Bill Wagner (Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group President, Regional Director
and author of the C# Core Language Little Black Book and Effective C#) is going
to be doing a webcast on how to install and configure Data Driven Web
Applications.

If you’ve faced the frustration deploying a data-driven
Web application to a server, or tried moving applications from one server to
another, you need to attend this webcast. Learn how to create installations for
your Web application as easily as a desktop application. By attending this
webcast you will learn:

• Why your Web application needs an installer
  
• What problems you will face deploying manually
  
• How to create multiple Web sites and virtual
  directories in the same installation
• How to connect to and configure SQL Server databases
  
• How to manage security for your application
  
• How to edit web.config to customize your installation
  

Join Wise Solutions and Bill Wagner of SRT Solutions as
we cover the process of creating an easy installation
for a complex Web application.

Thursday, September 30 @ 8:30 a.m. EST

For Registration go to http://www.wise.com/wfwi_webcasts.asp.

Patrick Steele (http://weblogs.asp.net/psteele/archive/2004/09/16/230473.aspx?Pending=true) and Scoble have been talking about using descriptive titles on your blog posts to make it easier to scan and triage what posts you read. That’s actually a great point. I know that I scan 150+ blogs and Patrick is in the same ballpark. That’s an average of 80-120 posts a day and some days are more intense than that. The good news is that NewsGator (http://www.NewsGator.com), SharpReader (http://www.sharpreader.net/) and RSS Bandit (http://www.rssbandit.org/) all make scanning new posts.

Patrick went on to post about the number of pictures that are on blogs and how frustrating that is when you are offline. One the one hand, I agree with that. It’s really frustrating that when you are offline and the major portion of a given blog with an interesting headline is a picture. On the other hand, I really like the pictures that are on some of the blogs that I read. Some examples of this are:
http://bucsfishingreport.com/pMachine/weblog.php

http://weblogs.asp.net/jrule/Rss.aspx

I’m not saying that the pictures make the post but it does help the item. Some other blogs just add pictures for the fun of it and they don’t really add anything to the post.

There are few things that I’d like to suggest about pictures.

First, be judicial in your use of pictures. That is, make sure that they add something to the post.

Second, in the short term, make sure that you provide alternative text for all of the pictures on your blog.

Third, I’d love it if one on the readers (or all of them for that matter) would have an option to download pictures and the like with the posts.