Ping box from Yahoo!

It had been a long time since I had used Yahoo Messenger; however, I needed to install it and use it the other day, after doing so I found something which I found cool enough to blog about: Yahoo Ping Box!

With a couple clicks I was able to embed a yahoo messenger client right inside my blog. Or on any of my other sites / social networks. It was even easier then setting up AdSense. When you enter a nickname, my yahoo client is notified that so and so user has logged in. This is a negative in my opinion, as it pops up a little toast and it doesn't indicate it's from an anonymous source.

However it does warn you when you have an open chat window that it is from an anonymous pingbox user.

Get with the times!

I was checking my google analytics today (which I haven't done in ages), and I noticed something that was profoundly disturbing. In the last month, roughly 3% of the readers of this blog were using IE6.

Now I have nothing against Microsoft, (obviously since if you read my blog you would realize I develop using their tools), nor am I Microsoft hater; however, as web application developer, I strongly despise everything about IE6.

If your using IE6 or IE7 go upgrade already! Or go use FireFox.

Skinning a User Control

It's been a while since my last post, and while I have many ideas for posts, I have opted to spend my hours either working or enjoying my family; however, I came across a case today which will take only a second to blog about.

ASP.Net supports skinning and themes. If you don't know what that is I suggest you go search on it. In a site I am working on we have a User Controls, which are being used as Web Parts. A new requirement came up that depending on the theme we are using we will want to change the Title of the web part. So I fire up Visual Studio, and first thing was to add a new item to my skin file:

Navigating to the page resulted in the YSD (Yellow Screen of Death) with an error indicating that myControl couldn't be themed. The next step was to go and add a Themable attribute on the properties in the control I want to skin. You also need to add Themable to the class as well so you end up with:

[Themable(true)]
public class myControl : System.Web.UI.UserControl
{
     [Themable(true)]
     public string Title {get;set;}
}

At this point you can not skin your user controls. One thing I did skip is to make sure the skin knows about the user control. You can do this by registering it in the web.config by adding a record to the Pages\Controls section as follows:
 

You can also register it on the skin using the following declaration:

<%@ Register TagPrefix="myComp" TagName="myControl" src="~/Controls/MyControl.ascx" %>