Jim Conigliaro

Part of the requirements for our search engine is to provide a thumbnail preview of a web page when a user hovers the mouse over a search result.  To do so we have constructed a service that is responsible for generating thumbnails of newly indexed or updated web pages. We are using the built in WebBrowser control in the .NET platform to render the page. Step 1: Navigate to the page: This is is relatively straightforward, we simply instantiate the WebBrowser control and initialize it.  ... Continued

I am often presented with a free software option. Sometimes the free software is in the form of an open source solution, free-ware, a donation from a kind-hearted developer, or one of our own developers that had too much caffeine and couldn’t sleep. In most cases I find myself rejecting these free options. To be clear - I am not anti-free software or anti-open-source; we use plenty of it. I am anti-jumping-into-a-project-without-analyzing-it-first. So what kind of analysis do we {should we} perform? ... Continued

So, we’re looking into our options for rebuilding our internal web site search.  Why?  See my previous post on the search series. Step 1: Explore Our Options We’re looking into three options A) Continue to work with the product we have B) Construct our own search solution C) Use the built in search engine within our content management system. The first thing we are interested in is whether or not B & C are even feasible options.  We built some rapid prototypes to aid ... Continued

This is the first in a multi-part series of posts chronicling a project to improve the search feature on our web sites.  So, I’ve made the case for addressing the search issues that we have with our sites and have gotten the green light to start working toward a solution.  The problems can be summarized as follows: Results lack precision – the top results will often have very little to do with what you are searching for unless you are very explicit in the query Performance ... Continued

How many times have you encountered this?  The senior developer in a group/company is a pretty lousy developer.  I’ve seen it.  I’ve heard complaints from others about it.  I wouldn’t say this is an epidemic by stretch of the imagination.  The problem appears to be far more common in smaller organizations that have less formality in their hiring and promoting practices. There are two reasons why this seams to happen, they are either long established employees being ... Continued