c# Import Feefo customer and product reviews with .Net

Forward

Recently I was asked to implement the Feefo system on one of the UK leading fashion underwear and lingerie web-site;  www.gounderwear.co.uk .

What is Feefo?

Feefo is a customer feedback system for online business.  Feefo is special as only genuine customers are invited to leave feedback on your service and products they bought.

Getting  your Customer reviews

Feefo offer two solutions for grabbing your customer and product reviews, Javascript and XML.

Javascript Customer reviews

The Javascript implementation is easy to get inserted and running on your website but the downside of this method is that it’s not SEO friendly and will not be picked up by most search engines.

XML Customer reviews

The XML implementation is a little harder to consume. Loading the reviews this way means it can render the reviews at the same time the rest of your page is built. Great from an SEO and performance prospective.

Show me the solution

Base64 CSS Images for speed MSTASK

Hi all,

Following on from previous posts and the possible cheap ways to increase your web-site load times. I thought I’d share a little bit code that helps reduce the number of calls your web pages make when loading images either from CSS or in the HTML itself.

The process is straight forwards enough; It’s just a case of where you want to implement it, either during the build process or at runtime.

iPhone Apps built with Monotouch

My MonoTouch iPhone app is live

Recently I was very fortunate to work on contract for one of the UK’s leading nationwide used car sales company, Carcraft.

During my time with Carcraft, I worked on number of exciting and fun web projects with a really great bunch of people. One of the more interesting projects was the development of the Official Carcraft iPhone app. 

Twitter Plugin MVC .NET – Yet another twitter reader

As I have free time this morning, I thought I’d share a simple twitter feed reader. Yes I know there are hundreds if not thousands out-there, whoever another will not hurt and might just help someone.

Left start with the “File > New Project” in Visual Studio 2010.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,000 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 6 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 47 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 2mb. That’s about 4 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was November 16th with 54 views. The most popular post that day was Stag night.

Convert .net MVC Model to KeyPair QueryString

Very quick post today;

I had a need today to create a QueryString from a Model (Serialise). There was a good reason why, which I won’t go into; Lets just say it involves SEO requirements, ever changing model, pagination and price sorting.

So lets get to it and see what we can do. We need to build a function that will take any Model and strip it to any Key and Value’s.

Minify HTML with .NET MVC ActionFilter

To make our site a tight as possible, I thought we’d explore the idea of removing the white space in our generated HTML.

I’ve had this idea for a long time, but after reading @hugoware post about removing white space, I decided to implement it in my own projects. As with any good code, let’s stand on the shoulder of giants and make it fit our needs.

Normally, if we did a “View Source” on our web page we would see something like this:

Now a lot of good HTML developers like to leave closing html comments and notes in their code. This helps them track end elements in nested code.  For example:

<div id="wrap">
    <div id="content">
     content goes here, with more elements of <>
    </div> <!--end content-->
</div> <!--end wrap -->

The issue we may face on larger pages is there can be a lot of notes and end line comments which can add to the overall size of your page, which the user doesn’t care about but the developer needs for easy editing later.

Cache for speed with .Net

The better you can make your users experience the more they will like to use your site. One aspect is of this experience is speed.

Following on from my previous post, we will look at adding simple caching to our project for another quick win, this is just one method of many. Caching really depends on the size and type of your application and hosting environment.