Why I Deactivated My Facebook Account

Posted by Steve Kinsey on May 12, 2010

I’ve been considering this for some time and today I decided it was right to deactivate my facebook account. I know this may sound strange given that everyone and his dog is signing up with facebook, but I genuinely feel it was an appropriate thing to do. When I first signed up with facebook, it was to find old friends, and keep up to date with existing ones. But lately I’ve gotten concerned with facebooks attitude towards privacy and I suspect that there is a lot of information from there being analysed by many sources in an attempt to target your spending.

Now I’m not usually privacy paranoid but there is just something about facebook lately that doesn’t make me very comfortable, and I feel much better with my account deactivated. Also it’s the constant bombardment of this and that application, dozens of offers from peoples farms, etc. It has been interesting to catch up with people from the past, but even then, after a short email exchange you both move on and never talk again. I guess there is a reason you haven’t seen each other for twenty years and that’s because you weren’t that close in the first place.

At the end of the day, if someone is a friend they can reach me by phone, email, twitter or many other means, and visa versa with me contacting them. I probably sound very unsociable, but I question just how social facebook actually is, as I said, if you want to talk to a friend, pick up the phone and say hi, it’s much more sociable.

Having said all this, I may possibly in the future open another account as a purely business tool, I would focus it completely towards the company, but I’m not as yet convinced that I even need that. Would be very interested to hear your comments on this, am I unsociable, am I mad, or do you think I have a point?

Rethinking The Theme Of The Blog

Posted by Steve Kinsey on March 17, 2010

I’m thinking of renaming / redesigning this blog. I have this thought that I want to steer the blog away from the entrepreneurial slant that it has now in terms of title etc and just make it more of a personal blog where I talk about whatever grabs me as something to say at the time. I probably won’t change the actual design too much as I do like it.

The problem I have though is I can’t really think of what to use for a title and tag line, because my new focus is going to be quite generic I can’t really think what to use. Maybe that is an indication that I shouldn’t make the blog too broad, I’m not really sure on that one.

So I am shamefully looking for any suggestions you have, judging from the theme of my posts do you have any suggestions for a blog title. Clean ones please, although I’m always happy to read something that will make me laugh. Feel free to comment here with any suggestions you may have, I really look forward to reading them.

Workaround bug with ASP.Net hyperlink control and Eval function

Posted by Steve Kinsey on February 11, 2010

Came across a little bug today that I thought it was worth mentioning in case it helps anyone else out. Say you have a repeater control and somewhere in there your using eval to populate a control in there. This kind of thing for example:

<asp:label id="label1" runat="server" text='Some Link<%#Eval "Link" %>' />

Works perfect as you would expect it to, however if you tried to do the following:

<asp:hyperlink id="hyperlink1" runat="server" navigateurl='Some Link<%#Eval "Link" %>' >Some Text</asp:hyperlink>

You will find that it doesn’t work, there seems to be a bug that stops it evaluating the eval code. However it is pretty easy to fix, all you need to do is reformat the control as such:

<asp:hyperlink id="hyperlink1" runat="server" navigateurl='<%#"Some Link" & Eval "Link" %>' >Some Text</asp:hyperlink>

Now it works, weird huh.

Exporting Gridviews From Ajax Panels And/Or Master Page

Posted by Steve Kinsey on February 1, 2010

I had a problem recently with being unable to export of gridview into excel when the grid was inside an AJAX update panel, plus the export button was also inside the panel. Took me a while to find the solution so I thought I would share it here.

Firstly lets deal with the problem of a grid being inside an AJAX panel, if your export button is also inside the panel your export function will probably give you the following error:

Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerParserErrorException

Or something along those lines. To fix this problem all you need to do is put a trigger inside your panel for a postback event on the button. Just make sure it as a postback event and not an asynchpostback. For example:

<Triggers>
<asp:PostBackTrigger ControlID=”btnExcel” />
</Triggers>

This should fix the problem. However if you are using a master page in your application you may still be getting problems with your export routine. To fix the problem add the following code to your aspx page code behind:

Public Overloads Overrides Sub VerifyRenderingInServerForm(ByVal control As Control)
'This code is required to export data from
'within an ajax update panel
End Sub

Dont’ add anything inside the sub, just leave it as it is and this should work. Or if you prefer you can add the following code in your Master page code behind and it will work on any page.

Public Overloads Sub VerifyRenderingInServerForm(ByVal control As Control)
'This code is required to export data from
'within an ajax update panel
End Sub

Hope this is of as much help to you as it was to me, feel free to comment.

Yes I Am Now A Twit Or Is That Tweet?

Posted by Steve Kinsey on March 29, 2009

Yes I have decided to join the world of twitter and tweet along with everyone else. I’ve no idea yet how I might use it or how often I might post twits or tweets (which is it?) but so far I am enjoying following other people, both online business people as well as the odd celebrity here and there.

I took the opportunity to install a Twitter tool for the blog which you can see sitting on the sidebar. It’s called simply Twitter Tools and it seems to do the job it was designed for perfectly well. Was just a simple plugin download and didn’t requite any HTML editing or anything more than activation and installing widget.

I took the opportunity while I was there to clean up the blog a little, I switched from three columns to two as I think it was looking a little cluttered and I took away some things I considered unnecessary like archives. I mean who really uses those archives?

Well I hope you like the changes and if you want to follow my ramblings then my twitter page is: http://twitter.com/stevekinsey

I’m Selling One Of My Sites

Posted by Steve Kinsey on March 25, 2009

I’ve decided to put one of my sites up for sale, I’ve had the site for a while and the domains for even longer so they are nice and mature. I’ve never had the time to focus on it but I do think it could be a good and profitable site for the right owner. The site in question is GetThatBargain, I’ve set it up as a purely affiliate blog showing all different kinds of online deals and bargains, however I think the name could be adapted to suit other things.

Here’s a more detailed list of whats included in the sale:

• Mature domain names, google likes mature domain
• gethatbargain.co.uk domain
• gethatbargain.com domain
• gethatbargain.net domain
• gethatbargain.org domain
• Easy to use and customised blog theme from uniqueblogdesigns.com
• Site and email hosting for you if you need it, first 12 months hosting included free (subject to traffic levels)
• Complete site ready to go
• Over 40 existing posts with comments

The blog theme is a new affiliate focussed one from UniqBlogDesigns and is very easy to use and includes lots of little features for monetising a blog. This site is an ideal startup project for someone moving into affiliate marketing.

If you are interested in purchasing this site, post a comment here or get in touch via the contact form and lets discuss.