Google Co-op Search and Expression Web (Designer)

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Google Co-op search has been worked over very nicely. I am expermenting with one in the footer of these blog entry pages. This particular one does targeted search on .NET-related topics, and searches a long list of blogs, including many from the Microsoft Bloggers OPML, which I have imported. I hope to add more soon.

Here is the homepage of the co-op search.

You can also open these up for collaboration by sending invites to others, and then have a whole group of people that can add target search sites/ blogs to your Search Engine.

This isn't as open as I had hoped, because it appears you have to invite your collaborators first. My theory, instead, is to let anyone add a search target site or blog, and then the admin(s) would either approve or disapprove it. I say this because they've done a very nice job on their custom Google Groups. I started one about open - source software sometime ago (has over 200 members now) and as admin, I can go on and set settings for new users, moderate posts, and even kick somebody off if it becomes obvious that all they joined for was to post job-listing spam. So the Custom Search will need features like this to compete and become a true collaborative environment.

I currently have some 1346 blogs in the search facility (you can add sites in bulk, and it accepts both RSS/ATOM feed urls as well as regular HTML urls to a page or site). You cannot add more than a couple hundred at a time, however, since the JSON dies on the vine with too much baggage. Being able to add straight OPML would be a nice feature.

It's funny that I ran across this today, since I had already started on something similar. Now I'm encouraged to continue working on it. (Mine will be better!)

Expression Web



Working with CSS and positioning is a weak point for a lot of ASP.NET developers, myself included. It's a full-time career to become a professional web designer (and from the looks of many ASP.NET sites, that's a self-fulfilling prophecy) -- codemonkeys simply do not have the time or inclination, except in special cases, to earn those kinds of skills.

CSS support in IE 7.0 has been enhanced quite a bit, with over 200 fixes in the release version of the product. I've always used Dreamweaver to do my positioning and styling, not only because it is good - especially 8.0 which hardly ever crashes - but also because it doesn't mangle server tags from an ASP.NET page. So, I can do my layout and CSS, and then save and reload the page in VisualStudio.NET for server-side coding.

But now there is Expression Web. My first impression? Pretty damn slick. It has CSS features, a "web site" facility that's better than Dreamweaver, and you can actually design and live-preview an ASP.NET page - including Master Pages -- with all the ASP.NET controls right in the Expression designer.

Take a look - it's still Beta, but if they keep working on it like this, its a sure winner.
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. Robbe Morris9:21 AM

    Hmm. The search at the bottom doesn't work for me. Trys to send it to this url:

    http:///?cx=006498929212005832858%3Am_ul2dqhe5i&q=Peter+Bromberg&cof=FORID%3A9

    ReplyDelete
  2. peterbromberg9:32 AM

    It's still in the experimental stage, dood. Be patient!

    ReplyDelete

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