Month: January 2016

AMP Accelerated Mobile Pages for MVC ASP.Net

Google has a new mobile standard for html that strays from the recent common knowledge involving responsive web pages which show the same html for both mobile and desktop traffic, but which reformats itself to the width of the browser Instead, Accelerated Mobile Pages ( or AMP ) actualy adds a lot of resrictions and some new tags and other goodies with the intention of making the mobile experience much faster. This has been the common compliant I’ve had with the mobile web- even with a powerful smartphone on a fast connection, the web experience is often very slow and just bad. I’m not even sure why some pages are so terrible when they even seem to be built to support mobile, but they just are. This must be the resaoning behind the new AMP standard. 

AMP has recently been in the news because google has indicated that sites supporting AMP will soon receive a bit of an SEO boost. So now, many webmasters who depend on search engine traffic are scrambling to deploy AMP-enabled versions of their sites to take advantage of this slight…advantage. 

Since most of my web projects run on ASP.Net MVC, I’m looking to implement AMP using some boilerplate template code. I’ve checked Nuget and haven’t found anything in there yet. Maybe we’ll have to develop this and add it to the nuget repository. 

Have any of you built or found something to help accelerate developing and/or deploying AMP using .Net MVC? Comment below to discuss further. 

Skype chat messages appear in wrong order – how to fix

I use skype for chatting almost all day, and today it started doing a strange behavior – my types messages would jump “up” the chat thread, to appear earlier than other messages I had already received from my chat partner. I figured it would clear itself up, but a day later things were still wrong. I assumed either my system clock or my partner’s was off, so we started comparing notes and I dicovered the clock on my laptop had skewed off just a few seconds- 5 or 6 – from what the time services show as the “correct” time, and so this was causing skype to get confused about when it was receiving new messages – my chat partner messages seemed to be almost in the future a bit, and so my messages sent to him would jump up the page behind his, in their “chronological” order based on the timestamps of each message. 

I’m actually not having this issue any longer, so I’m not sure if it was being caused by issues with connecting with a time server, or it might have been the intensive ftp transfers I had running for almost a week, pulling 10 threads of files constantly- I think this may have been taxing the cpu in a way that caused the time to shift over the course of a day. In any case, it seems to have stopped now. 

Back on topic- If you find this happening on your system, how can you fix it? 

We can force the clock to sync with a time server again to get the clock back on track. Follow these steps: 

– Open Control Panel, and open Date and Time icon
– Click the Internet Time tab (if you are on a domain, this apprently is not available)
– Click the Change Settings button on the page
– If UAC pops up, click Yes
– Check the “Synchornize with Internet time server” check box, pick a time server from the dropdown (or use the default), and click Update Now

Sometimes this will throw an error if the server cannot be reached. You can try hitting Update Now again, or try selecting a different server and do it again.

Now you’re done! Go back to skype and test out your chats, they should show up in the correct order now. 

There is a commandline option as well, but I haven’t had luck making this one work- maybe you will: 

-open an admin-level command prompt
– run: w32tm /resync   OR IF on a domain run: net time /domain

I’ve seen this throw a “time service is not running” error, in which case I tried starting the windows time service and ran it again, but still no luck. Apparently you can keep trying it until it works, but I just used the UI version above instead.