Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This NYTimes technical post explains it well: The “www” is a subdomain, a specific area within the domain, but not all sites will use it. If the address works with or without the “www” prefix in the address, the site’s administrator has mapped things out so that both addresses point to the location of the server’s Web content. If the site has not been configured to automatically serve up the pages if you leave off the “www,” you usually get a message saying the site cannot be found. In that case, you need to type in the “www.” Related: HOW TO make a website accessible even when "www." is not appended before the domain name 

In Jeff Brand's article explaining the Simulator in Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8 , he talks about the DOM Explorer & JavaScript Console. I was happy to know about these features because unlike the Developer Tools for Internet Explorer (F12 shortcut key) which can be used to debug web applications I had not come across anything similar to debug a Windows 8 Metro app after it has started. The article doesn't explicitly mention how to access these options. I found that after you run the app (F5), these options are present under the Debug > Windows menu item. I however miss a IE Developer Tools Network tab equivalent. Using a separate HTTP debugging tool like Fiddler tool appears to be the only way to monitor network traffic when you're building a Windows 8 Store app that uses Web-based APIs.

MSDN documentation is a great reference but for learners getting started with Windows 8 app development using JavaScript, the maze of links within the articles can be distracting. Here is a collection of end-to-end, free technical resources that I've found so far: Jeff Brand has written a nice article series on building a Metro-style HTML/JavaScript app on Windows 8 . The articles are short, simple & well-written. The content is also available in video format.  The PDF version of the Apress book Metro Revealed: Building Windows 8 Apps with HTML5 and JavaScript by Adam Freeman is available as a free download from Microsoft 12 of the 17 chapters of the free ebook Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from MS Press are available for previewing. The complete book will be released on 26th Oct, 2012 Also see: Free 42 episode video series on HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript for Beginners Get Microsoft certified in HTML5 with exam 70-480

While responding to JavaScript questions on online Q & A forums, I find it a hassle to create a HTML page ( EditPlus is my favorite editor , its Ctrl+B option lets you run your HTML page within the editor) every time, to build & test my sample code. I've found Rajasekharan Vengalil's  JavaScript eval console very helpful to run small snippets. The author of the tool has provided the code as well, so you can use it locally ( link to zipped file ) or try the online version . Related - C# Snippet Compiler

If you have time to kill & just Google at your disposal, you can search for your favorite cartoonist's comic strips. I discovered this tip from a Quora thread on Gary Larson. To see Gary Larson's The Far Side cartoons, type  Gary Larson cartoons in the Google Search box & then choose Images from the options in left. Zoom in ( Ctrl + + ) to make the  preview images bigger & readable. click on image to enlarge  Similarly, you can replace the artist's name or cartoon series title with that of your favorite while searching.

The popularity of the Q & A site, StackOverflow (and the related Stack Exchange family of sites) is such that product companies appear to be using it as a platform for tech support rather than set up a dedicated forum. This post in the Google Code blog announces that Google engineers will monitor StackOverflow and answer questions on Google Drive SDK posted with the tag google-drive-sdk. - 0 - (Update: 20/Nov/2013) The Mozilla team has announced that it will watch out for questions on Firefox OS app development and Open Web Apps that are tagged firefox , firefox-os , html5-apps - 0 - Among others, I've seen team members of products like ASP.NET, Windows 8, Facebook, Gmail, Google Reader contributing answers. Here's a list of such team members (in topics I follow) that I've found so far - Microsoft Scott Hanselman Larry Osterman Pavel Minaev  (Visual Studio) Doris Chen  (Evangelist) Jared Par Eric Lippert James McNellis David Mako...

Compared to 7 editions of Visual Studio 2010, the freely downloadable Visual Studio 2012 Express has the following 4 editions: Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8 Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Desktop Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Express 2012  - provides small teams of up to five developers with source code control, work item tracking, and build automation for their software projects so that  they can deliver predictable results. Visual Studio Express Editions support connecting to TFS Express Some interesting features of Visual Studio 2012 from the launch video - End tags will automatically change when the start tag is modified Full Intellisense for HTML5 elements & attributes VS Automatically inserts event handler & opens code-behind when you write an event declaratively for a server control Vendor CSS prefixes are automatically added for some CSS3 style definitions ...

1) Consolidate details of your Contacts at a single place - Gmail lets you import contacts (select the Import Contacts link in the left side bar when you're within Contacts) from multiple sources. As  it supports importing CSV files from Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Eudora and some other apps , you can consolidate all the information about Contacts within Gmail. 2) Configure Gmail Contacts as a search provider within Chrome & Opera- When you normally search for your Contacts, the URL pattern looks like this - https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#contacts/search/ %s .. where  %s is the search parameter. You can use this pattern to configure Gmail Contacts as a search engine option within Chrome  & Opera so that you can assign a shortcut to invoke it from the browser address bar. I've assigned "c" to be a shortcut for  Gmail Contacts. So now, whenever I need to search for a Contact I type "c" in the Chrome address bar,...

Expression Encoder is a free screen capture program   that can extract video & audio of anything playing on your computer. Following the capture, the playback screen capture output file (XESC) can be edited and encoded into a desired audio/video format. While it is possible to extract both audio & video, I wanted to extract just the audio. After some casual searching, I did not find any articles online so I tinkered around a bit and found a roundabout way - * Follow these detailed steps to initiate screen capture with the Expression Encoder Screen Capture tool * Before starting the screen capture, provide the lowest values possible for the various Screen settings to keep the file size of the output file short. * In the Audio tab of Settings, select the playback device and optionally provide the highest values in the Format & Bitrate dropdown boxes to get an audio file of the highest quality possible. * Reduce the region to capture to...

Windows 8 Reader is an app that lets you read .XPS & PDF files. So, you don't have to install Adobe Acrobat Reader or its updates anymore. Though minimalist & light-weight, it feels like a half-baked product & is inadequately documented. If you are using Windows 8 Reader on a desktop rather than a tablet, you get things done faster with keyboard shortcuts -        F8 -  Toggle View Modes (Two Pages, One Page, and Continuous) Ctrl + R - Rotate Ctrl + H - Highlight text Ctrl + +/- - Zoom in/out Ctrl + P - Print Ctrl + O - Open Ctrl + A - Select All Ctrl + M - View Recently Opened files Ctrl + G - Jump to a specific page Ctrl + S  - Save document after highlighting text or adding notes When you close a file after highlighting some text within it, there is no indicator to let you know it's unsaved. Related: My favorite Foxit Reader keyboard shortcuts

Not everyone can hope to study at the world's top universities. However, the internet is a great leveller and if you desire to learn there are plenty of resources ...many of them free! Coursera , a company founded by academicians from Stanford, is partnering with top universities in the world to offer free online courses for anyone to take and learn at their own pace. I recently signed up for the  Gamification course (Thanks Sid !) and I'm loving it! My teacher, Kevin Werbach, is an Associate Professor at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Gamification is the application of digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges. The Gamification course examines the mechanisms of gamification and provides an understanding of its effective use. This piece of insight about human psychology in a course lecture I was watching, made my day: What Things are Fun - From the vid...

Chrome Dev Relations guy & Web Standards champion, Paul Irish chatted up with the Bangalore JS community on Twitter a few days ago. He shared tips & revealed interesting facts about Chrome Dev Tools. Excerpts (paraphrased at some places to provide context): My favorite hidden feature in Chrome Dev Tools is shift-esc which reveals the console in slow-mo. You can now emulate User Agents, and screen size of a lot of devices...& emulate touch events. Soon geolocation spoofing. ..a more recent addition is "Force Element State" where you can force an elem into :hover mode.  new: in the console $_ now refers to the most recent returned value in the console. $0 refers to the element inspected. so, click on a tag in the elements panel, and $0 in the console refers to it. ..if anyone has any feature requests or trouble areas the DevTools could help with, Holler at me. I'm your man. the other complement to $0 is inspect(elem) inside console will switch over to ...

The State Of E-Commerce Checkout Design 2012 study has some interesting findings drawn from benchmarking the top 100 grossing e-commerce websites’ checkout processes: The average checkout process consists of 5.08 steps - Advice:  don’t focus too much on the number of steps in your checkout — instead spend your resources on what the customers have to do at each step, as that is what matters the most for the checkout experience. 24% require account registration -  Of the 23 websites that had more than $1 billion in online sales, 65% of them did not ask for account registration. 81% think their newsletter is a must have (opt-out or worse) -   .. of those 81% of the websites that think their newsletter is a “must have”, 32 of them proceed to do something even worse than pre-checking a checkbox: Amazon is just one of the 32% of the top 100 grossing e-commerce websites that automatically signs customers up for their newsletters, without clearly informing ...

HTML5 is not a standard yet but all browsers support its features to varying degrees. Starting from August 2012, Microsoft even has a certification on Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 (Exam 70-480) . Passing this exam paves the way for achieving Microsoft's new MCSD Windows Metro style Apps and Web Applications tracks. Except for a Classroom Learning resource, there are currently no other official resources . David Pallmann, who has successfully passed the exam, informs that you would need to work in HTML5, CSS3 & JavaScript for at least a year to pass the test. For preparation, he relied on Pluralsight online training, W3Schools & lots of hands-on work. Related: I passed the 70-480 exam! Free exam voucher for "Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3" (70-480) test Free 42 episode video series on HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript for Absolute Beginners Get ready for HTML5 Free Pluralsight videos