I used Simile Timeline for the second time on ASP.NET the other day. The Simile Timeline documentation is a bit sparse, but the Google Group supporting it is good.

There's lots of stuff out there on Google about using Simile Timeline with ASP.NET specifically, but as usual much of it is wrong. As a probably pointless attempt to counter those who spend their time copying incorrect data around the internet, here's some correct data about using Simile Timeline on ASP.NET 3.5.

This stuff actually works, and I know because I built it and sold it to someone. If you're in the class of sad copiers, don't forget to correct my spelling mistakes when you steal this.

More...

I've struggled with how to display panoramas on the web, previously using just the browser to display them. The standard flash plugin I'm using doesn't render them well: it works best with images of consistent size. "Lightbox" gets around that issue. The original Lighbox is Prototype/ Scriptaculous based. I like those, but MS are moving towards JQuery, and as this is running on ASP.NET, I used the JQuery Lighbox extension.

I lashed up a little extension to BlogEngine.NET which squirts out the magic incantations required for JQuery and the Lightbox extension to it, and then I hacked someone's thumbnailing extension for BlogEngine.NET ... so now I can drop images in here and they're automagically thumbnailed and displayed in a lightbox.

Like this:

These are all huge panoramas, so you'll need a fairly large screen to see them. I do have a bunch of nodal-point gear, but these were all taken hand-held and then stitched using PTGui and/or Photoshop. And as they're displayed without browser plugins, they're pretty much the only photographs on this site which you can see in the correct colours.

I found the BlogEngine.NET extension handler rather flakey. The principle's great, but it needs a little polishing. Unless you happen to have a wet afternoon to spare.

or what to do if your web hosting company use weird anti-spam mechanisms and you can't convince their support people that there are better ways to do this.

1 the problem

It's standard to avoid open SMTP relays in order to make life harder for anonymous idiots sending spam through an ISP's servers. So everyone closes those SMTP ports, usually 25. That's a bit serious if you're a valid customer though, and you actually want to send your non-spam email. There are several approaches to letting you do that, including:

More...