I've release a new version of PopBox today, 2.7a. I would love to be excited about it but there is still one IE8 bug that is so far eluding me. It's probably simple but it's driving me crazy so I thought I would stick the script with the main fixes out there for you all now. Look for a 2.7b version in the future.

Actually - if anyone can figure out why the PopBars aren't positioning correctly for non-floated images in IE8 I'll give you a free copy of PopBox. Any takers?

As always you can get the latest version from the product page and I've updated the documentation page accordingly too.

Time sure flies. I've gotten a lot of email about PopBox's issue with IE8 and I promise I am still working on the script and will have an update soon. For those who don't know what the issue is, it seems that images only pop once under IE8. What? Did you want more than once? :)

I'm rolling in a couple of other fixes too for Chrome/Safari so it should be a good release for stability. New features will come next.

Some have been a bit nasty in their demands for a fix by the way... Don't they know you get better results being nice? I really do try to answer every email, but I do have a backlog of about two months right now so I'm sorry if you haven't gotten a response yet. If your question is on IE8 please accept this posting as your response. If your question is something else I will answer you when I can.

And the donations keep coming in so thank you guys (and gals) so much! I didn't do this for the money, but I will freely admit that a donation puts you right to the top of the email support response list. And that nasty tone? Right to the bottom. Karma.

I think it's today. I hope it's today. I'm pretty sure today is the day that PopBox gets a Computer Arts magazine article!

I'm actually still trying to verify this since I can't view the issue online and can't seem to be able to buy it either, but I'm pretty sure it's in the latest issue, No. 154, under "Image pop-ups: Product zooms for websites."

I was contacted a month ago by one of the designers of the Nora Does website, Laura James, and told that she had been asked to write a tutorial for Computer Arts magazine based on the functionality in the Nora Does website.

I'm flattered. Totally flattered. If you're not familiar with Computer Arts it is the premier digital artist magazine available online and in print. Don't believe me? Read these reviews for yourself.

Yes it's a UK magazine so I'm trying to get a couple of copies shipped to myself across the pond and I probably won't be able to see it myself for a couple of weeks. But if you're in the UK, and probably a lot of Europe, you can pick up your copy at newsstands now.

If you have read the article I would appreciate any feedback on it so please email me and let me know what you think!

And be sure to check out the Nora Does website and Laura's too. Both are worth the clicks!

I know what you're thinking... didn't John send out a PopBox announcement just last week?

Well yes I did. But that was for PopBox 2.6. This is for PopBox 2.6b!

There's only one small change, thus the "b" suffix. I modified the PopInPlace method to pop the image over the original, but also to move the image so it will fit in the window if necessary. It's a subtle but significant difference that I believe should make it much more useful for your visitors.

As an example you can look at the Links Page and hover over an image that is very close to the edge of your browser window. In the previous version it would expand only to the window edge. Now hover over an image that is only partially in the window with the rest of it beyond the screen. See how it moves to expand? In the previous version the image would actually shrink to fit within the window. Probably not what you intended.

As always you can get the latest version from the product page and I've updated the documentation page accordingly too.

A couple of new features have gone into this release along with a slew of bug fixes. Overall PopBox has been fairly stable as evidenced by the long interval between releases here.

1. Added the PopInPlace method to more easily pop the image in place instead of to the center of the screen.
2. Added the popBoxExpandCaptionsBelow global variable that will allow you to display the captions below the image instead of over the image.
3. Added the popBoxExpandCaptions global variable that will allow you to display the captions already expanded when the image is popped.
4. Added the RevertAll method that will cause all popped images to revert to their original size.
5. Fixed a few functionality issues that occurred when the page used the <base /> element in the header.
6. Fixed an image size bug where IE would cache the original size of the image. This mostly affected development but it was still a pain.
7. Fixed a positioning bug in FF & Safari when a <div> parent element used the overflow style.
8. Fixed a FF bug where the image would pop twice under very rare conditions.

As always you can get the latest version from the product page and I've updated the documentation page accordingly too.

I also finally created the Popbox Links page where you can see a gallery of web sites that are using PopBox. With over 10,000 downloads this is a very small sampling, but not many have sent in their url either. If you'd like to be included on this page let me know and I'll add you.

I continue to get donation requests so I'm finally giving in. Frankly, now that I only have a part-time job I could use the donations! You may do so on the PopBox Donation page.

FastSpring has added a new pricing scheme so I've added a second entry for them on the E-Commerce Calculator.

They are absolutely loaded with features by the way and seem to be able to do most anything to help your business.

I had previously mentioned that EC Suite was at the top of my list, but now I'm not sure. I think EC Suite might cost less, but they actually might not have as many features as FastSpring. Check them both out and see if you need what they have to offer.

I've been very nervous about the way the Safari 3.0 version handled DHTML interaction with image styles, but it looks like everything is going to be okay. The latest version, 3.1.2, seems to have corrected the matter.

When PopBox expands an image it doesn't actually expand the original thumbnail - it expands a small version of the large image and hides the thumbnail. This transition is pretty seamless and the effect is to look like the original image is popping instead of a completely different image. (This is assuming you're using a separate image for the thumbnail and the large image.)

The hiding of the original image is achieved in script by setting the 'visibility' style of the image to 'hidden', which works like a charm because it doesn't affect the layout or shift the original objects around but just neatly makes the image invisible. All browsers completely ignore all events that occur on an element whose visibility is set to 'hidden'.

Until Safari.

For some unknown reason Safari 3.0 decided that click events on these hidden objects are still valid events. So what do you think happened when someone clicked on the original hidden image in PopBox? Chaos my friend. Chaos.

There were a couple of ways to fix it in the code, but none of them were pretty and all were complicated just to support a browser that has a low percentage usage (2.4% as of this writing).

Now I don't have to fix it because Apple did it for me. Safari now behaves much like the other browsers and correctly ignores the hidden object events. Thank you.

On a related note I received a few vague bug reports for FireFox 3 beta, but I've not been able to duplicate any of them in the release version. Since I have a new version of PopBox coming out in the next week or so I would appreciate receiving any bug reports as soon as possible so I can roll them into the next version.

Today is day 2 of my new job. Yes - new job. With who you might ask? C6 Software. I know you've heard of them - you're reading the blog right now.

For years I've been planning to take the plunge and convert my fledgling consulting practice into a true software company and this is the first major step. Sure I've been working on it when I could - a couple of hours in the morning here and there, a late night once in a while, but this is different. It's major because I cut my consulting in half, working only 20 hours a week for my employer. This has freed up 20+ hours a week to focus on my business.

Ok, so it's only part time, but now my income depends on it. And that's a heck of a motivating factor.

I have a lot planned for the coming months and I'm happy to report that the work began well yesterday. I'm a proponent of Getting Things Done so I spent quite a bit of time yesterday clearing out my inbox and organizing my workspace. There was quite a bit to do but I'm more productive already.

A few changes were made to the E-Commerce Calculator in regards to table formatting and Paypal prices. And I finally had a chance to put iPortis on the grid. Many thanks to Charles out there for being so patient. If you're in the market for an e-commerce provider check them out!

PopBox is rapidly approaching 10,000 downloads which is pretty exciting. There is a major update coming very soon that will fix a few nagging issues, and believe it or not a customer wrote in an excellent solution to make PopBox 100% XHTML compliant and still be 100% backward compatible. I didn't not want to be compliant, I just didn't want to suffer a 'simplicity' penalty.

There are also a few issues with FireFox 3 and Safari that I'm trying to resolve. I can't make any promises with Safari though because they've really screwed up DHTML and script interaction. In every browser except Safari you can't click on an object whose 'style:display' is set to 'none'. Because Safari allows this it royally screws up Popbox. I hope they've fixed it in the final release.

And of course design is progressing on my commercial application. I've switched tacks here and am designing an application that I can reasonably write in a couple of months. Although my savings account will keep my family afloat for a good while I'd rather not tap into it any more than I have to, so if I can get something in the marketplace in early Fall I'll be much happier.

I might even have time for a longer article or two. Exciting times ahead!

I got an email this week from E-Commerce Suite (EC Suite) introducing themselves and asking for a spot on the E-Commerce Calculator. After a quick look at their site I was glad to oblige!

While not the cheapest option for a mISV they definitely have the most features - and all at the same low price. You can host your web site with a shopping cart, sell your products with your credit card of choice, include DRM and license keys and they'll even pay you weekly!

Here's what I wrote on the calculator page about them:

If you're looking for, well... everything in one package then check them out!

A lot of testing and feature requests have gone into this release and I think everyone will be happy with the results. There are a few bug fixes and a couple of new features that will probably make my non-English customers happy too. Yes - PopBox has been localized for your language!

Okay - so it was only two text fields, but it needed to be done.

If you use the pbSrcNL attribute then I would definitely get this upgrade as it fixes a major bug that somehow went unnoticed for months. If you use the roll-over feature you also want to get this upgrade. If you use landscape pictures you want to get this release. If you use PopBox at all you want to get this upgrade.

You'll like it. It's better than Cats. You'll want to use it again and again.

1. Added the capability to pop images in a landscape format where the image is automatically scaled to the height of the browser but will extend beyond the width if necessary to support wide images (ditto for tall images).
   For most customers this is 100% backward compatible, but if you are using the PopEx method instead of the Pop method you should take a look at the parameters as they now have extra functionality. See the function definition for details.
2. Fixed a bug that occurred when the pnSrcNL property was set to a relative path url. If you use the pbSrcNL instead of pbSrc then you need to get this upgrade.
3. Added a work-around for a browser bug where the image would sometimes not revert on roll-overs when the mouse left the image. This fix requires a few more resources but is only enabled for the page when you use the onmouseover feature. There is a global variable, popBoxMouseMoveRevert, that you can set to false to use the old method instead if you prefer.
4. Fixed a bug where the size of the image is incorrectly rendered during a revert if the command to revert the image is initiated prior to the image popping completely. This most often showed up on mouseover effects.
5. Set the minimum value for the top left corner of the popped image to 0,0 if the image is dynamically positioned (you pass in null for the left and top). Most browsers tested had difficulty scrolling to the left and this will solve that problem.
6. The "more" and "less" textual links in the caption are now contained in global variables to support other languages. Now you can set popBoxCaptionMoreText and popBoxCaptionLessText to "mehr" and "kleiner" or to whatever you desire - just keep it short or the length calculations will be off.

As always you can get the latest version from the product page and I've updated the documentation page accordingly too. In the following weeks I'll try to get it to print out correctly for those who don't like to view docs on screen.

I'm also touched by the number of you who have written in wanting to know how to send me money. Thanks, really. I've placed my official position on that subject in the FAQ page.

I have a good five days over the Christmas holiday to work on my next project so I hope to complete enough about it to blog about it here. Stay tuned...

Did you know you can place textual links in the pbCaption? This allows you to support things like "Buy Now!" links and "Add To Cart" links directly in the caption of the image.

It's a bit tricky but works wonderfully. I've written up a sample and added it to the FAQ.

I thought it was about time for an E-Commerce Calculator update since the last check was July 25. Only a few things have changed in the last 3 months.

We saw the demise of two vendors: Digital Candle and Virtually Free. I'm not sure if they just went out of business or were swallowed up by the Digital River juggernaut, but either way they're not around anymore.

I don't think anyone will miss Digital Candle, as they didn't really stand out as good or bad and there are plenty of others to choose, and I'm practically positive that no one will miss Virtually Free as they were easily the most expensive of the group. Sayonara.

Other than that I did notice this sentence on the Plimus fees page:

I've heard good things about their service, so you might want to call them up and see if they'll match Google's advertised rates (free). Tell them I sent you and I promise to publish the hate mail.

Frankly, I'd even be impressed if they'll match Google's advertised rates for 2008.

PopBox was recently mentioned in a few blogs that have a higher readership than mine, and from there it got stumbled, dugg, reddited and delicioused. Is that a word?

The point is that suddenly in the course of 24 hours PopBox went from 10-20 downloads a day to over 300 downloads a day. While I fully expect this to decrease again it has presented me with a much larger user base which means more support and more feature requests.

It also means more testing on more diverse systems under more unusual usage patterns. Thus the release of version 2.4 that includes one new feature and one bug fix:

1. Added events that fire before the image is Popped or Reverted. Now if you have UI elements on the page (such as <select> drop-downs) that always render on top you can hide them prior to the image Popping and then make them visible again when the image Reverts.
2. Fixed a sizing bug that occurred when multiple identical thumbnail images (with the same src value) each Popped to different large images.

If neither of these items affect your installation you don't need to update, but 2.4 is 100% backward compatible with 2.3.

I've also spent a little more time enhancing the Quick Start and FAQ page to better explain some of the features and how to accomplish common tasks. One of the biggest complaints that I read about on one of the blogs was that they wanted to use the "title" attribute instead of the "pbCaption" for the caption of the image.

Actually the fallback to title if pbCaption doesn't exist was built into the caption capability from it's initial release in version 2.1, but they're obviously having difficulty finding where it says that so I added it to the FAQ page. Check it out!

More fun stuff to come soon!

I know what you're thinking - yes they do. But really they don't.

"GLOBAL" and "LOCAL" don't complete the picture. A globally scoped variable is accessible from a stored procedure that is called by the first, and a locally scoped variable is only accessible from within the same stored procedure. But that's really pretty inadequate.

Can you tell me what the final result of this script will be?

If you said 'This is a test.' then you didn't look very hard.

If you said there would be no result because it would never leave the while loop then you correctly understand scoping of variables as used in most modern languages today. But you'd still be wrong.

The correct answer is null.

If you're shaking your head you had the same reaction I did when debugging a production procedure a couple of weeks ago. The declare @str2 varchar(50) only runs the first time through the loop. The second time it already exists and retains its value of 'test.' so it sets @str1 to null which ends the loop.

Of course when you add null and 'test.' you get null.

Next time when you think about scoping variables in TSQL remember to declare your variables outside the loop or explicitly initialize them to the value you want instead of relying on them to be null. You'll be much happier with the results.

This is just a small release to fix a bug in the PopBar where it wouldn't display if the image id attribute wasn't set. If you set your id attribute on your images then you wouldn't have experienced this.

I did discover something interesting though that you may want to know about if you do dynamic image creation in javascript: the variable returned from document.body.getElementsByTagName("img"); is a true pointer and not a copy of the array.

Why does that matter? When I create the PopBars I'm iterating though this array and checking each image for the PopBar attributes and creating the PopBar magnifying images as an overlay on the original image. When those overlays are created where do you think they go? Right into the document.body.getElementsByTagName("img"); array!

So for every image that has a PopBar image another image gets added to the array. That's another image my loop is querying for PopBar attributes that don't exist. This is just inefficient so I've instead copied the original array and am now operating on just the copied pointers. As a result the PopBars get created faster and I'm happier - and so are your visitors.

I really am working on other stuff too - I promise! I've got an article coming out in the next couple of days with more to come shortly thereafter.

I finally got over multiple colds and being really swamped at my day job so I could write up the Frequently Asked Questions page for PopBox. It's got quite a few answers to questions I've received about the product.

If you don't see your answer there please feel free to email me and I'll do my best to respond in a timely manner.

Over the past month I've received email from Avangate and Plimus requesting that I make changes to the E-Commerce Fee Calculator to make it more dynamic.

Many vendors do indeed have different pricing structures and since the calculator is cross-linked now I've been getting a lot of traffic to it, so it seems only fair that I make it more accurate. So as of today you can get true accurate pricing from the calculator without having to go to the vendor web site to make sure the percentages fit for your product.

As an aside it's nice to know that those two vendors have their fingers on the pulse of the mISV community enough to find my meager web site. That alone makes them worth a look.

This release of PopBox is just a bug fix release that makes it far more stable on most browsers, especially FireFox/Mozilla. There were a couple of nasty bugs that I didn't catch because my pages were loading too quickly on my development box and I didn't have time to see the problems of random clicking prior to completely loading the page.

The biggest bug found was pointed out to me by Richie Hindle of Entrian Solutions where the image would display if clicked prior to the page completely loading, but then wouldn't if clicked again after the page finished loading. Now I'd call that a bug!

At least that only affected the 3-4 people out there using FireFox. <duck>Just kidding!</duck>

Big thanks to Richie for going so far as to even create a Flash video of the bug so I could really see what he was seeing. It made tracking the problem much easier. If he puts that same level of detail into his other work then I'd say his products and services are certainly worth a look.

Another FireFox/Mozilla bug was found and fixed where the wait image wouldn't display if the image was clicked prior to completely loading. I detailed this in yesterday's blog.

And in more wait image wierdness it wouldn't disappear if you tried to pop the image multiple times prior to it completely loading. That's fixed too.

You can always see the full revision history on the documentation page.

Thanks to all for the support and comments. I have gotten a question or two on my software experiment starting next week, but I'm not telling anything yet. You'll have to wait. :)

I learned a valuable lesson this week while hunting down a tricky bug in PopBox, and I feel silly to have not known it already.

In script it's a common task to check an object to see if a property exists on it prior to trying to use that property. If you do any cross-browser work you know exactly what I'm talking about, but for those that might not I'll give you an example by showing you the line I used to check if an image was fully downloaded for display:

var isReady = (objToPop.readyState) ?
   (objToPop.readyState == "complete") :
   ((objToPop.complete) ? (objToPop.complete == true) : true);

For Internet Explorer an image tag has the "readyState" attribute that is set to "complete" when the image is fully downloaded, but Mozilla browsers, and other W3C standard-bearers, use the "complete" attribute.

Testing for existence is fairly simple between the browsers - you just see if the property exists with a simple check like
if (objToPop.readyState) { do something }

This is actually a shorthand way of writing
if (objToPop.readyState != 'undefined') { do something }

But there's a big problem with using the shorthand syntax in this instance on Mozilla browsers. While IE's "readyState" is a string, Mozilla's "complete" is a boolean. In the sample above Mozilla browsers would always return true.

var isReady = (typeof objToPop.readyState != 'undefined') ?
   (objToPop.readyState == "complete") :
   ((typeof objToPop.complete != 'undefined') ?
   (objToPop.complete == true) : true);

As you may have guessed I will be releasing another version of PopBox tomorrow with this bug fix included, so all you FireFox fans will finally get to see what the spinner wait icon looks like.

Sad to say, but there was an even larger bug in v2.1 that caused some really bizarre behavior with Mozilla browsers. But that one got fixed too and you should have a much more stable version tomorrow.

Thanks everyone for your feedback! I'm getting a lot of email and I appreciate your kind words. There have been a number of questions regarding functionality choices and tech support, so I will be putting up a FAQ page in the next couple of days also that should go a long way to answering your questions about PopBox.

I'm excited about starting my market/software experiment next week. Stay tuned...

I'm releasing PopBox 2.1 today. I've put in pretty much every requested feature plus a few I thought of myself and I can't think of what to do with it next. I suppose someone in the user community will come up with something.

It will be nice to get back to writing some articles and not-free software also. PopBox has been a fun project and a good learning experience, but I have a few other software projects that I want to release this year and they're all in a half-finished state. It will be nice to finish them too. Even so - if you have PopBox suggestions I am still open to hearing them.

Here's the list of new features in PopBox 2.1:

• Added the ability to display a caption for your images. If it's too large to fit on one line it automatically renders with an expanding capability.
• Added a "pbSrcNL" attribute to the <img> tag that allows for a different image to be used for the Popped image that is NOT preloaded. So if you'd rather the large image download when the user clicks this is the attribute to use.
• Fixed the stylesheet to display custom cursors in FireFox also.

It may not look like much, but it took some thought to get the caption to work correctly and I didn't have much time during the week to work on it. A couple of bugs were fixed also - one of them fairly significant. You can see the full revision history on the documentation page.

Remember to send me the url where you're using PopBox! When I get enough of them I'll create a page with the list. That's free advertising for you and a nice customer testimonial for me. Win-win baby. Win-win.

I guess FireFox does support custom cursors. Hmmm.

In previous testing of PopBox I just couldn't seem to get the magnifying glass icons to work correctly in FireFox, so I assumed that it just wasn't supported, but the reality is that I was lulled to sleep by Microsoft's excellent documentation.

I mean that in a good way - generally speaking. One of my primary development resources for years has been the MSDN Library, where you can find information on any Windows API and most companion products as well. For example, let's say that I want to see what cursor styles are available for use on an <img> tag. I would fire up my copy of MSDN Library, click "Contents" and navigate right to it:

Web Development -> HTML and CSS -> SDK Documentation -> HTML and DHTML Reference -> Objects -> img -> Styles -> cursor

Among the list of cursors supported in IE is one called "hand," which is the same as the "pointer" cursor used by other browsers. But all the Microsoft examples use "hand" when "pointer" would be cross-browser compatible. I didn't catch that.

So defining my custom cursor class like below didn't work in FireFox. Even though it understood the url cursor it wouldn't render because it bombed on the hand cursor type:

/* incorrect values for cross-browser compatibility */
.PopBoxImageSmall
{
   border: none 0 white;
   cursor: url(http://www.c6software.com/images/magplus.cur), hand;
}

But adding the quotes around the Url (oops) and defining a secondary cursor that FireFox can understand (pointer) made the difference.

/* correct values for cross-browser compatibility */
.PopBoxImageSmall
{
   border: none 0 white;
   cursor: url("http://www.c6software.com/images/magplus.cur"), pointer;
}

I guess I should have figured that Microsoft would gear their documentation toward their own products.

All I can say is that I'll do my best not to fall asleep again. In the meantime, if you're using the default PopBox stylesheet classes you may want to modify the cursor properties.

Speaking of PopBox - I've got a new version with more features and a bug fix or two coming out either tomorrow or Monday, depending on how much time I have for testing. The stylesheet fixes will obviously be in there too...

PopBox 2.0 is finally here!

From the email I've received people really wanted that true thumbnail image capability so I'm happy to report that it's in there.

I won't repeat myself actually - everything that I said would be in there on Tuesday did make it in, so just scroll down to Tuesday's post if you want the list of new features, or go straight to the PopBox product page.

Slated for the next release is the ability to define a caption for the popped image. I have a couple of ideas and have received 1 or 2 from other PopBox users on how they'd like to see it implemented. If you have any ideas let me know!

This is just a heads up that PopBox 2.0 should be coming out in the next couple of days. It is feature complete and I am just doing some compatibility and regression testing prior to calling it done. The documentation is almost finished as well, so barring something unforeseen 2.0 should be out by Friday.

It's much easier to use and the most requested features are all in there. Here's a list of enhancements:

• Allows for a different image to be used for the thumbnail and Popped image, with built in preload, caching and wait images.
• No longer need to add the call to Revert to your image tag. It will be called automatically.
• Added PopBar transparency, which allows you to overlay text on the thumbnail image also.
• Allows you to display the RevertBar and PopBar above the image or overlaid on the image.

When I released PopBox a couple of weeks ago the community received it very well and it looks like I may have been able to help out a lot of people. That's great and in part what it's all about.

I did however receive a request for the same feature over and over, and that was for a small "X" or close box in the upper right hand corner of the Popped image to make it obvious to the user how to close it.

I resisted this feature request for days, thinking that no user could truly not figure out how to close an image. It seemed simple enough to me - you click it to open, you click it to close. Since PopBox also has the ability to automatically close the image when the mouse cursor leaves the image I figured I had all the bases covered.

Besides - adding the close box to the upper right corner of the image would be hard.

But the request kept coming in. So I did what any smart man in my position would do: I asked someone smarter - my wife.

Gentlemen, you should all be as lucky as I to have the wife I have. Only go find your own of course. She said to me, "So you don't want to do it because it would be hard?" That pretty much ended the conversation.

Not to be outdone I decided to make my close box the fanciest, most functional, slickest and classy close box I'd ever seen. It's a multi-element transparency with text and an image that really allows you to direct the user as well as being intuitive.

My wife's comment? "You think you're pretty fancy, doncha!" That's all I need.

You can check it out at the PopBox product page, and I've finished the documentation page as well.

Do you have a web site? Do you display small images that represent larger ones such as "thumbnails"? Or do you need to dynamically move or resize images on the page? Then you need PopBox!

With only a few simple modifications to your web page your thumbnail images will be "popping" out of the screen when visitors click on them instead of reloading a time-consuming second page.

PopBox is an image magnification javascript solution for dynamically resizing your images on your web page, with only 3 simple lines of HTML/Javascript code. And it's free!

I've written up an introductory article on PopBox, or you can go straight to the product page now!

The planned network upgrade went very smoothly today and the web site was down for only a couple of hours from about Noon to 2:00.

My average speeds are now:

• Download Speed: 9466 kbps (1183.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
• Upload Speed: 10994 kbps (1374.3 KB/sec transfer rate)

I know that's not a big deal for most businesses with T1s and such, but for running my server from home over fiber DSL that's great!

Product release tomorrow...

Due to a planned network upgrade the web site may be down for a couple of hours on Wednesday, May 23 in the afternoon PST. I don't have an exact time or length of outage but I'm excited about the prospect of much faster speeds.

I'm also still on track to release my product on Thursday, so remember to check back!

My current internet provider here in CA is SureWest, and I personally haven't had any problems with them. In fact, they have been very easy to work with and have even upgraded my speed once or twice without a price increase which is always nice. Well, they're doing it again.

On May 23 they have scheduled me to get a fiber drop and a bandwidth increase to 1MBps synchronous. The fact that this is a synchronous connection means that my upload speed will be the same as my download speed, which makes a big difference when you run an internet-facing server on my side of the connection. Late next week you should notice a big difference in page responsiveness.

The only downside that I can see is that they tell me I will need a new IP address and could be down for up to 4 hours, so I've decided to delay my product launch until the day after the upgrade so as to avoid any outages so close after launch. I don't really expect a flood of visitors to be trying to get through but I do expect the product to become popular (and not just because it's free) and I'd rather not look flaky.

So if you have a lot of images or screen shots on your web pages be sure to check back on May 24!

I've been sidetracked for the last couple of weeks with a completely different product, but I got excited about it and totally went for it. I finished it this morning but I can't release it until the web docs and product page are complete so I'm working on that. It sure takes a long time to produce anything on only an hour or two a day.

I won't get super specific on what it is right now, but I will say that it's a great little javascript library product that will greatly enhance any web page that displays images. Did I mention it's free?

I should be able to release it early next week and then I can get back to my commercial product.

On the Business of Software site we had a discussion of e-commerce providers where we talked about the good and bad of creating your own e-commerce system vs. going with an established 3rd party provider. I thought it would help if there was a comparison matrix that would allow you to see the costs before you made a choice, since it's difficult to decide between a provider who offers 1.9% + $0.21 per transaction or one who offers 2.1% + $0.19 per transaction.

The numbers obviously depend on lot on your product price, but I've just made it all easy to calculate for you with this handy matrix. It's changed my mind!

My fiber router went down today taking me offline for about an hour. Someone was, a-hem, checking some telecom lines with a multimeter and accidentally sent a little shock through pins 1-2 of the RJ45 interface cabling.

I didn't notice the outage until I tried to access the internet about a half hour later. I got lucky that rebooting the router solved the problem and I've promised myself NOT to touch those lines again. Traffic to my site is on the rise but it's still pretty low, so it's a silver lining that probably few people noticed. :)

Over the course of the last month or so there has been a lot of talk on the blogs about recursion. It's being touted as a great way to separate the good programmers from those who don't know what they're doing, but I think in the middle of all the praise it should be noted that despite the benefits of recursion it has a nasty downside: Recursion doesn't scale.

I suppose that somewhere in the heart of the mass of cubes it settles down to a dull hum, but here on the edge traffic is considerable. Just a few days ago a cube mover was pushing a squeaky-wheeled cart down the aisle and the pitch of the wheel squeak was like fingernails on a chalkboard. I had to cover my ears and hum while I had flashbacks of Eddie Murphy plugging his ears and yelling "I'm not listening to you!"

I've already received email about my rss feed showing duplicates. I know - it's a pain but I really needed to make my feed standards compliant if I was going to continue doing this. It's better to do it now than a year from now when there would be a lot more entries. If it's really really bothersome you can delete the feed and re-add it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I also noticed that compression was wreaking havoc with my SSL-enabled pages. Response time was literally in the minutes instead of seconds. That obviously won't work for e-commerce. Either the FlatCompression filter can't correctly compress a https stream or my lamo server CPU can't handle the load of compressing and encrypting. It's a pretty old server so I'm betting on that. I was able to add FlatCompression headers to keep from compressing those pages and the problem was solved. Since I can't afford a new server any time soon I'll have to structure my e-commerce/shopping cart pages to be under a different directory or subdomain so I can easily add these headers in IIS.

After only a week of getting up at 4:00 I got a lot done, but this morning after the daylight savings time change it proved too difficult and I slept in. I told you 3:00 was too early! I'm ready for tomorrow though.

I've spent the last week making some changes to my web site and its infrastructure to make it easier to navigate. Most of these changes are subtle but there are a few big ones too. All this is in preparation for the e-commerce I expect to run in the next month or so for both my site and my wife's.

The first thing I did was enable compression on my web server with the free FlatCompression ISAPI filter. I was using IIS 5 built in compression, but it apparently wasn't working and I've recently read about a few bugs with it anyway. Eventually I'll upgrade to IIS 6, but for now I am very happy with the way this is working out. You should notice much faster page loads.

The second thing I did was to completely revamp my rss feed. It turns out that I was not standards compliant on a bunch of issues, and perhaps more importantly I had not set the <ttl> element of the <channel> so some feed readers were pinging way too often. I just don't have the time to update more than daily so I set my ttl to 1440 minutes (24 hours). I also excluded the hours I'm typically asleep and Sundays because I'm not working then either. I hope that will reduce traffic to the rss.xml file to something manageable as this site grows. You can see all these changes by viewing the source of the feed xml file.

The next change I made was to eliminate the CodeSolutions menu choice and place all the solutions in the Articles section under the "Solutions" category. You can click the "+" to the left of the Articles header to open a categorical list. I made this backward compatible by keeping the old pages there, but redirecting them server-side with Server.Transfer(). Very fast and efficient.

Then I created a reverse chronological archive page and have on the back-burner an online reader page so that a reader can step through the blogs from start to finish if a reader were so inclined to do so. This is all a little overkill since at the time of this writing there are only 21 entries, but I expect it's value will be made evident in the future.

I have also created "Permalink" entries by each blog date so that you'll have a reference to return to this entry easily. Again - this is something I expect will show true value later. Along with that the default number of entries displayed has been set to 12 so page load times will be snappy, and there is a "Previous" link at the bottom if you want to see more.

All these changes are pretty easy in .NET. I know a lot of people are using specialized tools like WordPress, but I really don't see the advantage when you have access to a full development environment like I do. Maybe there isn't one?

In posting articles it has always been my goal to be helpful to others, and so in the spirit of helpfulness I will be publishing a series of posts on how to start your own company and more importantly on my real-time experiences transitioning from a consulting company to an Independent Software Vendor. I'll also post thoughts that originate from my day job too.

I love to program, BUT... I'm getting tired of programming for someone else. So now that my side projects are complete I'm going to take my morning block and use it to increase my Micro-ISV business.

Funny that I should call it that actually, since I only have one product so far, and it's free. That certainly isn't going to support the family. Maybe it's more like a micro micro-ISV. The idea here is to create software that actually helps people and become profitable in the process, but my issue has always been with time.

I should preface this with a little background information… I already make a good income through my consultation, so money really isn't the problem, and yet it is the problem as well as time. As I mentioned in a previous article, every dollar I make requires me to put in time working for it since I'm an hourly consultant. In addition to my regular gig I normally have a number of side projects that keep me busy but it's starting to grate on me. It's a good thing I don't need a lot of sleep.

A good income doesn't mean that I'm rolling in dough or anything. I have a wonderful family with a beautiful wife and three boys who are all supportive of my software habit, but we've accumulated some expenses, mostly relating to the kids, that keep the well fairly dry most of the time. I guess it proves that no matter how much you make you can find a way to spend it. What I'd like to do is match my consulting income with software revenue so that I can get out of the consultant business and spend more time with my family.

So from here on out I get up at 4:00 AM every day! I was getting up at 5:00, but with my day job starting at 8:00 I don't really have enough time when you remove time spent showering, eating breakfast and playing with my family. I end up with about 1.5 hours of usable time. That's not bad over the course of a week (I get up early on Saturdays too) which gives me about 9 hours a week, but if I get up at 4:00 I can add an additional 66% for 15 hours. That one extra hour makes a huge difference. Don't even try to recommend getting up at 3:00 - that's going too far!

I'm going to accomplish this by simply going to bed when I'm tired, which is usually around 11:00 PM. I expect this to shift to 10:00 within days of getting up at 4:00. I base this on Steve Pavlina's excellent article on getting up early that has worked for me so far. The other reason for the shift is that I can't work at night because it keeps my wife awake, but she won't wake up once she's asleep.

I guess I should explain my work environment. I live in a ~2000 sq. ft. home in Northern California in the suburbs. I love the neighborhood and would like to stay where I am, but we are definitely cramped on room. Life is about compromises though. We have a formal dining room that is NEVER used and a 4th bedroom that has been converted to a playroom for the kids downstairs off the kitchen. Two bedrooms upstairs are for the kids and there is the master bedroom for us. So unless we convert the dining room (not going to happen) or I move into the play room (which incidentally my wife has already done to run her other business), the only place left for me is the wall of the master bedroom.

I don't have the latest and greatest computer. I don't even have an LCD monitor. But I have the latest development environment and the will to produce. Feel free to support my advertisers so I can spend more time on writing and coding. :)

So over the next couple of weeks/months here's a partial list of the articles I hope to write, interspersed with other entries:

• Starting a company.
• Incorporating.
• Choosing a company name and logo.
• Choosing a product.
• Preparing for e-commerce.
• Writing your own shopping cart.
• Writing a technical specification.
• Releasing a product.
• Advertising your product.

As always every article will have examples and code snippets that you can copy or download. I have a few articles on the back-burner that relate to contracting that I will finish and get online also.

Wow. It's kind of nice getting up at 4:00!

I was going through my old programs trying to see if I could jazz something up to sell and I came across a Visual SourceSafe crack tool I wrote way back in 2000. Now I know that SourceSafe isn't the most secure application, but it's really not even close to being secure, and with the advent of Microsoft's Team System I felt I could release this tool without worrying about the security ramifications.

Of course I'm not the first to offer password solutions for SourceSafe - a search on the web will reveal many, but I appear to be the only one who is offering an actual tool, free. Why free? Frankly SourceSafe is too easy to crack to charge for it and there's already so much information publicly available. The tool is pretty fun actually because you'll easily see just how lame the security really is.

This article lists 4 separate ways to hack into SourceSafe and provides a link to a free tool as well.

I've always been a big fan of Andy Marlatt's work on SatireWire and thought I'd try my hand at a satirical news posting. I had fun writing it so whether you have fun reading it or not I will probably do a couple of these a year.

This "news release" pokes fun at Microsoft's release schedule and product line up, touting a release of a new version of Windows Vista with the "Vasta" tagline.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article on streamlining your company from the top down and I really wanted to follow it up quickly with some tips on how to do this from the bottom up as well. Unfortunately I came down with two separate illnesses over the holiday season that kept me from writing for almost two weeks.

Although I may have wanted to complete this article as the last one for 2006, perhaps it's an even better note to begin 2007. So here are a couple of tips on how to streamline your company from the bottom up.

One of the benefits to being a consultant is that I've worked for a large number of companies over the past 10 years, and I've seen a variety of corporate structures and cultures – some good and some not so good. There are a few key points that those with the most explosive growth have in common and I've tried to capture those points here. Not coincidentally working for these companies has also been the most rewarding.

Here are a couple of tips on how to streamline your company from the top down.

"These two events got me thinking of the symbiotic relationship that I have cultivated with my manager and how we have helped each other along the way."

Here are a couple of tips on how to advance your career by making your manager look good.

It's been over two years since I've added an article to my site - so why now? Well, when Joel Spolsky posted an article about what he'd like to see in a resume I responded innocuously to his reddit that a contractor resume was totally different. And my server got hammered.

My traffic thus far had been very light since I didn't publicize the content, but suddenly I'm cross-posted and showing up near the top in Google searches and being crawled with a greater frequency than before. My other articles started showing up in searches. And then my code solutions. And then someone signed up for my mailing list.

That mailing list link has been on my site for years and no one had signed up since 2004. I sort of figured that since I hadn't written anything in so long I didn't have to worry about new sign-ups, but that single sign-up became two, then three, then many. It got to the point where I had to reexamine whether I should finish those articles I'd started so long ago and I thought - what the heck! You might all regret it now...

So I plan to post something new roughly once a month or more often as time is available. I'm typically swamped and really don't expect to post more often than that, but we'll see how things go. I'm really looking forward to this!

My first article back comes at a time when I am reviewing my career options and wondering if I'll be able to support my growing family and still retire on more than social security - as if there will be anything left for us. I realized that as a developer there were really three tiers of software revenue from which to choose, and it may be time for me to make a change.

Feel free to pass out the URL for my mailing list (http://www.c6software.com/EmailList.aspx) or alternatively you can grab my new RSS feed (http://www.c6software.com/rss.xml). I do read all my mail and feedback is appreciated.

Thanks,
John

I obviously favor being a contractor over a permanent position at a company. That's not to say that if the right offer came along I wouldn't entertain it, but generally speaking I really enjoy the contractor lifestyle. For any of you who may be interested in jumping in but are a little nervous about the temperature of the water I have written a few guidelines that might help to make the transition a little easier.

This is a difficult market to be looking for a job, but that comes with the territory of a technology marketplace. I feel sorry for all those big company employees who have lost their jobs, because many of them have lost the skills of finding new employment. It makes me glad however that I'm a contractor, because I believe we are better suited to weather a difficult job market.

Since I started programming in C# in 2002 it has quickly become the language I use for almost every project. It's really quite amazing to note the speed at which this technology has taken hold of the industry.

I only have one sample from the many projects I have done so far simply due to scheduling constraints, but more are coming in the future.

If you've used Response.Redirect(url) in your ASP.NET applications you've no doubt come across the sparsely explained ThreadAbortException. Here you'll find an explanation and two simple solutions.

I've rarely been to a job interview for which I was qualified and not been offered the position. This certainly doesn't mean that I was necessarily more qualified than the other applicants, but it does mean that the hiring manager thought I was a better fit for the position. There are a few things you can do in an interview to tip the scales in your favor.

Since I began contracting the longest I've been out of work, unwillingly, is a week. That's a pretty good record considering I was steadily employed through the .COM bust. I attribute a good portion of this to having a good résumé, without which I would have never been granted the interview.

Many of my business colleagues who were looking for work asked me to review their résumés and provide feedback, and I found that I had quite a bit to say on the topic and was repeating myself to a different person every couple of weeks. So instead of fielding more requests on this topic I've compiled the thoughts in one location: Designing a Contractor Résumé.

At almost every contract I've held I've been offered a permanent position by my manager or the manager of another group, but I have yet to take any of them up on their kind offers. Each of those companies had a lot to offer a prospective employee, and a few of them expressed surprise that I wouldn't jump at the chance to sign on, but there are some very compelling reasons to remain a contractor.

When I set out to start my own company I didn't have much of a plan. I expected it to fall into the category of "Just hang your shingle out and fend off the wave of business requests." It didn't exactly go that way...

What I realize in retrospect is that I didn't have a plan for my company. I didn't really know where I wanted to take it and my uncertainty kept me floundering. It took me a while to realize that in the absence of luck you need to have a goal for your company if you want to be successful.

There are a lot of these multiple-reader single writer locks available. There is an excellent one written by Jeffrey Richter that you can find in his book Programming Applications for Microsoft Windows, but it lacked something I needed for a specific job I was working on. I needed a class that allowed for multiple reentry into the lock from the same thread or arbitrary object. Thus my MRSWSync class was born.

This script allows you to launch any Windows Scripting Host file on another computer. You may need to have the latest Windows Scripting Host installed.

This script file will allow you to set the Microsoft Exchange 2000 mailbox manager schedule with a simple script. Use it with the RunRemote script below and set all your mailbox servers at once from a central location.

This is a simple class for cryptographically manipulating strings.

Do you work with VARIANT dates? Or DBTIMESTAMPs? Or maybe you prefer time_t, tm or FILETIME? Well, I got so fed up with converting one type of time to another that I finally wrote a class that did it all for me. I don't know if this class can be used in commercial software since I shamelessly "reused" code from Microsoft's olevar.cpp in MFC for two of the functions, but it sure is nice for internal applications!

Like most network administrators I used registry files to quickly insert values into the registries of clients on the network. Scripting these with a standard .reg file was the way to go and these files were simple to create and deploy.