Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Archive for August, 2006
Pimpin’ My WordPress – Part 1
Aug 24th
For this post series (my first post series) I want to highlight some of the wordpress plugins and extensions I’m using. As noted I’m running wordpress on MySQL & PHP on a windows 2003 server running IIS6 hosted at AppliedI.net. Oh and since acronyms like WIMP (WTF? WIMP?!?!) are hot these days I have officially coined my own for this series: WOW! for WordPress on Windows! WOW! (I wanted to use HOT DAMN! But just couldn’t come up with the right set of words 
)
Probably the first thing that stood out when you visited my blog was the theme I’m using. I’m using Vistered Little Theme. One of the nice features with this theme is the great backgrounds. You can select the backgrounds by clicking on one of the small thumbnail squares up in the left column. To upload your own background image you simply upload an image to the backgrounds folder and reload the home page and your new image is one of the available backgrounds. The backgrounds are listed in alphabetical order so you can adjust which background appears as default by selecting it above.
Another nice feature about this theme is that you can customize the location of the status bar on the right hand side from within the theme options.
You can also adjust the skin around the various blocks. I personally prefer the default skin as the others are well ugly in my opinion but then it’s my blog and my opinion.
One thing I found difficult with this theme was getting a handle on which page to edit to extend it. Some of the other plugins I’m using required special blocks and such so I had to get a handle on that first. Really there’s just two files I ever edit in the theme editor, the “Main Index Template” and the “Sidebar”. I edited the sidebar to add the various special features like weather, clustrmaps, my tagcloud, etc. I edited the Main Index Template for things like my rate this post, number of views per post, etc. The nice thing about this theme is that each block is setup in it’s own CSS div block so it’s really quite easy to get a handle on how to edit it.
All in all, the theme is very impressive visually and definitely gives the “WOW” effect and if nothing else the themes in wordpress were reason enough to switch to wordpress from the CommunityServer application I was using before.
Powered by WIMP:Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP
Aug 24th
So I learned a new acronym the other day, Seems the Linux guys have LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP. It’s an extremely popular acronym and everyone knows exactly what you’re talking about the moment you mention it (well in geek circles anyway). The Windows guys that run PHP & MySQL are WIMP. Well I suppose I should be happy we have our own acronym but it bothers me somewhat. You see on Windows we can run MySQL & PHP, no problem. I also won’t argue that MySQL runs better on Linux because it does. But PHP runs pretty damn good on Windows, in fact it’s generally balls on accurate on windows with very little extra configuration or work needing be done. In fact, this very blog runs on WIMP and isn’t missing any features or functions that any other wordpress blog has. They call that a well engineered platform (PHP) and a damn good system administration (Windows MySQL hosting).
What bothers me a bit is that one would think “oh yeah, it’s windows hosting, that’s WIMPy” when in fact one could argue it’s as versatile if not more so than Linux. As we run PHP & MySQL, PERL, Python, you name it, everything the Linux web guys want to run and we also run ASP, ASP.net and MS SQL. Now the .NET framework is being ported to the various unix platforms via MONO, but like early PHP ports they lack the performance and functionality that is found on a Windows hosted platform and probably will never have the same performance as Microsoft keeps their special sauce still very secret. So yes I may run on WIMP, but my platform is far from wimpy.
Posting To WordPress From Windows Live Editor
Aug 22nd
This is a test post from within Windows Live Editor. Windows Live Editor is Microsoft’s new swiss army knife of blog editors. It’s actually really impressive. It supports several different types of blogs including Community Server and WordPress, as well as the popular blogging services. Really won’t go into that because there’s plenty of posts on the internet already related to this.
One of the nice things is that it ties directly into IE6 and provides a pretty comprehensive toolbar within IE6, including such features as
- tabbed browsing
- Search the web search box (live.com ofcourse but also provides the ability to search RSS feeds, news, the current website) lots of cool stuff.
- I really can’t go into everything but it’s a very impressive toolset of features and searches.
It also provides a “blog on this page” feature that allows you to blog an article related to the webpage you’re currently on. This is probably the coolest time saver of all (unfortunately, I’m using FireFox these days so it doesn’t save alot of time for me..)
What I like the most is that I can blog from within a nice WYSIWYG editor without mucking up my wordpress plug-ins that aren’t compatible with WYSIWYG editors.
For more details on Windows Live Editor check it out at:
http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/
I’ll want to add that the view in the editor is identical to the view in your browser as posted to the blog. This is true for both community server and wordpress as I tested this prior to switching out of community server and into wordpress. It’s dead on in fact, even better than the WYSIWYG editors in wordpress.
It also supports uploading and scaling images to your blog making it easier to publish images in your blog entries so one of my next posts will hopefully be all cool and stuff with images like kewl guys and grrls..
One downside though, it seems to add some serious overhead to IE6 and atleast for me crashes the crap out of it.
Okay one more addition. The past couple paragraphs were added after the post was added to the blog. I realized I wanted to see what would happen if I edited the posting and added more information after the post was posted and it just let me add it without any problems. Now that’s damn cool.
Automatic Login for SmarterMail Webmail.
Aug 21st
One common request is how do I set it up so that my user's can automatically be logged into their smartermail webmail without having to manually enter their login id and password. Well the solution is finally here:
The URL to use is: http://mail.yourdomain.com/login.aspx?email=USER@YOURDOMAIN.COM&password=USERPASSWORDwheremail.yourdomain.com is the url to mail serverUSER@YOURDOMAIN.COM is the email address for the user in questionUSERPASSWORD is the email password for the user in question
This would also make a great bookmark because now you could click your bookmark and be automatically logged into webmail.
Another common request with smartermail's webmail is do I have to type my full email address in every time I log in? If you setup the webmail to respond to http://mail.YOURDOMAIN.COM and your email address is USER@YOURDOMAIN.COM then you can use just USER as your login id in the login form.
Firefox Cheatsheet
Aug 20th
Now that I'm a firefox user, I figured it would be worthwhile to post a list of useful firefox links and plugins so here they are:
- The firefox cheat sheet: http://lesliefranke.com/2006/06/22/mozilla-firefox-cheat-sheet-update/
- SearchStatus – provides a PageRank & Alexa Rank notice for all sites at the bottom of your browser. May not be all that fancy or useful you'd think but it's pretty nice to see the pagerank for various websites while you['re browsing them.
- TabMixPlus – This is really handy. It tracks your tabs and should your browser crash, your computer reboot, etc, it will restore your tabs for you to how they were.
