Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

A view engine provides Controllers with the ability to translate views into HTML. There are multiple reasons why you may choose one view engine over another . Here is a list of different types of ASP.NET MVC View Engines, the first two are available with ASP.NET MVC 3 - WebForms /ASPX – classic ASP.NET MVC views Razor (CSHTML) Spark NHAML  -  (pronounced enamel) is a pure .NET implementation of the popular Rails Haml view engine. NVelocity  Brail It is possible to use multiple view engines in the same project Related reading: ASP.NET MVC View Engine Comparison Spark and NHaml - Crazy ASP.NET MVC ViewEngines

A relevant comic strip introduced into an article or presentation can make a topic more appealing & livelier (assuming you have permission to use if it's not your own). Finding the image of a strip on the web that you remember reading in a Sunday newspaper may not be easy. Don't you wish there was a comics search engine that could get you cartoons for a keyword you submit? Here are a few that I found - Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine by Michael "Bing" Yingling Dilbert Strip Finder  by BF Martin XKCD - use this search filter on Google: [keyword -site:*.xkcd.com site:xkcd.com]. The first filter is to exclude searches within subdomains of xkcd.com . The content is indexed by Google because each strip has hidden text.   Related: Software industry related comics

To show that DuckDuckGo, a search engine site winning rave reviews, doesn't " filter bubble " or track you, they have illustrated guides to demonstrate how Google may not be as saintly or good as it may appear. The facts they present are something to ponder on. On a different note, DuckDuckGo provides a great API alongwith other goodies like the easily configurable Karma Widget  that displays your online karma (e.g. twitter follower count, facebook fans, etc.), for your blog, profiles or other Web sites. Here's how a sample Karma Widget looks - Related: Say Goodbye to Privacy

Using a Print stylesheet is a more convenient way to generate a printer-friendly page than creating such a page through server-side coding. Tim Connell has a nice CSS tip in his article on things to note while coding a stylesheet meant for printer output . At some point, you have probably found yourself reading a printed article when you get to an engrossing section that includes a link for more information. A link that sits there teasing you with its blue underline. Without a mouse or Apple’s latest interfacing doo-​​hicky you have no chance of finding out where that link goes unless you return to the original article on screen. The solution to unclickable links is an easy one to deploy. Use some CSS to print out the location of the link that would otherwise be hidden: #content a:link:after, content a:visited:after { content: ” (“ attr(href) ”) “; font-​​size: 80%; text-​​decoration: none; } As a result of using the above CSS content property setting in the stylesheet mean...

Interesting points from BuiltWith.com's Mobile Web Technology Report 2011 - The growth of the mobile web is staggering, with approximately 726 million people having access to a 3G mobile subscription The viewport meta tag was originally designed by Apple to resize the layout viewport of a website, a requirement for the mobile device to understand how the website designer has defined how the content should be displayed to the end user. Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and iPhone all support the viewport meta tag Close to 3% of the top 10,000 sites use the viewport meta tag  Of the top 100 sites most visited on the internet, 71 of them have content specifically designed for mobile devices. The remaining 29 either do not support mobile devices or, depending on the device, prompt the user about a device specific application. jQTouch is currently the most used mobile JavaScript library (38%) in the top million sites, shortly followed by JQuery Mobile (32%), both of which a...

There are currently close to 400 videos on Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel featuring Matt Cutts who answers questions posted to the Webmaster Help Forum or to the Twitter handle @googlewmc. Occasionally, some Google secrets slip out in these videos . You can also pick up some tips & tricks on SEO by watching these typically 2-minute videos. If you are SEO inclined, the videos have some interesting titles that draw you to find out the answers. I track updates through their YouTube channel RSS feed. I sometimes wish the answer was part of the intro that comes with the feed so that I can find the answer immediately. For future reference, I plan to jot down summaries of these videos while I watch a few of them every week. Here goes the list ( Last updated: 8-May-2014 ) - *  Is there a version of Google that excludes backlinks as a ranking factor?  (19 Feb 2014) No *  How can you tell if your site is suffering from an algorithmic penalty, o...

I've used cross-browser testing tools like Adobe BrowserLab, Browsershots & Expression Web SuperPreview but didn't know there were a dozen more. Smashing Magazine has done an exhaustive review of all available cross-browser testing tools with a nice tabular summary at the end for easy comparison. It covers the following list of tools - Free: Adobe BrowserLab Browsershots Expression Web SuperPreview (free and commercial) Lunascape 6 IETester IE NetRenderer Spoon Sauce Labs (free and commercial) - 200 free minutes/month Browsera (free and commercial) Browserling (free and commercial) Commercial: Mogotest Cloud Testing BrowserCam Multi-Browser Viewer CrossBrowserTesting