Ben's Quarters adventures in application development ...

The latest check-in of BE.NET (1.5.1.36) has a small, but important change.  The three themes included with BE.NET now include rel=”nofollow” on the links of commenter’s websites.

This is a theme specific change.  So if you’re using a custom theme, and even if you upgrade to the latest build of BE.NET, there’s a good chance you might not have the NOFOLLOW instruction on these links.  It can simply be added in the CommentView.ascx file in your theme’s blog folder.

As I’m using a custom theme myself, I just added NOFOLLOW to this blog too.  Wikipedia has a good writeup on NOFOLLOW, in case you aren’t familiar with its purpose.  I’m a little surprised it’s taken this long to get NOFOLLOW into the themes that are included with BE.NET.  Better late than never!

I get a lot of comment spam on this blog.  As I’m moderating comments, it ends up never showing up since I don’t approve any of it (TIP to spammers, stop wasting your time!).

Comment spammers are a lot more likely to leave comments on blogs that do not include NOFOLLOW.  Yes, I’m sure a lot of the spammers actually look at these types of details when scoping out blogs to attack.

Incidentally, the ResolveLinks extension that comes with BE.NET already includes the NOFOLLOW instructions.  This is the extension that will convert URLs in comments into hyperlinks.  If the extension finds a URL like www.google.com in the comment content, it will convert that into:

<a href="http://www.google.com" rel="nofollow">www.google.com</a>

This conversion is done as the comment is being served.

I’m anxious to see what type of impact adding NOFOLLOW will have on my level of comment spam.
Fingers crossed ...

This is the first blog post on Ben's Quarters.  If you search for a post prior to this one, you simply won't find one!

I'm excited to finally put a blog on the web.  I can't tell you how many times I've had some code sample, problem, idea, rant or thought to share, but didn't have anywhere to post!  Well, those days are now over.  Although I don't anticipate very frequent posting, I do hope to post on a consistent basis.

If you don't know me, don't fret -- I put together an "About Me" page (see link on left side).

The focus of posts on Ben's Quarters will be programming and software development related.  This is a large field.  My software development career has revolved around Microsoft technologies -- .NET, Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc.

I finally got a chance to work with jQuery a couple of weeks back.  I'm honestly not crazy about these types of libraries and have actually never used a JS library prior to jQuery.  There was definitely a learning curve and I wouldn't say that I can't live without it.  It seems like most JavaScript I need is not a big deal to just create straight without any libraries.  I see the biggest benefit of using a library such as jQuery is the cross browser support it gives you.  But again, the JavaScript I usually create without jQuery for validating input and manipulating some elements on the page already seems to run fine in the browers I test against.  I still don't mind incorporating jQuery into some web projects I work on, but don't feel like I need to.

I actually have a short jQuery related post I'll get up shortly.  It'll be post #2