i recently had an internal email come through on one of our distribution lists that asked who the owner of mysearchoff.com was. it wasn’t until that email came through that i realized that i completely forgot i built this thing over a year ago as an attempt to see for myself what search engine was truly providing the best results… live search vs google vs yahoo!.

because i built it in a couple days (the sql took the longest… i am just plain no good at database schemas and stored procedures), i really did not put much thought into it. that is until i saw that mail come through and the accompanying blog post.

so that made me go dig up the source code (i first had to find it… there is something to be said for source control even with just one developer) and update a few bugs and update the framework to .net framework 3.5. first i fixed the crashing in firefox 3. at the time i deployed it over a year ago, it was working in ff2 but times change and i guess so does “standards”. second, there was a z-order problem in showing the scroll bar for the yahoo! results. fixed that too.

since i spent the time to fix some of the bugs with my little engine that could, i thought i would set it as my default search provider (in ie, notice the search toolbar turn orange and allow you to add mysearchoff to your providers) to see how useful it really was. it turns out that i am using it more and more and really finding interesting results. it is extremely helpful in finding information since it basically gives me the best of three engines at once (although, nothing against you yahoo!, but i collapse your pane down most of the time). mysearchoff is now my default search provider in internet explorer and firefox.

i have had some really good feedback on what to add and would love to hear more so let me have it. also, don’t forget to click the green checkbox icon in the upper right to vote on the engine that gave you the best results (full disclaimer: i am not capturing any personal information when you vote. i am only capturing your search criteria and your vote).

 

Example search for “gorbett”:
my blog 1 on yahoo! (maybe i should stop collapsing your pane!)
my blog 2 on google (google likes me more than msft :( )
my blog 3 on live (wtf?!? show me some love msft. i work for you for pete’s sake!)

i have long prided myself on being a devigner (typically i would link back to a wikipedia article, but one does not exist... anyone interested in contributing?). this is a term that is starting to come back, but has been used for a long time by others that roll as a developer and designer. my fellow msft friend, adam kinney, talks about it here as well (although the designer force is much stronger with him).

anyway, as i was working on my site, briangorbett.com (yah... no link. you are already here. click the house icon in the upper right), i learned how asp.net 3.5 has made my development much easier and the growing complexities of site design has made my life a living hell.

let me start with the development. actually, there is not much to talk about here. with asp.net 3.5, i have never plumbed a site so fast. my homepage is rotating out the last 5 blog posts i made. in the past, grabbing the rss feed and manipulating the stream was fairly tedious. with asp.net 3.5, i did it in two lines. no, i am not kidding.

 

Dim xmlReader = System.Xml.XmlReader.Create(feedUrl)
Dim feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(xmlReader)

oh yah... i roll with vb baby!

there you have it. just replace feedUrl with your blog feed and you got it. one thing to note is that you will first have to add the reference to System.ServiceModel.Web (don't bother looking for System.ServiceModel.Syndication you silverlight fans... you won't find it unless you dig into the silverlight namespaces which won't work here). then do an imports (or "using" you c# fanboys) on System.ServiceModel.Syndication. here are my other "imports":

Imports System.ServiceModel.Syndication
Imports System.Net
Imports System.Xml

 

once you got that all wired up, have fun with feed items! in this case, i am adding posts to an arraylist:

For Each item As SyndicationItem In feed.Items
      feedList.Add("<a href='" + item.Links(0).Uri.AbsoluteUri + "'>" + newTitle + "</a>")
Next

there is actually a wee bit more code in my implementation because of browser differences in rendering (more on that in my next post).

 

slide.show silverlight slideshow
after that all the silverlight love goes to vertigo (you know... the guys that launched that crazy cool deep zoom site for hard rock at mix) for their slide.show silverlight application that is really easy to wire up to a flickr feed. i am pointing at a feed that will grow as me and my fellow msft evangelists post shots of events and general craziness. there are quite of few tweeks you can make to the app to suit your needs and are easy to change via an xml file. if only the formatting of the site was as easy as using this control.

 

my next rant... um... i mean post will discuss the challenges standard compliant design and browser compatibility gave me. i am still too flustered with losing a good full night of my life trying to somehow convince ie <8 ("ie less than 8" is my new term for all versions of internet explorer before version 8) that the css attribute inherit is really valid for other properties besides direction and visibility). i am starting to get mad just thinking about it... i have to take a breather before my next post.