Requiring a login just to read your content?

By
One of my little pet peeves is how some developer - oriented sites require you to log in in order to read their content, even though they appear to have taken pains to enable Google and MSN et al to index it.

Is this piss-poor, or what? I've practically memorized these sites already and when I am searching for something and I see a link to one of these sites, I don't even bother to click on it anymore.

These folks are advertising - supported too, and apparently they just haven't "got it"! Apparently they are happier shooting themselves in the foot than making advertising revenue from quality search-engine driven traffic!

Then there are the blokes who make you log in in order to download their "precious resources" (zip files of code, usually). What a bunch of HORSESHIT! People don't deep-link to other sites' downloads, they link to the articles!

Now, if you have a messageboard, sure I can see the validity of requiring a login so that you can track threads and provide email feedback notifications. We run a profitable site at eggheadcafe.com, we've never required users to log in to read our stuff.

I just don't get the mentality at all. Anyway, I've always seemed to be able to find another site where I can read up on what I'm searching for for free. And if I like their ads, I click. Isn't that what its about?

Enlighten me if I appear to be missing something, but it appears to me that these people are just a bunch of fyookin' idiots! On second thought, don't bother. Since I've already made up my mind they're idiots, most likely any explanation would be like farting into the wind.


HOW ABOUT BANKS?

While I'm on it (venting my spleen) How about BANKS?

Let's face it, most banks absolutely SUCK at customer service! They hide behind their internet banking facades and their Voice response systems. I needed some statement copies that we misplaced from last year. I walked into the lobby of the bank and basically was told by a bunch of incompetent boobs, "Call the 800 number". Well, the 800 number guy told me if I used their Internet banking, I could request statements there. So I did. Know what? They want $4.00 for each check image plus an additional fee for the fyookin' statement itself! Highway Robbery! So if I had a statement where I wrote 20 checks, they are into me for $80 bucks for a copy of a lousy statement! The other bank we use let's you get them online for FREE, and you can download it as a PDF in seconds!

You know what? When I start my first BANK, I'm gonna offer the "75+" account. If your IQ is over 75, I give you free checking. Doubt if any of the bank employees at my bank would qualify...


Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar


The Microsoft Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides a variety of tools for quickly creating, understanding, and troubleshooting Web pages. This version is a preview release and behavior may change in the final release.



Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Edelman8:24 PM

    SWEET SWEET LORD! I have been searching for a tool like this for AGES (months)!! Thank you so much for the link for the IE Dev toolbar. Finally, I don't have to rely completely on Firefox to tell me what the eff is wrong w/my code!

    Jason

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

By
I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b...
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

By
Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

By
One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m...
Read more

System.Web.Caching.Cache, HttpRuntime.Cache, and IIS Recycles

By
Recently I chimed in on a newsgroup thread to an OP (Original Poster) who was questioning why he was losing Cache items. This individual would load a dataset from the Cache object into a local object to use to perform processing. He had been using httpcontext.current.cache and noticed that sometimes he was not able to get the dataset out of the cache. He tried switching to HttpRuntime.Cache and it seemed to help. The OP claimed that the application is under heavy hits, and once or twice every month he would see this error. He wanted to know why does the HttpContext.Current.Cache call work sometimes, while some other times does not. A couple of posters replied, one of whom is a respected MVP who usually makes very astute, high-quality posts. He posted," The cache is only valid during the life of the request. how is you[sic] code using the cache?" Somebody else (also pretty astute, usually) responded, "Cache is valid during lifetime of application not request.....". W...
Read more

FIX: Requested Registry Access is not allowed (Visual Studio 2008)

By
Symptom: in Visual Studio 2008, you attempt to add a new WebContentForm and associate it with a MasterPage. You receive an error dialog "Requested Reqistry Access is not allowed". Don't ask me what caused this; I'm guessing that the registry keys involved had their access denied due to removal of a previous version of Visual Studio, leaving the new guy (Visual Studio 2008) in the lurch. Here's the fix: Download "subinacl" here . This is a command-line tool that enables administrators to obtain security information about files, registry keys, and services, and transfer this information from user to user, from local or global group to group, and from domain to domain. After installing subinacl.exe (it will be in the C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools folder.), drop to a command prompt and run the following batch file, which you have saved in the same folder with the filename "FIX.bat": subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudi...
Read more