DomagojSalopek.com

When making this website I intentionally did not migrate any of the old posts. The reasons are many, including the lack of knowledge in some areas. For example, I did have a CCNA certification and was working on obtaining a CCNP, but life happened and I simply devoted much more of my time toward Web Development and various other personal projects and simply abandoned my CCNA/CCNP ambitions. Currently, it does not seem I will ever return to it, except as a hobby maybe. But even this is doubtful. As a result of these developments, I would not be able to answer the questions about it, so I did not see any point in keeping these posts alive.

No worries series is designed to do just that - enable you to say "no worries", just copy the code and fire it up. For the first post in the series, we'll do two simple, but very common requirements using some web.config tricks. So, let's get into it.

Force HTTPS

<system.webServer>
<rewrite>
	<rules>
		<clear />
		<rule name="Redirect to https" stopProcessing="true">
			<match url=".*" />
			<conditions>
				<add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="off" ignoreCase="true" />
			</conditions>
			<action type="Redirect" url="https://{HTTP_HOST}{REQUEST_URI}" redirectType="Permanent" appendQueryString="false" />
		</rule>
	</rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>

Sometimes you'll get a requirement to have content available only through www subdomain or without it.

Remove www subdomain

<system.webServer>
<rewrite>
	<rules>
		<clear />
		<rule name="Remove www" stopProcessing="true">
		  <match url="(.*)" ignoreCase="true" />
		  <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll">
			<add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www\.(.+)$" />
		  </conditions>
		  <action type="Redirect" url="http://{C:1}/{R:0}" appendQueryString="true" redirectType="Permanent" />
		</rule>
	</rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>

I have seen that a lot of people visit this site when searching for:

Handler "PHP_via_FastCGI1" has a bad module "FastCgiModule" in its module list.

So, here's how to fix it.

That's right. After two and a half years of being inactive, this website will be alive once again. Sorry that old content was not preserved, but these days it belongs only in the archive anyway - it would not be of use to anyone.

The most useful things would be the networking posts, because AFAIK - and that's a big AFAIK because my CCNA has expired and I didn't refresh it - not much has changed in the world of getting certifications, so networking might be useful to some, but at this point I am not willing to invest time to migrate it. The previous version of the site used BlogEngine .NET and this one is using a beta version of own CMS, so there's no possibility to migrate it automatically without some development, which means - either development or I do it manually.

That is not to say that I won't transfer anything ever, but for now, it seems like it's gonna be a brand new start.

For those who are new - and let's face it, after 2.5 years of inactivity everybody's new - my name is Domagoj Salopek and I am a Web Developer. I have been in the Web area professionally for about give or take 10 years, started with Perl, then PHP and these days I'm all about Microsoft..

I don't spend much time on Facebook, and I'm sad to say, even my Facebook page is not very active. Also, I'm not a social media guru, so I missed the announcement and no doubt lengthy discussions about page posts in multiple languages.

As a Croatian, who lives in Germany, but posts in English, I find this option awesome. Now I can make posts in both English and Croatian ... maybe even German, when my German gets much, much better.

So, here's how to turn it on.

1. Go to your page -> Settings

Sure you can find this, it's in the bottom right corner, next to "Help".

Search engines care about page speed. Users care about page speed. It only makes sense that you try to make your pages load as quickly as possible, without losing anything important.

So, here's a few quick tips on how to do that. Let's get into it:

1. Reduce number of HTTP requests

Browsers have limitations how many parallel requests per server/proxy they do.

Firefox 2:  2
Firefox 3+: 6
Opera 9.26: 4
Opera 12:   6
Safari 3:   4
Safari 5:   6
IE 7:       2
IE 8:       6
IE 10:      8
Chrome:     6

Source: stackoverflow, you can also take a look at Browserscope.

So, what can we do about this? First thing that comes to mind is bundling. Bundling basically means that you combine all the different CSS or JS files into a single file which then browser downloads using only one HTTP request.

If you haven't been programming in visual studio for long, chances are you haven't heard about code snippets.

Code snippet is actually code which you can quickly insert into the code editor. Typically snippets are common language constructs which you use often and a number of them come bundled with VIsual Studio. You probably noticed them in IntelliSense as you were typing code.

As the tooltip says, you can simply go to code snippet and then hit TAB key twice to insert it.

There are a lot of great developer resources out there on the Internets, so it occurred to me that it would be interesting to showcase some of them, especially ones that are jam-packed with great resources, such as a Developer code samples sub-site on MSDN.

The basic premise on this site is that everybody can upload a code sample, and then community votes on it, meaning that the best quality samples are really, really good and useful.

Lately I have been playing a bit with F#, mainly out of curiosity. To be honest, functional programming looks a bit scary to me, especially the syntax. But the guys over at fsharp.org and fsharpforfunandprofit.com are pretty persuasive, so I did decide to invest a bit more time in playing with it. I will see where it will lead me. Hopefully, I'll blog something concrete about #fsharp in a little while.

As a part of my journey so far I stumbled upon this video where Jessica Kerr explains the basics of functional principles and how to apply them in our "main" languages, like Java or C#. I strongly suggest you invest a bit of time and at least take a look at what it's about and how you can apply functional principles already today.

 

I really, really think you can watch the video and take away something from it immediately. It might even inspire you to try a bit of functional programming yourself.

Jessica also has a blog and she also tweets under @jessitron. I suggest you pay her a visit.

I had to take a minute out of my day and share this wonderful and funny video about how is it like to be an engineer in a corporate world.

I really suggest that you take a few minutes to watch it.