The look of a website is key in determining the emotion that your visitors will feel when they look at it. For example, it’s been proven that photos of people on your website will increase customer confidence, and lead to a higher sales conversion rate.

Traditionally stock imagery has been expensive to purchase, and time consuming to create. Many sites that I have seen simply steal images from other sites, or even hotlink in some cases.

I wanted to make sure my blog is using images that are legal, and I discovered iStockPhoto.

As of this writing, they have over 3 million images. The majority are extremely professional, and be just what it takes to give credibility to your website. I’m usually able to find a picture for each of my blog posts, which makes breaks up the content and makes it easier to read.

Here is a site for monitoring your position in a search engine, which I took the liberty of redesigning with some stock imagery.

Before:

After:

In Adobe Flex 3, you can get a bitmap image of any control by using this code (you’ll need to import "mx.graphics.ImageSnapshot"):

var snapshot:ImageSnapshot =  ImageSnapshot.captureImage(backgroundCanvas);

By default, it uses PNG encoding.

If you want to then send this image to the server, use this code:

var req:URLRequest = new URLRequest();
req.method = URLRequestMethod.POST;
req.data = snapshot.data;
req.contentType="application/octet-stream";
req.url = "snapshotuploadhandler.aspx";
var loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader;
loader.load(req);

Reading the uploaded file is easy using ASP.NET:

private byte[] readPostedFile()
{
   if (Request.ContentLength > 0)
   {
       byte[] buffer = new byte[Request.ContentLength];
       using (BinaryReader br = new BinaryReader(Request.InputStream))
           br.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
       return buffer;
   }
   else
   {
       return null;
   }
}

Two days ago Intel dropped the price on the Q6700 (2.66Ghz) processor in half. Newegg currently has this processor for $299, and you get Unreal Tournament 3 for free.

Before the price drop, I was recommending the Q6600 (2.4Ghz) because of its low price. Right now, it’s going for $229.99.

If you’re not going to overclock, and you don’t plan to take advantage of all of the cores, then the Q6700 is probably a safe bet because of the slightly higher clock speed (10% higher).

If you’re trying to save money at all, or you plan to overclock, the Q6600 is still an amazing processor. It’s easy to overclock to 3Ghz, while still running extremely cool.

Both of these processors would be great for a VMware server. Paired with some fast hard drives, and a couple gigs of memory, you could easily run 4-8 virtual machines (depending on what they’re doing of course).

It’s amazing how cheap it is to build what I would consider a fairly top of the line machine.

Every since reading Joel’s article “Painless functional specifications – Part 1: Why Bother?”, I’ve be a big fan of writing functional specs. I’ve done it for a few projects, and I’ve encouraged others to do the same. The biggest reason is to solve problems ahead of time, instead of waiting last minute.

Then, I start reading about the LEAN philosophy, and it’s telling me to not plan anything, do what you need to do, and change as the customer makes requests, or as you learn what the project really needs. What??? How the heck is that supposed to work.

I think the answer is a hybrid approach. Write your spec document, but don’t try to design your entire program before writing any code. Solve the overall issues that you know need to be solved, and also plan any features that you are absolutely sure you will need. The spec document should be a snapshot of the bare bones version of what the software needs to look like.

The problem with Joel’s approach is that it assumes that the customer won’t change their mind, and if they do, they’ll be able to get all of it out of the way before any code is written.

I’ll give you a real life example of a project I’m working on. The project was extremely rushed to get the first version out the door. Because of a lack of planning (I wish we had a spec!), we had to throw a lot of our work away and start over.

The lesson learned was that we needed better planning.

However, once the site was live, we realized that we didn’t really understand what the customer wanted. We needed to look through our statistics and get customer feedback before we could attempt to plan future features. The result is that we try to plan our features is detail, but we meet every week to prioritize them.

If we were to formally plan the next version of the site, and then code it for a month, I believe the results would be a disaster. Because we are constantly learning, we need to be able to adapt to changing conditions quickly.

If we were to plan another major release of the site, I would advocate creating a detailed spec, but try to minimize the size of the release as much as possible. Release early, and release often.

I know that Joel is against the “release early, release often” mindset. The truth is, it highly depends on what kind of software you’re writing. Joel is writing Fogbugz, which is already very popular, and has a great set of features. They can afford to take their time, and they probably have a good understanding of what the customer wants. If you’re not as fortunate, you may just have to put something out there that isn’t perfect, learn what users want, and adapt quickly.

By default, the title tags that Blogger uses are less than ideal. Search engines put a lot of value on your title tags, so it’s worth taking some time to make sure that they’re set up correctly.

When I initially set up my blog, I set the title to "Young Technologies Tech Blog". Look what happened in the search results:

YUCK! There are two major problems here. The first is that the titles are not at all useful to a human. How would you expect anyone to click on titles like this?

The second problem is that my title tags don’t tell Google anything interesting about my site. You want the search engines to figure out the keywords in each of your pages, and having those keywords in the title reinforces that.

In "classic" blogger, you would simply use

<title><br /><mainorarchivepage><$BlogTitle$></mainorarchivepage><br /><itempage><blogger><$BlogItemTitle$></blogger> - <$BlogTitle$></itempage><br /></title>

instead of:

<title><$BlogPageTitle$></title>

This would use the title of the post item as the title of the page. The problem is the "new" blogger has a completely different template system. Be sure to back up your template before editing it! Here is what I did, step-by-step:

• Shorten your actual blog title. I was unable to figure out how to remove the blog title from each post page, without losing the post title. Unfortunately Blogger doesn’t have a token for the item post title. For my blog, I changed the title to "YTechie.com", which I think is a reasonable prefix for my post page titles.
• Customize the title tag in your template. Do this by editing the HTML, expand the widget templates, and put the following code in place of the existing title tag. This will allow you to have a custom title just for the front page.

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
 <title>Front Page Title (change this)</title>
<b:else/>
 <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
</b:if>

• In the code above, put in the title you want for the front page. Try to keep it around or under 66 characters. For additional guidelines, consult this guide.
• Since you changed the title of your blog to something shorter, that will show up in the header as well. To customize the header text, replace this:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
   <data:title/>
 <b:else/>
   <a expr:href='data:blog.homepageUrl'><data:title/></a>
 </b:if>

With this:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
   This is my header title (change this)
<b:else/>
   <a expr:href='data:blog.homepageUrl'>This is my header title (change this)</a>
</b:if>