Technology Blog

Every now and then when I have a sudden burst of programming inspiration I reach inside my programming toolbox and pull out an old trusty friend - Visual Basic. Over the years I've appreciated the benefits of using VB. One of them is not having to spend countless days creating a Windows GUI application the old fashioned way by using C/C++. WndProc, GetMessage, and RegisterClass are things I used to do a decade ago as a Windows developer and it was a real pain.

Microsoft has graciously offered a free version of VB called Visual Basic Expression Edition. This product has some limitations but as far as I am concerned, its a nice little utility to prototype Windows applications quickly.

In this article, I discuss how to integrate MySql with VB.Net.

Suppose you are building a voting booth application. One of the things you want to avoid is letting a user vote multiple times to skew results. How do you prevent this from happening?

When creating landing pages, its often best to leave your users with a choice of where to go after they read your content. Under Drupal, the best way to do this is to use the taxonomy module and tag all your content. Then, show all related articles to the content.

I'm very surprised Drupal's poll module isn't more flexible. One of the more common things Drupal sites want to accomplish is showing a poll on their web pages. But what good is it if you can only show the latest poll? Not very. This article shows how you can choose any poll to be show in a page.

So you have a successful blog or website and noticed that you get quite a bit of international traffic. You know that these visitors are struggling to even read your English based site. So what do you do to keep them loyal and wanting them to keep coming back for more?

A question was posed on Digital Point Forums today on how to determine what kind of ad will show up in Adsense if you were visiting from another country. After pondering this for a bit, I tried to come up with an answer. Here's the spelunking I did to arrive at an answer.