In the Oct 20, 2008 issue of Ad Age, it was announced that YouTube is now the second largest search site at 2.6 billion searches in August (they overtook Yahoo at 2.4 billion searches). Although this doesn't come close to Google's dominance of the search category (7.6 billion), it does raise some interesting questions about the value of niche search sites.  When people are searching strictly for videos - they are turning to youtube.com to get their info. Most of these searches are regarding entertainment; and the gaming and movie industries are buying up ad space featured under "promotional videos". But I also found some interesting microsites for companies you wouldn't necessarily expect including: Bank of America (http://www.youtube.com/yourmoney) and University of Phoenix (http://www.youtube.com/UofPhoenix?feature=pyv). Lessons learned: YouTube is definitely a player in the search space. In addition to Facebook applications, your PPC campaign, blogs and other social media - consider not only posting your videos/ads on youtube.com but also creating content driven microsites for your paid ad listings to engage users with your product.  Afterall, 2.6 billion people are searching every month...

Seasonal Gems!

The fall season is upon us and as year round cyclist I'm begining to appreciate the change in seasons more and more. Though October may yield shorter days and chiller nights the sunsets on the ride home are getting better and better. Its hard to pay attention to path ahead when the best stuff is over your shoulder,  across Schuylkill rowers and behind the Piles of trees that hide our constantly backed up and beloved i76.

These are some candid shots I snapped on the ride home yesterday that prove that riding your bike to work everyday is well worth the effort.

Adding Some Sweet JQuery Animation to Your ASP.NET Form Validators

This blog post is a continuation of my previous post on this subject. In case you haven't, I highly suggest you give it a read here so that you will have some clue what the heck I am talking about. After writing that original post, I received number of requests asking that I take it a step further by adding some animation into the mix so that my extended ASP.NET form validators are truly deserving of the title "jQuery Style". The results are pretty slick, and I have added the new functionality into our internal timesheet system and it seems to be holding it's own accross the different browsers and operating systems that we employ here at DS. And yes, I actually used JQuery to do it, since it offers some nice, quick out of the box options for animation that have been battle tested.

See Demo | Download the Source Code 

How It's Done

Ok, prepare to be dazzled. This whole addition is doable by overriding one of the .NET validation functions and adding about 2 lines of code to it.  Have a look:

   1:  ValidatorUpdateDisplay = function (val) 

   2:  {

   3:      if (typeof(val.display) == "string") 

   4:      {

   5:          if (val.display == "None") 

   6:          {

   7:              return;

   8:          }

   9:          if (val.display == "Dynamic") 

  10:          {

  11:              //changed this block to not set display to inline, but to remove style attribute entirely

  12:              //undo comments if not using jQuery

  13:              if(val.isvalid)

  14:                  $(val).hide("fast");//val.style.display = "none"; 

  15:              else

  16:                  $(val).show("fast");//val.removeAttribute("style");

  17:              return;

  18:          }

  19:      }

  20:      if ((navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Mac") > -1) && (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("MSIE") > -1)) 

  21:      {

  22:          val.style.display = "inline";

  23:      }

  24:      val.style.visibility = val.isvalid ? "hidden" : "visible";

  25:  }