Marker and Yellow partner to bring IE 8 first in New Zealand

My good friend Nigel Parker over at Microsoft beat me to the post with his excel­lent blog post on Marker Studio’s new search site for Yellow and customised IE8 browser experience:

The launch has been very success­ful with over 10,000 down­loads of the Yellow IE8 browser in the first 2 days!

To add a bit of tech­ni­cal detail to Nigel’s post we made heavy usage of the Google Search Ajax APIs. I kind of wish they still had the SOAP apis as it would have been easier in many respects using .net to bind the results using server side asp.net rather than be forced to work primar­ily with the ajax apis. Also, the ajax apis come with handy code snip­pets http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/ but they assumed things like ajax calls for paging requests which means the user can’t book­mark the urls. Aside from that a few workarounds here and there got us enabling Google inte­grated search quite easily. I would like people to note that the Live Search apis were supe­rior in terms of the range of ways one could consume search services, and rele­vance in my book is very compa­ra­ble between the two.

We made use of Linq to XML when consum­ing the core Yellow list­ings api which is REST based. This made the consump­tion and bind­ing of the search results to the page using a stan­dard asp.net repeater much easier. In fact, i cringed to think of the addi­tional effort that was involved before Linq for XML in navi­gat­ing XML Docu­ments with the .net 2.0 xml apis which I never found partic­u­larly intuitive.

There is also some Sales­force inte­gra­tion for help­ing to manage compe­ti­tion entries where we created custom lead objects in Sales­force. It’s kind of nice to have the abil­ity to regen­er­ate the wsdl for the web service after you make changes in the gui to core field infor­ma­tion. It would be even nicer to have this discov­er­able at runtime so i could just regen­er­ate prox­ies using a url rather than having to down­load the wsdl and re-run svcu­til across the wsdl locally.

And let’s not forget our good friend JQuery, and loving that Intel­lisense support in Vs.Net 2008;) Also a shout to face­box for those oblig­a­tory modals with rounded corners.

Oh, and the whole thing is powered by Kentico CMS. Kentico CMS is a power­ful, flex­i­ble and afford­able content and docu­ment manage­ment system that i have been person­ally recom­mend­ing to all and sundry since i first came across it in 2005. At Marker <shamelessPlug>we have a great team of expe­ri­enced Kentico devel­op­ers should you be look­ing in this direc­tion. Please give me a yell if you would like to discuss further</shamelessPlug>.