A few years ago search engines like Webcrawler, Alta-Vista and LookSmart where the most popular homepages that users selected. It was from there that most of their forays onto the web started.

Then the search engines started to turn themselves into portals to try and emulate the earlier successes of CompuServe and AOL - which in part lead to the success of Google who declined to join the features race and kept a philosophy of a very lean homepage that did one thing very well.

The Portal+Search paradigm (I love that word, so '90s) worked well when the web was dominated by the large, resourced media companies who brought us our news, sport and weather and gave us a hopping off point to search. Yahoo!, MSN and sites like CNN became the logical choice to have as your homepage if you wanted more than search - after all, they all had a 'search the web' box fairly prominent (usually powered by Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Alta-Vista or one of the many that where part of the search engine arms race).

The rise of user generated content - the blogsphere, podcasts, rss and the whole Web2.0 community - is changing the landscape yet again.

Sure, I still care about world news, local weather and upcoming movies. But there are also half a dozen blogs that I like to keep an eye on (some personal, some company mouthpieces) as well as keeping track of all those sites that keep track of things for me (eg Del.icio.us), find stuff for me (eg digg) or just plain entertain me (eg YouTube).

That has created a new market for smart, open, inclusive portals that can help aggregate content from all over the place (mainly thanks to the wonders of RSS, but many support an API that allows people to build gadgets / widgets to suck data in and present it in a variety of ways). Similar to the concept pioneered by the folks at Konfabulator (now Yahoo! Widgets) but as a hosted service you can access from any web browser.

It's hardly a surprise that the incumbent portals are adding this functionality (sometimes in a limited toe-in-the-water fashion, in others whole-heartedly embracing it) but it's fun to see how some of the new aggregation portals are stacking up.

Google have managed to keep their light touch with their personalised homepage. Seach is still central, and if you're scared by all this new content it's really easy to go back to classic Google. Microsoft have made a good opening salvo with the new Live homepage (after a pretty shaky start in beta I'll admit to being quite pleased with the current incarnation even if it is still a little light on gadgets and pre-defined feeds)

What's really interesting though is seeing some of the new players appearing on the scene. My current favourite is NetVibes. They have a great set of tools and a really slick Ajax interface and seem to be rolling out new modules and functionality on a weekly basis (and having just raised a $15m investment probably isn't going to hurt). If you don't like NetVibes then there are many others! PageFlakes is another new but rapidly evolving DIY Portal creator with a different look and feel.

I'm curious to see how this is all going to shape up over time. Will one of the new players rise to dominance because they've got the right presentation and a capable product (like Google did - appearing pretty much from nowhere to dominate search in a very short time) or will one of the big players (Microsoft, Google or Yahoo probably being the logical choices) come up with a de facto standard for widgets that can roll out on aggregator portals and desktop PCs and then it's just down to whose ID service you want to use to sign in with...

A few years ago search engines like Webcrawler, Alta-Vista and LookSmart where the most popular homepages that users selected. It was from there that most of their forays onto the web started.

Then the search engines started to turn themselves into portals to try and emulate the earlier successes of CompuServe and AOL - which in part lead to the success of Google who declined to join the features race and kept a philosophy of a very lean homepage that did one thing very well.

The Portal+Search paradigm (I love that word, so '90s) worked well when the web was dominated by the large, resourced media companies who brought us our news, sport and weather and gave us a hopping off point to search. Yahoo!, MSN and sites like CNN became the logical choice to have as your homepage if you wanted more than search - after all, they all had a 'search the web' box fairly prominent (usually powered by Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Alta-Vista or one of the many that where part of the search engine arms race).

The rise of user generated content - the blogsphere, podcasts, rss and the whole Web2.0 community - is changing the landscape yet again.

Sure, I still care about world news, local weather and upcoming movies. But there are also half a dozen blogs that I like to keep an eye on (some personal, some company mouthpieces) as well as keeping track of all those sites that keep track of things for me (eg Del.icio.us), find stuff for me (eg digg) or just plain entertain me (eg YouTube).

That has created a new market for smart, open, inclusive portals that can help aggregate content from all over the place (mainly thanks to the wonders of RSS, but many support an API that allows people to build gadgets / widgets to suck data in and present it in a variety of ways). Similar to the concept pioneered by the folks at Konfabulator (now Yahoo! Widgets) but as a hosted service you can access from any web browser.

It's hardly a surprise that the incumbent portals are adding this functionality (sometimes in a limited toe-in-the-water fashion, in others whole-heartedly embracing it) but it's fun to see how some of the new aggregation portals are stacking up.

Google have managed to keep their light touch with their personalised homepage. Seach is still central, and if you're scared by all this new content it's really easy to go back to classic Google. Microsoft have made a good opening salvo with the new Live homepage (after a pretty shaky start in beta I'll admit to being quite pleased with the current incarnation even if it is still a little light on gadgets and pre-defined feeds)

What's really interesting though is seeing some of the new players appearing on the scene. My current favourite is NetVibes. They have a great set of tools and a really slick Ajax interface and seem to be rolling out new modules and functionality on a weekly basis (and having just raised a $15m investment probably isn't going to hurt). If you don't like NetVibes then there are many others! PageFlakes is another new but rapidly evolving DIY Portal creator with a different look and feel.

I'm curious to see how this is all going to shape up over time. Will one of the new players rise to dominance because they've got the right presentation and a capable product (like Google did - appearing pretty much from nowhere to dominate search in a very short time) or will one of the big players (Microsoft, Google or Yahoo probably being the logical choices) come up with a de facto standard for widgets that can roll out on aggregator portals and desktop PCs and then it's just down to whose ID service you want to use to sign in with...

Many moons ago when I was playing with various Linux builds and comparing to OSX and WinXP I'd been looking at the desktop apps to see if it was possible to exist as a "linux guy" in a Windows world. For me the biggest issue was something that would take the place of Outlook (not Express. The grown-up version). On OSX it's an easy choice. It's called Entourage - and in some ways it's still slicker than Outlook 2007.

For Linux users the Outlook equivalent has always been Evolution. Sadly it was never available as a Win32 port (and one the one occasion I was foolish enough to raise the question the fanboys tried to roast me alive and I never went back!)

Well, turns out that in the long run I was right! Reading Chris Porillos (sometime acerbic but always amusing) blog I came across news of a workable port of Evolution to Windows that tidies up some of the idiosyncrasies of the official port (which had also escaped my attention - I've been playing with Outlook 2007 beta and not seen the need to keep hunting alternatives). Shame Evolution looks ugly but it's great to see the functionality is now here and stable.

I'm not going to try it for the moment... got a bit too much work on at the moment to spend the time it deserves to see how it all hangs together, but I hope the folks from the Outlook team at Microsoft do take a long look at it - just to keep them on their toes - as well as Thunderbird and the forthcoming Lightning mail integration to help keep Outlook out there as the tool of choice...

Many moons ago when I was playing with various Linux builds and comparing to OSX and WinXP I'd been looking at the desktop apps to see if it was possible to exist as a "linux guy" in a Windows world. For me the biggest issue was something that would take the place of Outlook (not Express. The grown-up version). On OSX it's an easy choice. It's called Entourage - and in some ways it's still slicker than Outlook 2007.

For Linux users the Outlook equivalent has always been Evolution. Sadly it was never available as a Win32 port (and one the one occasion I was foolish enough to raise the question the fanboys tried to roast me alive and I never went back!)

Well, turns out that in the long run I was right! Reading Chris Porillos (sometime acerbic but always amusing) blog I came across news of a workable port of Evolution to Windows that tidies up some of the idiosyncrasies of the official port (which had also escaped my attention - I've been playing with Outlook 2007 beta and not seen the need to keep hunting alternatives). Shame Evolution looks ugly but it's great to see the functionality is now here and stable.

I'm not going to try it for the moment... got a bit too much work on at the moment to spend the time it deserves to see how it all hangs together, but I hope the folks from the Outlook team at Microsoft do take a long look at it - just to keep them on their toes - as well as Thunderbird and the forthcoming Lightning mail integration to help keep Outlook out there as the tool of choice...

One thing that slows me down a fair bit as a developer is when I want to post a code sample in a blog. It takes forever to get it formatted just right, or I use an external tool and have to mess about with cut'n'paste and hope everything is good

Well, one nice thing about the Windows Live Writer is that thanks to it's plug-ins most problems will probably get solved in the tool and I won't have to go scratching around any more.

The latest neat add-on I found is a Syntax Highlighter that supports multiple languages and is one-click easy to use - adding this sample was as easy as copy from the original source, paste into the highlighter and then hit insert to put it into the post.

<%
	fileFld = request.files(0)
	If fileFld Is Nothing Then
	Else
		if fileFld.ContentLength > 250 * 1024 Then
			ErrMsg(2) = "Error - File must be less than 250Kb"
		Else
			If (fileFld.ContentType).ToLower() <> "application/pdf" Then
				ErrMsg(2) = "Error - Filetype must be PDF"
			else
				PDF = System.IO.Path.GetFileName(fileFld.FileName)
				fileFld.SaveAs(Server.MapPath(uploadDir & PDF))
			End If
		End if
	End if
%>

There's not much about it that I'd like to see change/improve apart from maybe for it to have a full understanding of the VB.NET classes, methods and properties just so I can get a bit more colour in here... but compared to what I had before this is a real help.

Of course, now I just need to start writing better code!

One thing that slows me down a fair bit as a developer is when I want to post a code sample in a blog. It takes forever to get it formatted just right, or I use an external tool and have to mess about with cut'n'paste and hope everything is good

Well, one nice thing about the Windows Live Writer is that thanks to it's plug-ins most problems will probably get solved in the tool and I won't have to go scratching around any more.

The latest neat add-on I found is a Syntax Highlighter that supports multiple languages and is one-click easy to use - adding this sample was as easy as copy from the original source, paste into the highlighter and then hit insert to put it into the post.

<%
	fileFld = request.files(0)
	If fileFld Is Nothing Then
	Else
		if fileFld.ContentLength > 250 * 1024 Then
			ErrMsg(2) = "Error - File must be less than 250Kb"
		Else
			If (fileFld.ContentType).ToLower() <> "application/pdf" Then
				ErrMsg(2) = "Error - Filetype must be PDF"
			else
				PDF = System.IO.Path.GetFileName(fileFld.FileName)
				fileFld.SaveAs(Server.MapPath(uploadDir & PDF))
			End If
		End if
	End if
%>

There's not much about it that I'd like to see change/improve apart from maybe for it to have a full understanding of the VB.NET classes, methods and properties just so I can get a bit more colour in here... but compared to what I had before this is a real help.

Of course, now I just need to start writing better code!

It was a little thing, but it bugged me with CommunityServer.

I could never include HTML or JavaScript in a specific post. Some HTML worked, other HTML just got stripped out (had driven my mad trying to style images initially.

I'd posted on the CS forums but not had any luck until I found this answer which basically said I should have RTFM in the first place!

Of course the functionality was as designed, and (of course) there is a way to fine-tune it. In this case in the <markup> section of the CommunityServer.config - it allows you to specify what tags and parameters are valid (and any not on the list simply get converted to safe markup. It's very clever. And just goes to prove I really should try and find more time in the day to read manuals!

It was a little thing, but it bugged me with CommunityServer.

I could never include HTML or JavaScript in a specific post. Some HTML worked, other HTML just got stripped out (had driven my mad trying to style images initially.

I'd posted on the CS forums but not had any luck until I found this answer which basically said I should have RTFM in the first place!

Of course the functionality was as designed, and (of course) there is a way to fine-tune it. In this case in the <markup> section of the CommunityServer.config - it allows you to specify what tags and parameters are valid (and any not on the list simply get converted to safe markup. It's very clever. And just goes to prove I really should try and find more time in the day to read manuals!

Even after many years of hacking up HTML pages it surprises me when I discover some new tricks. Or even better old tricks than now work how you expect them to! One of the great things about the forthcoming IE7 release (currently at "Release Candidate 1") is how it's adding a lot more consistent and correct support for CSS. Things like the hover attribute now work everywhere, not just on address links. Now if only Safari would implement the <label for="{id}>label text</label> I'd be happy (oh and if the CSS folks could trouble themselves to come up with a decent 'float:bottom;' type solution for site footers/copyrights that doesn't involve too much fiddling around).

Anyway, I digress. The two old yet new goodies I found (while, as usual, hunting for something totally unrelated) are firstly the <optgroup> sub-element for a <select>... it allows you to group related items together while not itself being selectable

<select>
	<optgroup label="Sites">
		<option value="s01">BigBrother</option>
		<option value="s02">ClubAV</option>
		<option value="s03">AMD Means Business</option>
	</optgroup>
	<optgroup label="Clients">
		<option value="ess">Endemol Southern Star</option>
		<option value="csa">Cat Savard Advertising</option>
		<option value="zzarg">Zzarg Advertising</option>
	</optgroup>
</select>

The next discovery is the <fieldset><legend> pairing. This allows you to create a block of related fields with a common boundary. And it's stylable with CSS. In fact, with the new IE7 style capabilities you can even change the look when it has focus

<fieldset>
	<legend>Log In:</legend>
	<label for="un">User Name:</label> <input id="un"> 
	<label for="pw">Password:</label> <input id="pw" size="10">
</fieldset>

<style>
fieldset {
	width: 450px;
	border-top: 1px solid #efefef;
	border-left: 1px solid #efefef;
	border-bottom: 1px solid #cccccc;
	border-right: 1px solid #cccccc;
	padding: 1em 1em 1em 1.5em;
}
fieldset:hover {
      border: 1px solid #ABC2EC;
    }
</style>

It all goes to show... you can teach an old dog new tricks. And it's even better when the tricks are actually old ones, that now just happen to work fine!

Even after many years of hacking up HTML pages it surprises me when I discover some new tricks. Or even better old tricks than now work how you expect them to! One of the great things about the forthcoming IE7 release (currently at "Release Candidate 1") is how it's adding a lot more consistent and correct support for CSS. Things like the hover attribute now work everywhere, not just on address links. Now if only Safari would implement the <label for="{id}>label text</label> I'd be happy (oh and if the CSS folks could trouble themselves to come up with a decent 'float:bottom;' type solution for site footers/copyrights that doesn't involve too much fiddling around).

Anyway, I digress. The two old yet new goodies I found (while, as usual, hunting for something totally unrelated) are firstly the <optgroup> sub-element for a <select>... it allows you to group related items together while not itself being selectable

<select>
	<optgroup label="Sites">
		<option value="s01">BigBrother</option>
		<option value="s02">ClubAV</option>
		<option value="s03">AMD Means Business</option>
	</optgroup>
	<optgroup label="Clients">
		<option value="ess">Endemol Southern Star</option>
		<option value="csa">Cat Savard Advertising</option>
		<option value="zzarg">Zzarg Advertising</option>
	</optgroup>
</select>

The next discovery is the <fieldset><legend> pairing. This allows you to create a block of related fields with a common boundary. And it's stylable with CSS. In fact, with the new IE7 style capabilities you can even change the look when it has focus

<fieldset>
	<legend>Log In:</legend>
	<label for="un">User Name:</label> <input id="un"> 
	<label for="pw">Password:</label> <input id="pw" size="10">
</fieldset>

<style>
fieldset {
	width: 450px;
	border-top: 1px solid #efefef;
	border-left: 1px solid #efefef;
	border-bottom: 1px solid #cccccc;
	border-right: 1px solid #cccccc;
	padding: 1em 1em 1em 1.5em;
}
fieldset:hover {
      border: 1px solid #ABC2EC;
    }
</style>

It all goes to show... you can teach an old dog new tricks. And it's even better when the tricks are actually old ones, that now just happen to work fine!