This is one of the most frustrating errors I’ve got to fix. I’m using rad editor for my aspx pages and in some pages, it works like a charm but some just doesn’t. Whenever I tried to update the page, it threw this error, “An error has occurred. Refresh the screen and try again”, in the rad editor content area.

My first thought was, the files much be read-only and hence to make writable to the files but it wasn’t the case. So I checked my code, cross check with another working page, recheck again and again, but I found no difference in code and doesn’t work. Then I created a new “test.aspx” file and pasted the same code and tested it. Strange enough, it works!

So I thought may be my page got corrupted, so I deleted that page and recreated a new page with the same name, paste the code back in. Then it’s not working again. The same god damn code in “test.aspx” is working and not in the other page.

Something was really fishily wrong! Since they are the exact same code, the only difference I can think of now is the file name. But I can’t change all the file names without knowing whether that’s the actual cause of the problem. So my final option, turn to google for help and there it was!

(ID#250) “An error has ocurred. Refresh the screen and try again”

PROBLEM
When saving the content from r.a.d.editor directly in the ASPX/ASCX the following error appears:
An error has ocurred. Refresh the screen and try again.

SOLUTION
When saving the r.a.d.editor content directly in the ASPX/ASCX the page name should not contain “(“, “)”, “-”, or ” ‘ “. If such names are obligatory, r.a.d.editor’s content should be saved in a database.

Link: Telerik KB Article

So stupid error. My error files are named using the “-” dash. Once I removed the dash, all working. It’s just so lame error message and even in the KB no explanation about why it cannot use a dash in the file names. Well you can use dash if you saving content in DB, but why not in the actual file? I just not satisfy with that KB solution explanation. Nevertheless, it solved my problem and thank god for that. Took hell lotta time from me. I guess next time, I better google first then check on my code. Hmm.

Every time a customer asks you a question like “How much going to cost to make a website?” or “How much for a design?”, I got a problem answering and most of the time I say, “It depends…”. And most of the time I transfer the call to my senior colleagues or project manager.

Seriously, I don’t know the exact figure and I don’t want to talk about money matter first. Most of the time, I ask why they want the website for, what are they going to do with it, get to know a bit of their requirements and general site audience. Depending on those, you start slicing your time against the tasks and provide the figure. So there is no set price for a website.

Some people think making/getting a website is so easy as 1 2 3. May be so. But it depends alot on how well you want your website to be, what platform or technology to use and many many factors.

I got this article a few weeks back from a friend and I thought of writing about it. Things are so busy this week and just now I can get back to my deferred posts. There is a great article and a good discussion at personified.com : How much should a design cost?, that you should check out for more understanding of how they decide on the cost factor.

One thing to note is that, the author is talking about the design cost based on ready-made CMS platform such as (WordPress, MoveableType etc) and not custom made CMS. More like the whole website functionalities part is not included as it’s open source and free of charge. His figures are only on DESIGN part such as creating CSS, valid code and abit of customizations. Plus he is concentrating mainly on Blog design. For those it costs around US$ 1500 – 2500. That would be around Fj$ 5000.

A blog is quite different from a website in terms of functionalities as well as a requirements. Blogs are more like news post or articles based publishing whereas website are different nature such as ecommerce site, portfolio site, portal site etc. For those kind of site, the cost will go higher because of custom made functionalities and you cannot use wordpress for that (well you can, but not advisable…so I think).

For those kind of websites, you have to start from scratch. Requirement gathering, specifying technology to use, database design schema, layout design, the backend codes, front-end codes, graphics…etc etc etc. Every steps require time and time is money. So the more requirements you have, the more steps involved, the more time you need and the more it’s going to cost you.

I think I’m not the right person to talk about it as I don’t involve in cost decision making but I only involved for specifying tasks and adding time against it. But you get the general idea of how we charge for website design and development. So comparing our (Fiji) design prices with overseas (US – personified.com) prices, we are way cheaper. We make custom content management systems, we use expensive and latest technology – MS SQL + .Net platform. Ofcos’ there are quality factor to consider too. If I must say and be fair about it, we are a bit lack in design quality factor cos’ most of our sites are not valid standards yet. But it’s only a matter of time we improve our quality…ie. our developers’ responsibilities.

You should check this article for more detail explanations: How much going to cost to make a website.

I like the first comment. I must add if (($CMS != “Word Press”) || ($CMS != “PHP/Open Source”)) { echo “price goes up”; }

Things are a bit tense here in Suva. People talking about another coup?? There’s gonna be some kind of march tomorrow and also a parliament session going on…or something like that. I don’t know, I don’t care!

Just that I’m so pissed off at the moment with god damn checkboxlist control. The freaking thing took me the whole of last nite till 3:30am to get proper binding and insert working. Now, checked items retrival from database is not binding well. Garrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrh! I just want to trash up the whole laptop!!

Oh and the damn phone at home, it’s not working for two weeks already. Telecom bastards giving too many excuses, like bad weather, too much raining, no technicians blar blar blah! No Phone, No Internet, No Nothing. If I see anyone from telecom rite now, I’m gonna go give a big kick. Arrgghhh!
Anyway, where was I? Oh yah so there is a big fishy fishy going on in Fiji air – the political affair. Some people telling me not to go to work tomorrow and may be on friday too. Good idea, but then I got two scheduled customer meetings tomorrow, so no can do. hmmmmmmmmmmm

PM public addressing on TV tonite at 7pm. Read more on FijiTimes: Fiji PM to address nation, resignation a possibility

I’m not a freelancer, well not yet but like to be in the future, but these 7 points by Successful Andy Budd are very worth taking note of whether you are a freelancer or not.

#1. Love what you do
To be a successful freelancer, you need to have a passion for what you do…

I love what I do. Yes, I really do. I never thought I’ll be doing what I’m doing when I was in high school as I didn’t even like looking at the computers. But once I start digging into this profession, I beginning to like it and yes I’m loving what I do.

I do have a passion. Right now I have a deep passion to eat one good “Kyar-San-Chat”. hehe Ok sorry, just a bit hungry at the moment.

#2. Never stop learning
Every day new ideas or techniques are discovered and sometimes it’s hard to keep pace…the best web designers are endlessly inquisitive and always want to keep abreast of the latest trends and technologies…

Sometimes, I wonder what will be like when I don’t want to learn anymore. IT and Computer profession is very different from any others. IT industry is very rapid and fast growing, every minute, everyday. If you cannot keep up with the speed you are rather useless in a few months time. Having a degree in IT field is nothing like having a degree in other fields like Accounting, Medicine, Nurseing. In those, you can make use of what you learn in school for a long time, unless ofcos, there is a new disease to cure/study or a new program is introduced to calculate accounts.

In IT, a degree is just a piece of paper to frame and is rather useless if you cannot keep up/don’t know what it’s like out there in the real world. Sometimes, it’s so tiring to find out how far behind you are with the latest technology. While you’re learning one thing and not even specialize on that yet, many other new things pop up and the thing you learning becomes usless. I wonder many times, how do I even keep up with this rate. But you know what, the most important thing is as long as you have a passion for learning new thing, you’ll be just fine.

#3. Specialise
Some skills are more in demand than others, but if you’re the top of your field in a particular language or skill, you’ll always be in demand.

Very true, as long as you’re the best in one field, you’re sure to make a living out of it. Lets’ see what I’m specialise at…

#4. Get a killer portfolio
The best way to do this is to contact friends and family and offer to build them a website. I’m not suggesting you do this for FREE as this is potentially damaging to the industry and can also leave you in the difficult situation where your work isn’t valued….create your own personal project or sandbox where you can demonstrate your ideas. I’ve hired freelancers in the past based solely on the basis of their personal work…

This is something I lack. I don’t have any portfolio of my own. Well, you can’t show off what you done for your company since it might be somewhat illegal? or they might not want you to since you are working under their terms and conditions. But if you are to be freelancer then you seriously need your own portfolio. Atleast have a website/blog of your own where you publish your latest informative muses, so people know you are still alive and up-to-date.

Lets’ see…I wanna build up my portfolio, who wanna hire me? Mom? Dad? Bro?? No free job, KFC would do.

#5. Network like crazy
As the old saying goes, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. This couldn’t be more true as a freelance web designer. The best way to get work is to use your contacts and network like crazy.

I’m really bad with networking. Actully I suck at it. I don’t know, I’m just not a people kind of person. I seriously need to work on this skill. Yes, a good point to note.

#6. Manage your time
As well as doing the work you get paid for, you also need to market yourself, manage your projects, do your accounts and everything else that’s involved in running a small business…One of the benefits of being a freelancer is being your own boss, so make sure you’re both strict and fair…

Freelancing is flexable yet very dangerous if your time management skills are weak. The article explains it well, so better read on it.

#7. Build your reputation
One of the best ways of becoming a successful freelancer is to become the person people want to do business with. You can also build your reputation by sharing your experiences and knowledge through writing articles, blogging and speaking at local events. By building your reputation as an expert, people will be happy using your services and recommending you to others. Blogging is a particularly good way of doing this and is something I highly recommend.

Whoa! In this case, I’m on the right track (kind of). I just build up my reputation as a jack-ass a few days ago. Hey still, I’m building up my reputation rite? ha` ha`. Yep, it’s way better to check out your blog to determine your personalities + many other things than checking your beautiful resume. You blog talks about who you really are and has a greater impact on people than reading a few pages of your resume.

I have a blog, I rock! I have a reputation, I kick arse!
Now, am I a potential successful freelancer or am I a potential successful freelancer?!? (wink*)
Read the article in detail here. Very resourceful and great notes there. Must read!

Just a workplace humor.

Memo from CEO to Manager:
Today at 11 o’clock there will be a total eclipse of the sun. This is when the sun disappears behind the moon for two minutes. As this is something that cannot be seen everyday, time will be allowed for employees to view the eclipse in the parking lot. Staff should meet in the lot at ten to eleven, when I will deliver a short speech introducing the eclipse, and giving some background information. Safty googles will be made available at a small cost.

Memo from Manager to Department Head:
Today at ten to eleven, all staff should meet in the car park. This will be followed by a total eclipse of the sun, which will appear for two minutes. For a moderate cost, this will be made safe with goggles. The CEO will deliver a short speech beforehand to give us all some information. This is not something that can be seen everyday.

Memo from Department Head to Floor Manager:
The CEO will today deliver a short speech to make the sun disappear for two minutes in the form of an eclipse. This is something that cannot be seen everyday, so staff will meet in the car park at ten or eleven. This will be safe, if you pay a moderate cost.

Memo from Floor Manager to Supervisor:
Ten or eleven staff are to go to the car park, where the CEO will eclipse the sun for two minutes. This doesn’t happen every day. It will be safe, and as usual it will cost you.

Memo from Supervisor to staff:
Some staff will go to the car park today to see the CEO disappear. It is a pity this doesn’t happen everyday.

Technorati Tags: Memo, Jokes, Humor, Workplace, Miscommunication

Hey check this out. This is very good offer for small/medium organizations. Google is offering (rather beta testing) for google application integration with your own domain. It’s kinda like subdomain system from google. You can offer customised google services like email, chat, calander with your domain.

Google Apps for your domain lets you offer our communication and collaboration tools to your entire organization — customizable with your branding, color scheme and content through the administrative control panel, and with no hardware or software to install or maintain.

Well I don’t think my domain can apply for that cos’ mine is personal and definitely not an organization type. But I think InternetFiji would try to test/make use of this for some of their customers. I’m sure inet will get an account if they apply for it. Well…just a thought, since I can’t check out for myself, Ian you mind setup an account for inet so I can play with it?
Anyways here are some facts.

Quick Facts
Cost: Organizations accepted by Google during the Google Apps for Your Domain beta period are eligible for free service for their approved beta users even beyond the end of the beta period, as described in the Terms of Service.

Languages:
Administrative control panel – Currently fully supported in English only.
Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Page Creator – varies by product.

Fully supported browsers

• Microsoft IE 5.5+
• Mozilla Firefox 0.8+
• Safari 1.2.1+
• Netscape 7.1+
• JavaScript and cookies must be enabled on all browsers.

Step 1: Sign your organization up

Step 2: Log in to the control panel and create your user list

Step 3: Select which services you want

Step 4: Activate your services

Step 5: Show your users where to find their new communication and collaboration tools

Sweet isn’t it? K try it out.
Links: Google Apps for your domain
Product Tour

Technorati Tags: Google, Applications, Domain, Beta

ေခါင္းထဲတြင္ ေနာက္က်ီ႕ေန၏၊
ေဘးတဖက္တခ်ပ္္ နားထင္စပ္က တစစ္စစ္၊
တေနကုန္ အလုပ္မ်ားခဲ့ရေသာ မ်က္လံုးမ်ားက၊ မ်က္ေၾကာအစံုကို၊ ေျခစုန္ကန္ ဆႏၵျပေနျပီ။
စူးရွမႉကင္းမဲ့တဲ့ မွိန္တိန္တိန္မ်က္လံုးမ်ား၊ ညိဳနက္နက္ၾကီးထြားလာတဲ့ မ်က္ကြင္းေဟာက္ေတာက္မ်ား၊
အထိုင္မ်ားျပီး လႉပ္ရွားမႉ႔ကင္းမဲ့လွတဲ့၊ အရိုးအဆစ္မ်ားရဲ့ ေအာ္ညီးသံေတြကလဲ မနဲေတာ့။

လွ်ပ္စစ္ဓာတ္မ်ား တသြင္သြင္စီးစင္းၿပီး၊ အေရာင္တျဖတ္္ျဖတ္ေတာက္ေနတဲ့ မွန္သားျပင္တခ်ပ္္ကို၊ စက္စုပ္ မုန္တီးစြာ တခ်က္ၾကည့္ရင္း၊ ေတာက္တခ်က္ေခါက္ကာ၊ ေအာ္ဟစ္ၾကိမ္ေမာင္းလိုက္၏။

နင္ဟာ ငါ့မ်က္လံုးေတြကို မညႇာမတာ အနိုင္က်င့္တယ္၊
နင္ဟာ ငါ့လက္ေခ်ာင္းေတြကို အနားမေပးပဲ၊ နာက်င္ေအာင္လုပ္တယ္၊
နင္ဟာ ငါ့ေရွ႕မွာ အခ်ိန္ျပည့္ ေနရာယူျပီး၊ နင့္ကိုပဲ ဦးစားေပး အေရးထားခိုင္းတယ္၊
နင္ဟာ ငါ့ေခါင္းထဲကို အပိုင္စီးဝင္ျပီး အျမဲတေစရွိေနေစခဲ့တယ္၊
နင္ဟာ
ငါ့ရဲ့ ကိုယ္ပိုင္အခ်ိန္ေတြ၊
ငါ့ရဲ့ လြတ္လပ္ခြင့္ေတြ၊
ငါ့ရဲ့ အသိဥာဏ္ေတြ၊
ငါ့ရဲ့ စြမ္ေဆာင္နိုင္အားေတြ၊
ငါ့ရဲ့ ခံစားခ်က္ေတြ၊
ငါ့ရဲ့ ရပိုင္ခြင့္ေတြ၊
အားလံုး၊ အားလံုးကို နင္အပိုင္သိမ္းသြားတယ္။ နင့္ေရွ႕မွာေပးစပ္လိုက္ရတယ္။
နင္ဟာ ငါအရြံဆံုး၊ ငါအေၾကာက္ဆံုး ေမွ်ာ့တစ္ေကာင္ ထက္အဆေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ပိုဆိုးတယ္။
သူမ်ားေသြးေသာက္ အသက္ရွင္ေနတဲ့ ေမွ်ာ့လိုပဲ၊
နင္ဟာ ငါ့ဦးေနာက္ေတြ၊ ငါ့အေသြးအသားေတြ၊ ငါ့အာရံုေတြ၊ ငါ့အကုန္လံုး ေဖာက္စားျပီး၊
အသက္ရွင္ေနတဲ့ ျပိတၱာတစ္ေကာင္ပဲ။
ငါဟာ တေန႔တေန႔ နင္နဲ႔ပဲ အခ်ိန္ကုန္ေနရတယ္။
နင္ကိုအၾကိမ္ၾကိမ္ ငါသတ္ျပစ္ဖို႔ ၾကိဳးစားခဲ့တယ္။
နင့္ရဲ့ ၾသဇာအာဏာေတြကို ငါေတာ္လွန္လို႔ လံုးဝမရခဲ့ဘူး၊
မရေအာင္လဲ နင္ငါ့ကို ၾကိမ္းဝါးထားေသးတယ္။
နင္ဟာ ငါ့အသက္ပဲ၊
နင္ဟာ ငါ့ဝိဥာည္ပဲ၊
နင္ဟာ ငါ့ရ့ဲဖန္ဆင္းရွင္ပဲ၊
နင္ဟာ ငါ့ရဲ့အနာဂတ္ပဲ တဲ့။
နင္ေသဆံုးတဲ့ေန႔ဟာ ငါကံကုန္မယ့္ေန႔ပဲ တဲ့။
မတရားဘူး၊ နင္လံုးဝ မတရားဘူး။
နင့္ကို ေကာ္ဆဲထားတဲ့ ဒီစာကိုေတာင္၊ နင့္ေရွ႕မွာ ခခယယ ခြင့္ျပဳခ်က္ရယူျပီး ရိုက္ေနရပါလား။
ငါဘယ္လိုေျပးေျပး နင္နဲ႔ မလြတ္ႏိုင္တဲ့ ဘဝပါလား။
နင့္လို ႏွလံုးသားမဲ့၊ အသိဥာဏ္မဲ့၊ ခံစားခ်က္ကင္းမဲ့ျပီး အတၱၾကီးတဲ့ မိစၦာေကာင္က၊ ငါ့အေပၚမွာ လက္ဝါးၾကီးအုပ္ အႏိုင္ယူထားတာ၊ ငါရင္နာလို႔ မဆံုးဘူး။

ငါဒီေလာက္ ေအာ္ဟစ္ေနတာကို နင္ကမထံုတတ္ေတး၊ အသိအမွတ္မျပဳ၊ ခပ္တည္တည္နဲ႔ ငုတ္တုတ္ထိုင္ေနတယ္။
ငါမခံနိုင္ေတာ့တဲ့ အဆံုး၊ နင့္ကို အဖံုးဆြဲပိတ္ျပီး၊ အိတ္ထဲ ခပ္ၾကမ္းၾကမ္းဆြဲထည့္လိုက္တယ္။
ကဲကြာ၊ နင္ဘာလုပ္ႏိုင္ေသးလဲ၊ ဒီေလာက္ေတာ့ ငါမွာလုပ္ပိုင္ခြင့္ရွိတယ္၊ ဟင္း။

ရွဳတ္ေထြးပူေလာင္ေနတဲ့ စိတ္အစဥ္ကို၊ ခပ္တိုးတိုး ေဆြးေဆြးေျမ့ေျမ့သီဆိုထားတဲ့၊ အလြမ္းသီခ်င္းတစ္ပုဒ္နဲ အရည္ေဖ်ာ္ျပစ္လိုက္၏။ နင့္ရဲ့ ႏွိပ္စက္မႉဒဏ္ကို မနက္ဖန္မ်ားမွာ ဆက္ခံဖို႔၊ ခံႏိုင္ရည္ရွိဖို႔အတြက္ ငါဒီည အိပ္စက္အနားယူု၊ အားေမြးရဦးမယ္။
ဒါသည္လည္း နင့္ရဲ႕ အမိ္န္႔ခ်မွတ္ခ်က္ တစ္ခုကို ငါနာခံလိုက္ျခင္း မဟုတ္ပါလား။