Some time ago I was lucky enough to get hold of an ebook called Revenge Of The Mininet by Michael Campbell. In that book and associated tools and utilities provided by search engine optimization guru Leslie Rhode was detailed ideas and strategies about how to control the flow of PageRank through your website.

I did some modifications to my Content Management System to do just that, specifically control the flow of PageRank exactly where I wanted it in my site and my customers sites and boy, it worked like a charm.

The option I chose back then was to modify the content management system to use javascript to redirect menu links. So I changed all the regular <a href links to javascript window.location. This has worked fine and served me well.

However, at the beginning of 2005 Google, Yahoo, MSN and some of the other major players introduced a new <a tag called rel=nofollow. This tag allows you to explicitly tell the search engine spider to either follow the link or not, which is what I had done with javascript code.

Now it’s all the rage to be ‘going natural’ with SEO and I’m thinking that it might be a better option to change the content management system back to regular <a links rather than javascript. I forgot to mention that the only way the search engine spiders currently crawl any of my sites modified in this way is via a site map, either a regular html site map or now xml site maps too.

So I’m going to try and find out if this is the way to go now before making any changes. Maybe I should stick to the old adage “if it aint broke, don’t fix it”?…

I’m putting the finishing touches to my upgraded Content Managment System. It’s called siteBOSS and is made up of several different components that are designed to help the small business owner and entrepreneur do business online.

I’ve upgraded the core of the system with a new rich text editor from Telerik. This puppy is fabulous! I’ll be releasing some video tutorials soon. It is of course all AJAX enabled, so the user experience is very nice.

The other components in siteBOSS are;

1. Customer Manager
2. Newsletter Manager
3. Portfolio Manager
4. Keyword Editor
5. Web Monitor

The portfolio manager went down pretty well at my last mastermind group meeting. I need to write some copy for that soon. I’ve put up a demo site for sales associates to demo the systems capabilities to prospective clients. Take a look, this is one of the ‘templates’ I designed for the layout, plus the color scheme is quite nice too…

I was lucky enough to get a great deal on the RadControls for ASP.NET by Telerik recently.

I’d been looking at their RADEditor offering as a replacement for my Content Management System rich text editor. The editor looks awesome and supports lots of browser versions, whereas my editor only works in Internet Explorer (its quite old now(the editor not IE)).

Anyway, I leaped into the RADGrid and began to put it into a project but stumbled upon a problem where I couldn’t get an event to fire. This has been quite a pain in the butt! I finally worked out the problem a few days ago and wanted to share it here in case anyone has a similar issue.

The RADGrid is fantastic and very powerful. It is in fact, huge in terms of it’s functionality and capabilities. After I’d got the grid loaded with data, I wanted to edit a row and save that data or add a new row. At this point I had a problem where I couldn’t get the some of the grid editor events to fire. Specifically the Update and Cancel events of the edit form.

You can find the full post and responses at the telerik forum.

I had thought it was maybe a ViewState problem, which it turned out to be. Even though I had enabled viewstate in properties I found I had to explicitly enable viewstate in the asp.net tags of each form, usercontrol and control that was in the loaded control hierarchy.

It works like a charm and I’m very happy with the results. I’ve only just scratched the surface and I’m looking forward to developing more solutions with this control.