throwing an exception vary by two parameters?

Don't worry this code never made it to production. I am once again going to go in and deal with the caching programatically so that site will get a boost. However, it is frustrating when 'enterprise' frameworks like asp.net fail you in terrible ways. Come on guys even though you are Microsoft and the world is accustomed to being let down by you, you can do better.

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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 solution that would require extensive modification of existing software.
• The off the shelf software you choose is not so great.
• You can afford to do it.

In our case all the above criteria apply. I have written more than a few forums in the past in various programming languages so writing a custom one will only take me a few days. Now back to work I go.

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