Revium

Cross-domain login in ASP.NET

Evgeny Petrov — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:17:39 +0000

At the moment we are extending a classic asp website and a new ASP.NET CMS (let it be website A) is a main part of this upgrade. However significant part of that old ASP website (let it be website B) remains intact and that part is going to serve authorised users only. There is a catch with these requirements – login page to website B should be part of the website A. Ideally website B code should not be changed. These 2 websites ate technically different and belong to different domains.

I’ve found a nice way (and I think elegant enough) to implement these requirements. It may be clearer if displayed in these steps:

New form tag

As ASP.NET pages already contain a default form tag, I’ve created another one just above the normal ASP.NET . The purpose of this form is to submit (http post) data straight to another website.

AJAX login validation

Instead of normal ASP.NET form validation use a javascript based AJAX validation – when Submit button is pressed, go server side with AJAX and check if user name and password are valid. If not – display a message as normal, if it is valid – go to the next step.

Javascript form submit

Use javascript/jquery to insert values into loginForm form inputs and then submit loginForm dynamically. The other website would process your http post request as normal and accept your login credentials.

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Revium Introduces New SEO blog

Steven Wade — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 04:16:15 +0000

We are proud to introduce our new SEO blog. Our SEO blog will provide up to date SEO information ,
latest SEO News and Tips on Search Engine Optimisation.

Keeping on top of the latest SEO news and the latest SEO techniques is a full time job , this is where the Revium SEO blog comes into its own.
We will keep you posted with all the latest Tips , tricks and news from the big three Google , Bing and Yahoo.

SEO is a vital part of any online endeavour, it can make or break a business. The art of SEO is exactly that an Art, there is no such thing as a blueprint that will work for every SEO campaign. There is also no such thing as the SEO Silver bullet. SEO should be a constant trail of action. With all this said there are certain techniques that will boost and help your SEO Campaign.

So Be sure to check out our new SEO Blog at http://seo.revium.com.au . Where we will offer the latest Tips and trick on SEO.

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Revium gets another menton on Smartinvestor.com

David Mclaughlin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 02:38:19 +0000

Revium has recently been quoted in the Smartinvestor.com online publication regarding the introduction of a turn key website product suite offered by Google aimed at entry level business customer. Read the full detail here.

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Social Media Presentation at DM Forum

David Mclaughlin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:13:18 +0000

Last night I gave a presentation at a regular Direct Marketing Forum in the city. The topic of my talk was “Social Media – Tapping Into The Commuincation Revolution“.

For those of you that attended and would like a copy of my slides, we have posted them on Slideshare.net.

I’ll be posting a blog entry in the coming day or so, summing up the key concepts covered in my talk – so stay tuned!

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Windows SharePoint Services Help Search – SPSearch Starting Error

Mark Wiseman — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:22:14 +0000

I was installing SharePoint for the thousandth time last week on our new internal server and could not get the Search Server to start successfully from Central Administration. When i tried to start the service i got an error page with 2 short lines of text:

Error
SPSearch ([search service account])

After a day of verifying all the users details and permissions it hit me to try to use the domain before the username. This simple change fixed everything but i can’t remember ever running into it before.

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Team building in 2010 – Comedy & Chinese

Andrew Ellett — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 04:14:05 +0000

If you need to phone any of the Revium team members on the evening of Friday 19th February, you’ll need to get us at the comedy festival. We’re off to the Last laugh Comedy Club to remind ourselves that life isn’t all about work!

If you do ever join the Revium team you’ll find that we regularly organise company team building events. This time it will be a meal, drinks and then out for some laughs. Last year we had a day at the Flemington races in the Bird Cage, a paintball afternoon and regular meals and drinks.

Whilst consistently performing quality work is really important, at the same time we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Life isn’t only about work and finding an appropriate work/play balance is something we encourage everyone to remember. Work hard play hard together is a motto we often use.

On the work front, in the last two weeks we’ve launched some major appications for Simply Energy, put several websites live in the consturction industries, installed a new development server in the office and arranged a new rack mounted hosting deal with Netspace to upgrade the speed and performance of several high profile client applications.

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Federal Government to Introduce Compulsory ISP Filtering

Peter Sharp — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 02:43:58 +0000

ISP Filtering

Senator Conway has recently released an explanatory letter indicating that the Federal Government is determined to introduce legislation requiring all Australian ISPs to filter out restricted content (RC).

The release indicates that research including that conducted by Telstra, confirms that filtering is 100% effective on restricted URLs and that the impact on Internet speed is negligible even though some industry sources have said otherwise.

Contrary to some press reports Senator Conway points out that in a number of European countries including United Kingdowm as well as Canada a number of ISPs have voluntarily introduced ISP filtering for RC material. Germany has passed legislation for its introduction.

He does concede that technical users may be able to usurp the restrictions.

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The Future of Social Gaming

Mark Whitehead — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 03:06:18 +0000

Social games have only been around for a few years, yet social networks like Facebook and MySpace have had some exponential growth with their user base in that time.

With over 200 million monthly users playing the top 10 Facebook games, and gaining millions more every month, to say that social games are booming is an understatement.

So what is a social game?

FarmVille

Social games do not entirely differ from video games we’ve been playing for years. The term ‘social’ does not necessarily mean ‘multiplayer’ either or that there is a large persistent world to play in, so what does it mean?

Well, the difference with social games is in the platform. Social networks like Facebook are delivering games into a completely new environment. Where normally the user was obliged to find the game themselves, now the game is able to find the user. This new power from social games brings us some exciting creative potential.

Where is social gaming headed?

It’s not hard to see from the trends of the internet over the years that companies and developers are consistently pushing the boundaries of web browsers to do things better & more efficiently; breaking through constraints.

Consider the growth of Ajax and Reverse Ajax application protocols and Flash games over the years. These are becoming the set standard for web sites and browsers these days. Look at what putting a real browser like Safari on the iPhone did for mobile devices. It’s obvious to us that the future of social gaming and networking lies in the web browser.

What’s the next step for browsers?

For the past few months, I’ve been trying out the new 3D technologies for browsers,
O3D by Google and WebGL by Mozilla and the Khronos Group. These technologies are amazing. O3D is a standalone plugin for the browser (list of supported browsers here), whereas WebGL makes use of the HTML5 Canvas element (list of supported browsers here).

Virtual Cathedral Tour

These technologies open up huge possibilities to web developers and game developers alike. Utilising tools such as these, it’s not hard to imagine the amazing things we can expect to see over the next few years.

We have yet to see websites or games really take advantage of the web technologies currently at the forefront. Social gaming is getting us closer through technologies such as flash, but we still have a long way to go.

Infinite Journey

Using 3D technologies and Ajax or Comet driven front-ends with a persistent database backend could provide some amazing environments for social gaming and for social networks as-well.

Will these new technologies pave the way for virtual worlds 2.0, a new platform for massively multiplayer online games, or a new gaming genre or mashup we’re yet to discover?
We will have to wait and see.

References:

http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/
http://www.khronos.org/webgl/
http://www.visualpurple.com/
http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/docs/gallery.html – Virtual Cathedral Tour
http://blog.largeanimal.com/demo/ – Infinite Journey

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Creating deployment packages in SVN

Evgeny Petrov — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:01:27 +0000

In software development (in an ASP.NET web development in particular) there are always repetitive time consuming tasks, which we would like to automate somehow. One of those things is the permanent need to create deployment/update packages with files which were changed since the last deployment. Until a week ago I have been creating this packages manually, simply by collecting changed files from various folders, organising them and deploying to the web hosting server. Last week I got very annoyed with that and after some research figured out how to utilize SVN/Subversion to do exactly that for you automatically.

Great. Just look at the next few screenshots how easy this is (just a note – this is demonstrated with the Windows SVN client – TortoiseSVN).

Step 1.

Open Repo-Browser and navigate to your website folder.

repo-browser in TortoiseSVN

Step 2.

Right click -Show Log, then select all revisions from top to bottom which you want to create a deployment package for.

Log screen in TortoiseSVN

Step 3.

Right click on the selection and select Compare Revisions.

Compare revisions

Step 4.

In the Changed Files Screen select all files, right click with your mouse and select Export selection to..

Export files

And that is it Enjoy your just created deployment package – structure of folders with files which were changed in your selected SVN revisions. Zip it up and deploy!

deployment package

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Advanced Searching in Google

Liani Liebenberg — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:47:33 +0000

All of us are familiar with the search functionality in Google and I am sure in today’s day and age nobody needs instructions on how to perform a standard search to find what they are looking for on the internet. However, Google allows for much more sophisticated and powerful searching than the basic keyword searches we all use in our normal day-to-day and I am unsure of how many of us are actually aware of this. I have therefore gone through Google’s search help pages at http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=134479 and http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861 to compile this short reference guide to refine your search results by using a more specific query:

Phrase search(“”): When you place double quotes around a series of words it instructs Google to only return results for which the exact words in that exact order exists on any given webpage. For instance, a search on [web development] returns approximately 171,000,000 results, while the same search on [“web development”] returns approximately 30,100,000 results.
Search within a specific website (site:): You can specify that your search results for your chosen key phrase must come from a specified website e.g. a search for [web development:revium.com.au] will return only results about web development found on revium.com.au.
Exclude unwanted terms (-): You can exclude certain words from the search results by placing a space and a minus sign immediately before the word you wish to exclude. For example, [web development -melbourne] will not return Revium in the search result listing where a search for [web development Melbourne] will return Revium (a Melbourne based web development company) within the first 4 listed results. You can exclude multiple words in this way e.g. [web development -sydney -adelaide -brisbane].
Wildcard search to fill in the blanks (*): You can include a * within a query which will instruct Google to treat the * as a placeholder for any unknown term. Google will then try to find the best match, for example: I want to see all pages where the marketing coordinator for Revium has been quoted online, but I am unsure of his name; searching on [* marketing coordinator for * Revium] returns a list of all the pages containing interviews with David McLaughlin.
Search exactly as is (+): This works in the same way as putting double quotes around a single word i.e. placing a space immediately before a word will instruct Google to match the word precisely as you typed it. For example [+web +development] will return only results which match these two words exactly.
The OR operator(‘|’ or ‘OR’): By default Google uses the AND operator for all words in your key phrase. You can instruct Google to return results for either one of several words, for example: [Revium 1997 OR 2009] returns results about either 2009 or 2010, and is different from a search on [Revium 1997 2009] which will return pages which include both these years on the same page.

References

Google. (Unknown Year). Google search basics: More search help. Available: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861. Last accessed 20 January 2010.

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