Using the ASP.Net Ajax Accordion

It was suggested that we utilize the Ajax Accordion control in a recent project and although the software is easy to install finding decent documentation on a quick solution was not as simple. I did finally stumble upon a couple of examples and modified the code from them to come up with an easy way to implement an image based menu with the accordion style navigation.

The first thing to do is register the Ajax Control Kit in the page header.

<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" TagPrefix="ajaxToolkit"%>

Place the Script Manage on the page itself or on the Master Page.Placing the Script Manager on the Master Page worked well in our case as multiple pages used Ajax .

    "ScriptManager1" runat="server">
            

The main body of code contains the Accordion definition, a Panes area, an Accordion Pane definition, a Header, a Content area, and closing tags. The unique thing that we did was to place an asp image object within the header group instead of text. Our content area also contained a user control but the links of the menu could have been created directly on the page just as well.

    "Accordion1" runat="server" FadeTransitions="True" 
    SelectedIndex="0" TransitionDuration="100"  HeaderCssClass="accordionHeader" 
    ContentCssClass="accordionContent" AutoSize="None" ToolTip="Something">
     
    "AccordionPane5" runat="server">
    
"server" AlternateText="Some Text" ImageUrl="~/Images/Menu1.png" />    
    
    
    ...
    ... Links to Menu items.
    ...
    
    
     
    

Buzzom/TWITin Helpful Twitter Follower Builder

I recently read a post on TechZoomIn about getting a good number of Twitter Followers within a month. The ideal is to utilize a service called Buzzom or TWITin to grow your following list by several hundred a week and then to flush the accounts that don’t follow you back. This is a good strategy and the Buzzom tool works well in accomplishing this. In fact, if you only want to flush current accounts that aren’t following you, it is a free resource for doing so.

You can enter your Twitter account and allow access for Buzzom and then set the tool to find users with similar geographies and interests that more than likely auto-follow Twitter users. You can then follow these users in large quantities, 50 at a time.  If you do this several days in a row and you can follow 200-300 new Twitter accounts per week. At the end of the week, you then ‘Flush’ or un-follow those accounts that have not followed you back. This keeps your ‘following’ to ‘followed by’ ratio decent.

The only downside to following a large number of users on Twitter is keeping up with the ones you really do want to read everything they post. But the new Twitter list feature will allow you to separate these important users out into a separate list that you can browse independently. The other issue is flushing accounts that you want to follow even if they do not follow you back. This can be overcome by ‘locking’ the important accounts with Buzzom and the service will never flush them from your list.