Mr. Roa

Space and content distribution is a very important part when designing a web site. That's why breaking content into multiple sections using a tabbed widget in order to save space is commonly used technique in web design these days.

Today I'm going to address a common issue that arises when using a tab widget, which is enabling/disabling specific tabs. But first let's talk a little bit about the Ajax Control Toolkit. The Ajax Control Toolkit provides a palette of AJAX enabled controls, with the purpose of creating an "interactive web experience". If you work with ASP .NET, you MUST have heard about ASP .NET AJAX, previously known as ATLAS. You must also have seen and feel familiar with update panels and Microsoft's ASP .NET AJAX paradigm. Certainly the ASP .NET AJAX framework makes AJAX implementation trivial to anyone.

Continuing my Oxite series of blog posts I'll address the comments area. For my taste oxite is missing a couple of things on the comments listing and comments posting department. It doesn't have a way to ensure that the comment being posted is not being generated by a bot. I've already been a victim of this and to be honest I'm not a fan of SPAM, so let's stop that! Oxite also doesn't have a special style for comments posted by the site admin. In this blog post we are going to address this issues by implementing a css class that helps the reader identify a site administrator comment from a blog comment's list and a captcha validation for the comments input.

For these tasks I'll be using css and reCAPTCHA, which is owned by google and it's used among popular sites as Facebook, The New York Times, StackOverflow, TicketMaster, etc. It's worth pointing out that reCaptcha was initially conceived in Carnegie Mellon University, where the term "CAPTCHA" was initially coined. The term contrives from the acronym "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart."

This is the first of a series of blog posts I'll be doing about Oxite, a simple blog engine written using ASP .NET MVC. Which happens to be the one I'm using to administrate and maintain my blog. On my first post I stated that I intended modify the blogging engine and complete it my way. I already created a list of features, that I'd like to see in it in order to get things going.

So, according to ME, the first "missing" feature in Oxite, is a wysiwyg. I know it can be integrated with live writer, but c'mon a blog engine shouldn't rely on third party applications, even though integration with those it's a nice feature.