Scott on Writing

Musings on technical writing...

4GuysFromRolla.com Turned Nine Years Old this Month

Hard to imagine, but 4GuysFromRolla.com turned nine years old this month. The first article I authored was titled, Using ActiveX Controls on Your Web Page and looked at creating an ActiveX using Visual Basic 5.0 and deploying it on a web page via the <object> HTML element. It was published on September 16th, 1998. To put it another way, I've been writing articles and FAQs and tutorials on Microsoft web technologies on, at minimum, a weekly basis, for nearly one-third of my entire life. Scary.

The site was originally started with three college buddies who covered non-web development topics, but by 2000 they had all moved on to other projects. 4Guys was sold to Internet.com (now JupiterMedia) back at the height of the dot com bubble, but I have remained the main contributor and editor for the site. Back in August of 2001 I wrote a short piece on the history of the site, which is still pertinent today seeing as not much has changed about the site since then. I keep pumping out articles every week, just like I did back in 2001.

I wonder if I'll still be doing this when 4Guys turns 10, or 15, or 25. Who knows. If you would have asked me in 1998 if I thought I'd still be writing web technology articles nine years later I would have thought the idea highly unlikely, perhaps a bit absurd. But the younger you are, the harder it is to have an understanding or appreciation of the scale of time.

In any event, it's been a great nine years and I look forward to the next nine. I hope you have found and continue to find the articles on 4Guys to be instrutive, useful, interesting, timely, and helpful.

Happy Programming!

posted on Saturday, September 29, 2007 11:23 AM

Feedback

# re: 4GuysFromRolla.com Turned Nine Years Old this Month 9/29/2007 12:24 PM Emad

YOU GOT THAT RIGHT!
you have no idea how many times i opened the browser and headed to 4GuysFromRolla to solve a web problem i had.
since i graduated 4 years ago and till now, let me say i can't imagine your site off the net!
so in this occasion, let me thank you scott for all that, and i am looking forward for the next 9 years as well!

# re: 4GuysFromRolla.com Turned Nine Years Old this Month 9/29/2007 7:52 PM Zubair.NET!

Hey Scott, good going so far, I first opened it up back in 2003 when I started learning web development using .NET and shortly afterwards wrote an article with you.

4guys is the one-stop shop for all things web development, you've done a good job on it.

Keep up the good work!

# re: 4GuysFromRolla.com Turned Nine Years Old this Month 9/29/2007 8:41 PM Matt Smith

Congrats Scott! I got a lot of mileage out of 4Guys back in the day. I even wrote an article in 1999 (http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/111899-1.shtml) that I still get emails on a couple of times a year.

# re: 4GuysFromRolla.com Turned Nine Years Old this Month 9/30/2007 3:32 PM cathal

Hi Scott, Back when I first started to learn asp programming your site was required reading, and the words "theres an article on 4guys with the answer to that" were my daily mantra in work, so thanks for the past 9 years, and I hope you keep it going for many more.

# re: 4GuysFromRolla.com Turned Nine Years Old this Month 10/4/2007 12:18 PM Andrei Rinea

Happy birthday!

# re: 4GuysFromRolla.com Turned Nine Years Old this Month 10/8/2007 12:03 PM Brian Bischof

Congratulations!

You might think it's a bit scary to have done this so long, but I think it's quite an accomplishment. Most websites are up one day and down the next. Very few people have the perseverance and dedication to stick with it. And to think of all the people around the world that you've helped learn ASP/ASP.NET (including me!), then this is a great thing.

# re: 4GuysFromRolla.com Turned Nine Years Old this Month 10/21/2007 3:04 AM Aaron Seet

incredible. not many people put in so many years of help to the community and I'd wanna say your contributions are appreciated all over.

# re: 4GuysFromRolla.com Turned Nine Years Old this Month 10/31/2007 5:58 PM Eric

I used your site countless times to help solve my ASP coding issues. Thanks for all of your time and effort over the years. It's much appreciated.

# re: 4GuysFromRolla.com Turned Nine Years Old this Month 10/31/2007 9:27 PM Aakash

Congratulations Scott! This site is on the top of my asp/asp.net resource list. I have used it countless time. Keep up the good work.

# re: 4GuysFromRolla.com Turned Nine Years Old this Month 11/12/2007 9:07 PM Clarence

Yeah...um I just read your MSDN article about viewstate, and I just have to know how you figured all of that information out? Where do you obtain such indepth information? Anyway, I enjoyed the way you presented the information.

Now, could you possibly help me? I have an ASP .net app. I have a ListBox control.
I am populating the ListBox(which is actually a <SELECT> html tag) via a client side javascript(and I've verified options.text and options.value exsist ).

It seems when the postback is executed, the ListBox populates all the server side item.text to the same value(which is the options[options.selectedIndex].text) and the Server side ListBox.items.count is not what it should be. It seems to be eqaul to (options.selectedIndex).

So I read your article about viewstates, and I tol the Listbox control to EnableViewState = False, but The Listbox control still has this strange behaviour, like it only knows about the options.selectedIndex vallue and text DOM properties.

Thanks in advance, and I'll bookmark the blog and check back later(if I find a solution or to see a response). Oh yeah BTW 4guysfromrolla is cutting edge and thats tight!

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