Localized Ads Service Launched in Preview!

Fellow bloggers and site owners,

If you are using Amazon Associates, eBay Partner Network or any other affiliate program to monetize you blog/site, I've just launched a free service to help us make more money.

The service lets you display different ads according to the country of origin of your visitors. It is self hosted and it is as simple to use as Google Analytics. There is only a JavaScript snippet to include in your pages!

Your Own Google Earth Web Page Screensaver in C#

Here's my latest blog post... I'm saying 'post' instead of 'article' because this is more of a showcase than a tutorial. Code is provided as usual so the learning process is on your side at your will and your pace :)

What the screensaver actually dipslays is shown above (Earth plugin required). The screensaver is continually fetching the latest North American Tweets containing the #Google Hashtag from Twitter and displays them. Pretty nice!

SEO Tip: Dynamic Google XML Sitemaps Generation in C#

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S—is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.

- About Sitemaps - Webmaster Tools Help

Create Zoomable Images Using The Google Maps API

I visited the Google+ Project website the other day and to my surprise, it was powered by the Google Maps engine! It is somewhat creative to re-use the Maps engine for any purpose other than mapping. It is just beautiful.

It also reminds me of the Art Project I've seen a while back that uses the Street View engine. A must see.

Anyways, I'm pleased to show you two samples today: they both let you navigate into an image using the Google Maps engine. I'm also giving up the necessary tools to do it yourself. Enjoy!

Is Google Maps API v3 Down?

(Today June 22nd 2011, 2:50PM)

There's a problem with the Maps API v3: The inclusion of the main file is ok:

http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false&language=en

But it turns out it includes another file which is currently not found:

http://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_ALL/mapfiles/api-3/5/7/main.js

Anyone else experiencing this?

Happy Father's Day 2011!

"Father's Day is a celebration honoring fathers and celebrating fatherhood, paternal bonds, and the influence of fathers in society."
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father's_Day

Don't wait till it's too late to express your love to your father! Like me, you might be interested to some deals on

! Plus, in doing so, you'll support my efforts in bringing more and more articles online! Thanks!

HTML Validation: Let Your Browser Be The Markup Validator!

Here's a quick article on XHTML conformance. Learn how to serve your pages in ASP.NET with another content-type to make your browser stop on any parsing error.

Read on!

FIX: jQuery JSONP request to the Google Maps API Geo Service

A lot of you guys (including me) had a problem with the Maps Geocoding API. Google seems to have dropped the JSONP feature of their library. Well they still support it (otherwise their own client library would not work) and here's a fix.

Note: this applies to v2 only.

Uncommitted Reads in LINQ: Avoiding Deadlocks and Timeouts!

This short post today is about a performance enhancement in LINQ to SQL: Reading uncommitted data. You have to know that it's not a LINQ to SQL concept but a straight SQL Server concept.

But read on to know how they relate to each other.

ASP.NET Web Forms versus .NET MVC: Comparing apples with.. really old apples

I'll say it up front, I'm tired of using Web Forms :) I'm a professional web architect (it sounds huge, no it's not. I just do that for a living) and I personally think that it's a counter intuitive framework to deal with. I can't do MVC often since nobody around me is using it (I'm not mad at that fact by the way). But it's a shift I'd like we do, and why we should do it is the main goal of this article.

So walk through the light Homer!