Expression Web Blog

Murray Summers Microsoft MVP - Visual Developer - Expression from Great Web Sights gives us his insights into Microsoft Expression Web this week.

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ReMix07 is sold out but don’t worry you can still keep up with what’s going on via the ReMIX07 Boston Facebook group!  and what’s more you can continue the conversation after the show.

Sadly if you dont’ have a ticket you won’t be in with a chance to win a brand new Vespa  LX 50 but Cheryl Wise - MVP - Expression Web will be crossing her fingers. Cheryl is presenting this year and we wish her good luck with the following session.

CSS and Standards Based Websites with Expression Web 
Why Expression Web? See some of the things Expression Web can do to make creating cross browser websites easier with its sophisticated CSS tools and standards based output.

Another of the sessions you should look at if your interested in making the best of your site is IE7 + Web Stds by  Molly Holzchlag

IE7 + Web Stds
In this session, gain insight into the design and development features that you can now use confidently to achieve cross-browser design. You’ll learn about CSS selectors that are now useful in progressive design; PNG transparency; and the techniques available to make sure your work looks great in IE6 and other browsers, too.

If you plan on blogging about ReMIX07 Boston, G. Andrew Duthie asks you to tag your post with remix07boston. You never know you might find your post being promoted amongst the best of the blogs on the ReMIX07 Boston site during and after the show. He also asks if you have an idea on just how interactive the conversation can get then either post your thoughts at the facebook group or contact him via:
http://blogs.msdn.com/gduthie/contact.aspx

Not only that you can download MIX07 session recordings. Each of the sessions include a camera feed of the presenter(s) alongside the demo feed. There are on-site interviews and videos featuring partner demos. Which you will see featured here as they are listed.

If you didn’t get in this year, there is always next year at MIX08

Fancy free resources? If your a Agency Web designer or Developer you should check out PHIZZPOP It’s a new part of MIX online and they want you to share and show off your work. Coming up on the site will be a national competion centred around design. You can watch a interview with some of the people from Acentimum that designed phizzpop and they tell you the ideas behind the site.   

PS. If your at ReMix07 Boston they are sponsering a party Monday night.

The big news on ReMix07 Boston is that they are releasing the source code for much of the .NET Framework, plus built-in support in Visual Studio 2008 for debugging into Framework classes. In this videwo Shawn Burke from the .NET development platform team talks about the announcement, so visit the link to learn more about it.

Part of the Mix Online experiance is the videos at Visitmix University  there are various videos on offer, personally I like the one about RSS feed.

Tip 12 - Scroll To The First Or Last Page Quickly

When you have a lot of pages open in Expression Web, the program will automatically produce scrolling arrows at the end of the page tabs, so you can scroll through your pages more easily. You can click the arrow repeatedly and each page passes by…..

The full above Expression Web tip is available for a short time when you sign up for our Any Expression Web Tips Ezine.   Our upcoming issue’s next tip is:

Tip 13 - Title Attributes (tags) in Expression Web
Small yellow pop-up messages that appear to explain the function of a button in most windows applications can be made to appear on your website. Using the ‘Title’ Attribute (tag). This attribute is designed to be used as an explanatory system for little-known acronyms….

Sign up now to obtain Tip 12 and be in time for the full Tip 13. We do not archive our Expression Web Tips.

If you find you simply can’t wait or have missed some of the tips we offer all 26 Expression Web Tips for the low launch price of $7. Expression Web Tips Ebook Vol l

The Expression Web Interview we have this week is with Alex Tushinsky of Left to My Own Devices. Alex is well known for his FrontPage addons and has now made two new Expression Web addons for the community called, Media Manager 2007 and Embedded Media Fix.

Our EW Interview series with the leading lights of the Expression Web community give insights into the future of the program and are well worth reading.

Quick Response and Datamatrix Codes

Typically available in Japan and not in the USA but beginning to be available throughout Europe. Quick Response Codes (QR Codes) (if it appears in Japanese just hit English on the top right corner) and Datamatrix (DM) are two dimensional bar-codes that can be read by any mobile device that has a camera and the right reader software. They can hold more information than conventional bar-codes and offer a lot more scope. This means when vendors incorporate these bar-codes in their products the given URL can lead you to their site and infinitely more information about the product.

This has even led to Audio Barcodes which might be used in the automatic transmission of website URLs to the mobile phone when it is directed at a TV or radio.

So just how does this work with Expression Web your asking?

That is where Feed2Mobile comes in. This is a free service which bridges the gap between web based and mobile based content. You simply use the generator to create the mobile code of your RSS Feed for your mobile readers, thereby producing it in a manner more suitable for a mobile device.

This is my code for this blog below:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://feed2mobile.kaywa.com/202182835.js”></script>

Simply insert your generated RSS Feed code in the sidebar in Theme Editor under Presentation (if your using WordPress) at the location of your choice. You can see results on the right. Simple click on the graphic to see how the RSS feeds for the blog will appear on a mobile device.

When the USA and the rest of Europe catches up with this technology we will be able to make much more informed choices about our purchases. This means your Expression Web site content had better be as good as it can be. So while you have time start your writing updates now.

My main Expression Web Help site had not been spidered since the 10th August. Though I added content and changed small bits on the homepage. So I decided to check what I’d not done that I thought I had done. This was twofold.

Getting Google to spider your site

I want to talk about the first part in this quest which was to do with redirecting the www of my domain to the one without as http://any-expression.com is the link I use and the link I want others to use. So to correct the dilution of my homepage link I needed to do a 301 redirection from one to the other. This domain happens to use a Unix plan with FPSE (FrontPage Server Extensions) installed. So I needed not only to redirect correctly using a 301 header but to make sure I did not break my FPSE.

First I needed to know what code I needed to redirect from one to the other. So I headed off to my favourite SEO Guru Blog to learn more about Basic 301 Permanent Redirect Here I found out I needed to add the following for my particular purposes

To Redirect www.mysite.com to mysite.com

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Now I had the code I wanted, the next bit of research was in finding out how NOT to break my FPSE. Fortunately for me Pat Geary had already checked out how to do this and her .htaccess file with FrontPage Server Extensions Tutorial outlined the directions clearly. There was more to come however.

Ernie Secrest of Sea Crest Hosting goes into detail where FPSE is concerned and explains the three OTHER .htaccess locations in the _vti_bin that also needed modifying if I was ever able to publish again. Sure enough I could not publish after adding the 301 redirect code to the main .htaccess, so I proceeded to do this. A quick check afterwards and I was able to publish once more. I then checked my site was redirecting from the www.mysite.com version to mysite.com version I preferred. Finally I did a header check

The correct version of http://any-expression.com/ returned the header code of HTTP/1.1 200 OK => which means Successfully Found. The www version returned the header code of HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently => which is exactly the result I wanted of Moved permanently.

I will continue write about other methods I employed and the resources I used in my quest to have Google spider my domain once more.

Tina Clarke. Microsoft MVP - FrontPage © Copyright 2007. All Rights Reserved