adorr.net » Web Development

Format Numbers to Currency String in VB.NET

d0rr — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:30:49 +0000

I thought it would be helpful to share this piece of simple code

In VB.NET, it is pretty easy to convert a decimal number (say, 12345.6789) to currency format ($12,345.679)

Just convert the number using the lines of code as shown below:

Dim value_int As Integer = 12345.6789 ' original decimal number Dim digit As Integer = 3 ' to format it to 3 decimal places Dim value_str As String = value_int.ToString("C" & digit, Globalization.CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("en-US"))

Also check out other cultures available here.

WordPress & Google XML Sitemaps

d0rr — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 05:30:10 +0000

One of the most important element in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is to have your site indexed properly (and regularly) by popular search engines.

As of today, Google has a significantly huge market share of 84.96% (resource) and is definitely hard for website owners to ignore.

I’m going to walk you through on how I generated XML Sitemaps for adorr.net (powered by WordPress) and submit the sitemap to Google for in-depth crawling.

Before we proceed further, I would assume that your site is running on WordPress, as per stated in this post title.

Generate Google XML Sitemap

First of all, you will need to download WordPress Google XML Sitemaps plugin and install it on your WordPress site. If you haven’t know how to install WordPress plugin, check out the steps here.

** Do note that if your WordPress has Multisite feature turned on, follow this instruction instead!

Once you’ve got the plugin installed and activated, browse to Settings > XML-Sitemaps

Look out for a link button to “build the sitemap” for the first time. If you get a permission error, check the file permissions of the plugin files.

The plugin will then automatically generate the XML Sitemap file. Mine is located at http://adorr.net/sitemap.xml (default location is on your root, unless you changed it, check the value under “Location of your sitemap file”)

The next time you want to rebuild the sitemap, click on the link button “Rebuild the sitemap” on top of the plugin page.

This is, however, optional since by default the option “Rebuild sitemap if you change the content of your blog” is checked.

XML Sitemap to Google

Next, login to your Google Webmaster Tools account. If you haven’t own one, free registration is just a few steps away.

On post-login page, click on “Add a site…” button and type in your domain name.

** Make sure you have a consistent domain, e.g. www.adorr.net or adorr.net, since they are treated differently. If you need an idea on how to make this happen, check out my another post on this.

There’s a simple validation process, where you are required to add in an additional metadata onto your site header, within tag.

It should look similar to mine as shown below (except that with different content value, of course):

Once done, browse to “your site” > Site Configuration > Sitemaps, click on “Submit a Sitemap” button and type in your sitemap file and location (it’s sitemap.xml by default, unless you changed it in previous steps when generating sitemap)

It usually takes 5 – 15 seconds for Google to download your sitemap file and digest.

If everything goes smoothly up to this point, you shall leave the rest to Google Bot to crawl your site

Last but not least

There are a few other tools that you may find it useful, e.g. Crawl stats, Site performance, but I’ll leave that to you to discover.

Hope these simple steps will help you a little, if not much, on your site’s SEO.

Cheers!

Remove WWW prefix in your domain name, or vice versa

d0rr — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 03:26:32 +0000

I was doing some SEO for my site the other day when I came across some inconsistencies in my website URL. Some appears to be adorr.net while the rest are www.adorr.net.

Do note that this only applies to Linux hosting accounts.

This can be annoying for search engines listings, and even cause mismatching paths when using Google Webmaster Tools to submit sitemap.

This issue however can be easily fixed by modifying .htaccess, and I decided to go with shorter version of adorr.net without www

Below is how the first part of my .htaccess

* Remember to replace adorr.net with your own domain!

RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.adorr.net$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://adorr.net/$1 [L,R=301]

Do note that the code above is to rewrite all requests of www.adorr.net to adorr.net.

If you want it to be the other way round, use the following .htaccess instead

RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^adorr.net$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.adorr.net/$1 [L,R=301]

Cheers!

Absolute/Sticky/Floating Header and Footer

d0rr — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:51:13 +0000

People have been asking me about how to make a footer stick to the bottom of the screen regardless of which vertical position the browser screen is at. In other words, how to create a footer just like how Facebook does it.

First of all, there are two different types of footer which I’d like to classify them as Floating Header Footer and Sticky Header Footer.

Sticky Header Footer

There’s nothing special about sticky header, it’s just a header that appears at the top of web broswer screen and doesn’t follow (means it will disappear) when user scrolls down the screen. It sticks to the top of a webpage.

Sticky footer will behave in two ways. If a webpage content does not fill the height of user’s browser screen, it will fill the empty space (means footer will be pushed to the bottom of browser screen) and footer will appear as if it sticks to the bottom. If a webpage content is longer than the height of user’s browser screen, it acts the same way as the normal footer.

Sticky Header Footer Example

Floating Header Footer

The best example for floating footer would be Facebook. There is this footer bar which always appear at the bottom of your screen whenever you scroll your web browser screen vertically.

However, it may not work as intended in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), as expected. In the example below, an ActiveX workaround is shown. You may also want to consider disabling the floating header and footer by changing it to display: none; (as how Facebook did it)

Floating Header Footer Example

Hope this short article accompanied with examples will help some of you out there.

I do not go through the code line by line as I suppose the examples are clear enough to be self-explanatory.

Cheers!

Different CSS for iPhone and other portable devices

d0rr — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:22:32 +0000

With Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, Google’s Android smartphones and other portable devices gradually dominating the market, it is getting more important to optimize websites to look better in these relatively-smaller-screen portable devices.

If you have been in CSS game for quite a while, you may think that defining media=handheld will do the trick

@media handheld { .navigation { display: none; } }

Unfortunately Apple defined it in such that iPhones will look for “screen” media type instead of the limited “handheld” media which deem to be outdated.

The solution to this is to specify CSS rule that looks at the device screen resolution.

There are some sayings that Internet Explorer has issues ignoring the CSS rule, but that can be easily fixed with Internet Explorer’s “conditional comments” feature.

Conceptually, you can define a separate set of CSS for iPhone (or devices with width less than 480px) as follow:

And the iphone.css can be any CSS definitions that will overwrites the original CSS definitions.

Hopefully this basic and simple trick can help you to kick start your website revamp to cater for different sizes of portable devices.