Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Archive for May, 2009
Instant search and access to great books
May 21st
Being a technologist all my life I’ve come to realize one thing: “to be good at what you do you can never stop learning”. (I also think to remain youthful at any age it’s important to never stop learning but that’s another conversation altogether.)
With that in mind you’re often confronted with a task that you don’t know the answer to. But if you know where to look for the answer chances are you find it quickly enough (yeah.. thank you Mr. Obvious). I’m doing some work with SQL Reporting and quite frankly my SQL query Kung Fu is weak. But there’s hundreds of books on the topic and available for me to review and here’s a few tips that will hopefully improve my SQL query Kung-Fu and become useful to you as well.
Doing the Book Search
Yes the web has everything and yes you can usually Google it up and find it on someone’s blog, some tutorial, some KB or something. But often you know what you really need is a good book to wrap your hands around and get up to speed. This week has been one of those items where I knew I could find the answer online (and got a few bits and pieces) but really needed a solid understanding and I wasn’t going to get that without diving into a good book. So I started looking. First I hit Amazon and did a search and then sorted based on reviews and found a few books that I thought would do the trick. So then I went to BarnesandNoble.com to see if they were instock anywhere near to my office (There’s a university nearby so they have a reasonable tech book collection.. reasonable being key). They had a couple SQL server data analysis books but not the ones I wanted “SQL Server Data Analysis with SQL and Excel”. Okay so now I don’t really know if this is the book for me or not. If they had it at the bookstore I could check it out before buying it. So now what?
Google’s Book Search
http://books.google.com was next. I went there and searched for my book and found a great deal of it available there! Ofcourse you get about half a page into a topic and find the next 6 pages missing but atleast you know this is probably the book for me.. But now we need to order the book and although I’m an amazon prime member and get free 2 day delivery, that’s not going to be until Tuesday and I want the book before the weekend. So I drop the extra bucks and get it overnighted but still my project is on hold..
Getting the book TODAY!
I really need this done today and being a proud iphone user and knowing amazon has Kindle for the iphone I thought Hrm… 3” display can’t be that bad… Yeah a few reviews on tech books say it really is so that’s out. Next is ofcourse O’Reilly’s safari books online (www.safaribooksonline.com) but they’re only O’Reilly… NOT!
Turns out they had all the books I needed and for $10 a month I got them today and am getting my project completed today (after this blog post goes up).
So here’s the Magic sauce to finding your book today and not tomorrow.
1. Identify the book you want by going to amazon.com and searching reviews.
2. Checkout the book online using books.google.com and reading through those books they have excerpts of online (amazon has a couple pages but I found google more comprehensive).
3. Check Safaribooksonline.com to see your book is there. Their search sucks though so you’re going to want to do a few searches before giving up on it not being there. They have all kinds of books and publishers listed there so it’s a good chance your book is there.
4. Get the book on safari and have a good at it. (for $10 a month you get 5 books so you can think of it as a $2 preview as to whether you’ll buy the book or not and it’s better to spend $2 to test a book than $50 to find out it stinks…)
5. Buy the book if you’re like me and need those physical pages to thumbnail and sticky note (I never write in my books though, I think that ruins them personally and somehow offensive) or to read in your ‘private library’ and you know the room I’m referring too.. it has great lighting, privacy and comfortable seating for one… yeah when you leave the room you flush and wash your hands (you do wash your hands, right?).
So that’s the tip, the golden nugget, the secret sauce in this blog post. get the reviews on amazon, read it on google and then trial it on safari and finally go buy it and get it shipped to you if you find it bookshelf worthy.
The easy way to create your first WordPress Theme.
May 6th
Tired of trying to find just the right wordpress theme? There’s millions of them to choose from afterall. Would love to create your own but have less artistic talent now than you did in Kindergarten with a box of busted chunks of crayolas? (You know what I’m talking about. First week of school you had brand new Crayolas by the second week they were all bits and pieces and nubs)
Well No worries! Artisteer to the the rescue! If you can use word, if you can click a couple buttons you can create your own WordPress theme with ease.
Creating your first wordpress theme is as easy as 1, 2, 3
After you download and install Artisteer you’ll want to run (uh duh, tell me something I didn’t know Jess). You’ll be prompted to pick what kind of theme you want to create and it supports more than just WordPress. In fact today it supports WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, an HTML template, an ASP.NET Application and a CodeCharge Studio Template (CodeCharge is for wannabe programmers just like us wannabe artists, I’ll talk about it in the next series and yeah, I use it too and no real programmers use it too).
Here’s the startup screen:
You’ll select WordPress and then get a screen like this:
Now with absolutely ZERO artistic ability and effort. I could export that theme and have just created my first WordPress theme. Let me show you how.
First you’ll click on the Export Button on the top right. and it will prompt you with a screen:
You’ll give it a name and set a path to where you want it to export to as I did above and then click the OK button to let the magic happen. Open up that folder you had it export to and ta-dah! There it is:
That’s it upload that folder to your wwwroot/wp-content/themes folder and you’ve got your own theme installed and ready to go.
Here’s my blog right now (that uses an artisteer theme)
and Here’s my blog with that new theme we just created selected as the theme to use:
Just as easy as 1, 2, 3 I was able to completely change up my blog’s design.
Making the Artisteer theme, your theme.
Here’s the thing. I don’t really care for the yellow sunburst, the palm trees or general layout of this theme so let’s change it up. By clicking the “Suggest Design” a few times, artisteer will randomly create some suggested designs for me and every time it’s something completely different.
After three clicks I got this:
I like the design, but I don’t care for the colors. So I click the suggest colors button a few times and I get:
Those are colors I can live with but I don’t like the background so guess what, I click suggest background:
Now I can go through and get suggestions for every element of my theme and I can also go in and tweak the particular features of the theme as well. Let’s look at the header. I want to change it up. So at the top I click Header and get a new menu bar at the top:
Now I can change the background image, the text location, add a foreground photo, etc, etc, etc.
With a little playing around (and don’t worry if you goof it up just click the undo button at the very top to roll back) this is what I came up with:
Yeah, I know what’ you’re thinking. That’s one scary clown Jess.. But you get the idea, you can tweak every single element of your theme and if you actually have (unlike me) more artistic talent than you did in kindergarten with those broken bits of crayola, it will look pretty nice.
If you haven’t grabbed artisteer yet, definitely do head over and give it a whirl.
I speak your language thanks to the Microsoft Translator Widget
May 6th
While at MIX, I learned about the Microsoft Translator. It’s a website widget you add on your site and allows your visitors to select their preferred language and then translates the page into that language. I had a wordpress plugin at one time that did this but quit using it (I don’t recall why, I think it was because I had to manually add it each time I changed the theme).
Anyway, you can learn try the translator on my site by visiting the little box on the right side that looks like this:
And selecting your language and pressing the little play button. Then without leaving the site it starts to translate the page, IN PAGE. Very cool, gotta love that AJAX/Javascript goodness.
How do I get one too?
Want to get it? Here’s a little known secret. All Microsoft’s beta stuff is available on http://connect.microsoft.com signup for it there and you’ll receive a beta code as soon as it’s available. Some betas are open immediately and some take a few days. It took about a month for me to get this one.
