I disagree that it a little compression is not worthwhile. I wrote this blog entry a while back on the topic.

http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/2007/02/25/how-big-is-your-javascript-library/

I like using JSMin even though it is not the best JavaScript compressor because it simply strips my verbose comments and the excess whitespace. Every little bit helps, especially when you can go from 70KB to 30KB. That is not insignificant for some users. These utilities were a bit a hassle to me though, so I wrapped JSMin and Packer into a MSBuild Task and simplified command-line. You can get Packer for .NET here...

http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/2007/08/26/packer-for-net-302-released/
http://svn.offwhite.net/trac/SmallSharpTools.Packer/

You can make this a regular part of the build for your website to compress your JavaScript on request. And in your code-behind you can switch between the compressed and raw files using the debug attribute in the compilation section of the configuration to automatically switch when you publish the website while being able to use a tool like FireBug to debug the JavaScript during development.

I just discovered that the 2.0 SP1 is not supported on Vista. Strange.

It looks like it requires the 1.1 Alpha release. I am still waiting for the final release. *biting fingernails*

This is seriously going to have an impact. I have been using VisualSVN with projects in Visual Studio and it has saved me a ton of time. I actually go between Explorer/TortoiseSVN and Visual Studio/VisualSVN all the time depending if I am adding/updating files that are a part of a project or not and it all works great. Lately I do some work on a project at the office, commit my changes and later do some more work at home. It is so easy. I am curious how the server product will work. The Apache configuration for security has always been a big challenge for me.

Here is that Tidy fix I just recreated. It uses the TidyATL library which is COM, so you have to run the Setup project installer to register the assembly. Then you can see how the sample website works. Everything is in Subversion at the location below. I am using TidyMCE so far but plan to add others like Rich Text Editor and FreeTextBox as well. May also try SPAW Editor.

http://svn.offwhite.net/svn/SmallSharpTools.Tidy/trunk/

Looks promising, but it needs to support modern standards for markup. It is still using FONT tags instead of style attributes and class names like you get with TinyMCE which is easy enough to drop into an ASP.NET application. It looks like this issue has been raised.

http://www.codeplex.com/rte/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=4354

Previously I had this issue with another editor and I applied the HTML Tidy tool to the markup to clean up the markup to fit my needs. It worked pretty well.

I agree. When the advertising is more dominant than the content, then it is just garbage. I wish more sites were like my blog. I cleaned it up recently to cleanly place the single Google ad at the bottom while the rest of the page is for the actual content. This week I did set it to use a fixed position which I think works well without being annoying like a pop-up.

We just need a lot better content to kick. I wrote up my suggestions the other day.

http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/2007/11/09/reasons-to-blog-and-tips-to-do-it-well/

Yeah, I vote to add bury with this blog entry as an example. Some points are OK, but it seems a few of us posted comments on the blog but they were censored out. The best part of blogs is a response to the points that are made so a reader can have some level of confidence that they are getting the full story.

The suggestion about the hard drive is key.

http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/2006/11/08/best-way-to-boost-developer-productivity/

These are very good suggestions. Just thinking about code, and just one language, does not open up your mind. I remember when Dave Thomas (Agile Developer, not burgers) gave a keynote on software development and he went through a series of paintings and then got into how they were created and how the masters created their masterpieces. The thing that most of us did not realize is that the great painters threw away a lot of their work because it was not good enough. He also explained that sometimes they would draw, with pencil, on the canvas to get the shaping just right before they started adding paint. It is sort of like prototyping and since it is much easier to move a line drawn in pencil it helped them create the new paintings more quickly and also get to what they envisioned.

I think a -1 kick is necessary because some posts are just inaccurate and should not make the main page. Somehow it should be possible rank the links with some sort of level of credibility because it only takes about 5 kicks to get onto the main page. A little while back there was a link on DNK that was basically a rant about website projects versus web application projects. The rant was full of misleading statements yet someone who read it may now be misinformed. I read DNK to get the best links that I hope inform me better than reading the Technology section Digg.com.

I also think that Digg.com is a pop culture website while DNK is very focused on the .NET community. I do not think we are in danger of teenagers coming in here and posting a bunch of links about LOL Cats. Consider how it works over at wikipedia. They do not allow you to edit a page until your account has been active for a short time. That seems to have kept the problems to a minimum. If we had a rating (karma) system which could indicate who the regular contributors are to the website then we would be able to keep the focus of the website on .NET and hold the contributors to that focus, otherwise their rating would go down.

I do link the idea of kicking/burying comments. On Digg.com you generally have to page through the comments to find something worthwhile. It is easier with their revised system, but generally it is just the funniest comments that kicked up. Here it would be useful to borrow from Slashdot and kick with a criteria like funny, interesting or informative. Then I would like to sort the comments based on those criteria, or just show the informative comments.

That != should be ==

My code would use a private method to instantiate the singleton with an attribute which handles the locking. It would look like...

// requires using System.Runtime.CompilerServices
[MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.Synchronized)]
private void InstantiateSingleton()
{
if (_singleton != null)
{
_singleton = new Singleton();
}
}

The attribute handles the locking for you and then the property access is much simpler.

public static Singleton Instance
{
get
{
if (_instance == null)
{
InstantiateSingleton();
}
return _instance;
}
}

The code is then also self-documenting with the descriptive method name.

I think karma maybe useful but not as useful as a -1 kick.

And if someone had a lot of good karma banked up would their kicks count more? That could be a good feature, but you would have to find an ideal multiplier so they "good" kickers do not overwhelm the rest of the kickers with only their links.

I noticed the "kick it" links look a bit different on my blog now.

http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/2007/06/30/aspnet-ajax-with-static-javascript-source-files/