August 2007 Archives

I usually code my ASP.NET pages using Visual Basic. When I'm googling for answers to a tricky .NET problem though, about half of the code samples I find are written in C#. I'm familiar with C# but it's not my native language so deciphering it and converting it takes time, which is a luxury that we developers very rarely have. So what can we do?

The wonderful people at Telerik have created an online code converter application which can take C# and convert it to VB (or vice-versa) for you in seconds. I've been using it all day and it does a pretty good job and can definitely save you a lot of time.

If you're a .NET developer this is definitely a tool that you need in your toolbox. Visit http://www.codechanger.com and bookmark it right now. I guarantee it will come in handy.

I've recently built a few blogs for friends and clients which I've setup with tag clouds. I've been asked serveral times for some recommendations on how to use tags when blogging, so here's a quick post with what I think are some best practices.

• Keep your tags short and simple. "Football" is a good tag for a sports blog. "The Chicago Bears are going to be great this year despite Rex Grossman's inconsistencies" is not a good tag.
• Limit the number of tags you use. Having a cloud of 700 tags probably isn't a good idea unless you're running a massive multi-faceted site.
• Keep your tags consistent and re-use them. Don't use "TV" on one post and "television" on another. Re-using your tags allows them to grow and be weighted higher
• Keep tags relevant to the content of your blog. I make a Rex Grossman reference above but I'm not going to tag this post with "football" or "Chicago Bears" because that wouldn't make sense to an audience of web developers.

Remember that your tag cloud is a navigation element. Having a massive tag cloud where every tag links to a single post isn't very useful to your users. On Code Scene I have about 25 tags that I consistently re-use so my tag cloud becomes an easy way to find all my posts on CSS, Movable Type, or some other topic. The number one rule for tagging blog posts is to keep it simple.