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DREAM. LEARN. DISCOVER... GET
STARTED.
Technology
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Technology
New Website for The Plan Collection
We recently completed a development upgrade and redesign of our website at theplancollection.com. The goal was to improve the user experience and provide our users with access to more detailed and relevant information. We appreciate your comments, feedback and suggestions. Read more
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ADDITIONAL ARTICLES ON
Technology
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Search Using ASP.Net and Lucene
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Getting Started
Getting Lucene to work on your asp.net website isn't hard but there are a few tricks that help. We decided to use the Lucene.Net 2.1.0 release because it made updating the Lucene index easier via a new method on the IndexWriter object called UpdateDocument. This method deletes the specified document and then adds the new copy into the index. You can't download the Lucene.net 2.1.0 binary. Instead you will need to download the source via their subversion repository and then compile it.
Don't worry this is an easy step. Using your subversion client - I recommend TortiseSvn get the source by doing a checkout from this url: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/lucene.net/tags/Lucene.Net_2_1_0/
Next go into the di Read more
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Be Careful With Page.PreviousPage
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I found something interesting while testing the website tonight. The new search we implemented was not working on the pages that display house plans. I thought that it was some kind of routing error that could be attributed to the url rewriting. However, closer examination showed that this is the error:
'Page.PreviousPage' threw an exception of type 'System.Threading.ThreadAbortException'
For some reason ASP.Net doesn't like certain nested master pages and will throw this error. My solution was to remove the Page.PreviousPage reference and key off of a parameter value - in this case the value contained in the search box. All that I can figure is that the PreviousPage reference attempts to actually load the page which can result in Read more
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XML Encoding Problems - Hexadecimal Value 0x1A, is an Invalid Character
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Recently I started noticing exceptions in my log files that stated "hexadecimal value 0x1A, is an invalid character". I did some searching and a lot of other people have had the same problem. It occurs when someone pastes in text that contains specific unicode characters that are invalid in XML. From what I gather this frequently happens when someone copies in text from Microsoft Word.
The trick was to find out which characters are invalid and then use a regular expression to remove them.
You can look at the specs for all the details:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xml11/#charsets
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#charsets
http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UCD.html
But it is probably easier to just get the code:
/// Read more
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Tags : xml, encoding
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Published On : 03-03-2008
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Author : Steve Donegan
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12738 Views
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Updated Forums
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We recently updated our forums. This was a big move as it required retiring our old forum software and migrating all the old posts to our new custom forums. We feel that the change will provide a better experience for everyone using the site.
If you have any questions or would like to make a comment feel free to post to the forum and let us know what you think!
One quick tip. If you paste a link to a house plan in the forum like this:
http://www.theplancollection.com/house-plans/home-plan-9218
the software will automatically add in the image of the house plan and create a working link. Read more
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The Forums are Broken
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The forums are busted at the moment. Sorry about that. We are currently using a piece of software called community server that we purchased so we didn't have to write our own. It has been nothing but trouble so now we are moving away from it to a simpler system. We are writing it so it will take a bit longer to finish, but you can expect to see it running within the week. The debate between whether to write your own software or to find something that exists is always a tough one. It is always nice to let someone else do the work for you, but over time it can actually be more cost effective to develop your own solution if:
What you need is only a small subset of the off the shelf software and you want to simplify the experience fo Read more
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Tags : Technical things
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Published On : 02-14-2008
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Author : Steve Donegan
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2289 Views
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Why Asp.net Sucks (Tonight)
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I have noticed a slight slow down on a few of the pages on the website so I figured that it was time to get in there and turn on some caching. Asp.net, the technology we use, is supposed to make this very simple. All you have to do is something like this:
Then magic happens and your page is magically stored in memory and millions of people can view it at the same time. The problem is that every page on The Plan Collection contains a login control. It is the little piece of code in the upper right. If you turn on caching guess what happens. The first person to login and view a page gets their user account broadcast to everyone else that sees that page. That's right the designers of the LoginView Asp.net control were so sh Read more
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Ping Feedburner, Ping-o-Matic, Google, Technorati and All the Other Cool Kids Using ASP.NET and Some Magic
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It has been a long time coming, but we have finally managed to migrate away from Community Server to our own custom blog software that is integrated directly into the web site. The reasons for the change are numerous including the need to customize the look and navigation of our blogging software and our desire to provide readers a more streamlined experience.
The final part of the migration to this new system was released tonight. This final piece being the ability to ping the various providers that watch new blog posts. The code required to do this is not difficult to write. I am posting it below in case anyone is interested in how it is done.
Ironically enough this post will be the first one to actually use the ping service. H Read more
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Fixed The Main House Plan Pages
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The other update I made last night was with the main landing pages. Some of the pages -
luxury house plans,
country house plans, and
arts and crafts house plans looked fine because we had edited those pages by hand. However, many of our other pages like cape code style house plans page and our colonial style house plans page looked terrible.
I was able to use our existing page processing system and create a template for our landing pages that is loaded dynamically and then sent through the processor. The template contains place holders that are replaced with values specific to the style. Those values are replaced on the fly and then the page is generated. The result is a much better looking page that the guys in the office don't Read more
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Updated Image Processing
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Working on a website in the middle of the night as I usually do is always an interesting and lonely experience. The benefit is that you get a lot done because no one bothers you. The downside is that waking up the next day is never fun.
This evening I managed to image processing code for our site. Every image - hundreds of thousands of them are passed through that code. It is fun to watch on the server because you can see the images being generated and then cached on the fly. Hundreds of them are generated every second. Pretty cool eh?
The uncool part was that it has had a few problems this last week. We recently received some images from our designers that were in a new format. (Who would have thought that there are so many f Read more
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Updated The Article System
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I updated the way we handle articles this evening. We used to use Commmunity Server from telligent systems for blogging, but I found that it was too cumbersome and way too difficult to update. The themes are terrible to maintain so I build a system that meets our specific needs.
Our new system is divided into topics that I hope our visitors will find relevant. Most of our main content will end up in the 'House Plans'. However, we hope to venture out a bit and include relevant content in the business section where we will talk about how we manage ThePlanCollection.com and our technology in this section. In addition, we have added a green building section where we hope to highlight methods of responsible homebuilding.
Enjoy! Read more
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