Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
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Homepage: http://www.jesscoburn.com
Posts by laptop
updated the blog with new features and a new look
Feb 20th
The blog needed a little love and was time for a makeover. I wanted to change up the theme and add a few features. I found a great article on building link love through creating “ultimate lists of …..” and one of the examples was a smashingmagazine.com article on 83 wordpress themes you probably never seen. #1 on the themes list was this theme, redoable. I have to say, it’s a pretty nice theme.
What’s so cool about the new theme?
I like the extended live article plug-in in wordpress. it gives the uber-cool google suggest style live updating search results (example do a search for virtuozzo and watch the articles start to show up).
I also added probably the plug-in with the absolute coolest administration panel of all time. It’s called gregarious and manages the digg and social bookmark links in a very clean manner.
Next I added the “popularity” plugin. This plugin shows what posts are most popular.
Why the change?
Well, I didn’t like how the old blog theme handled H tags that was really it. It was a very clean and professional theme. The mean reason I changed was that it’s nice to change up the design from time to time and it keeps the blog exciting and new for both me and you 
WordPress Displaying Posts Multiple Times
Feb 18th
Using WordPress, I like to tag my posts in multiple categories to help with SEO exposure. However, after upgrading to 2.1 I found that my posts were showing up multiple times on the index, once for each category they were in.
Turns out the reason for this was that I was using Category Visibility-RH. This plugin alters the visibility settings for different categories. I have my delicious bookmarks posted to my blog and have these in a invisible category so they don’t junk up the primary index page. Turns out this plug-in wasn’t 2.1 ready. Fortunately Rich Hamilton, the author released a beta patch that is working perfectly for me. If you’re having this same problem definitely try out the beta patch. If you’re not into betas then you’ll want to disable this plug-in until it’s released RTM.
A blast from the past
Feb 10th
Several years ago I created the little graphic ufo you see here. It’s actually a file from coreldraw like 2.0 or so. I took the image, put a little colored blur on the lights, made them rotate with using gifanimator and then published it on my site.
A couple years ago I saw the image posted on someone’s website. Turns out they purchased it on a shareware images cd from a computer show for $20 with a compilation of “royalty free graphics”. Thing is I never gave anyone permission to distribute my image and in fact I probably couldn’t as it’s not really ‘my’ image. How’d I know it was mine? The gif comments in the image shows it was created with the trial version of gif animator (same trial I used in fact) and it was the same small section animated.
PHP 5.2.1 for Windows Lives
Feb 10th
Yes, it’s official, PHP 5.2.1 is now available for download as per this article at mvolo.com.
What’s so exciting about 5.2.1?
Performance, BABY! Microsoft has been working with Zend to make PHP “rock solid” on Windows as well as working on a new FastCGI implementation.
From Mike’s blog:
You will also notice that the PHP 5.2.1 release contains an additional set of Windows binaries labelled “non-thread-safe”. These binaries are compiled without thread safety, which provides an additional performance boost for PHP when running in single-threaded envrionments like CGI and FastCGI. Be sure to download these binaries and try them out with the IIS FastCGI TP2.
What’s this mean for me and you? Well we’re running FastCGI today on our free IIS7 beta servers where you’ll be able to take advantage of this. In the next few days we should have 5.2.1 deployed to the shared servers. We’re holding off a bit longer to deploy FastCGI on the production servers but it hopefully shouldn’t be much longer before it’s ready for production.
You can download PHP 5.2.1 from php.net here: http://www.php.net/downloads
ASP.NET Code Camp Sponsorship
Feb 10th
Today, Applied Innovations sponsored the ASP.NET developer code camp as a way to give back to the developer community. Organized by the FlaDotNet Usergroup, a local ASP.NET users group. Turn out for the code camp was amazing with almost 600 developers showing up to share information on topics such as:
- ASP.NET AJAX, Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0, The new Lego Mindstorm and .Net Robotics and ofcourse, everything .NET related.
As the local leader in ASP.NET hosting, the Applied Innovations booth was extremely popular.
To promote the code camp we setup a special offer just for code camp participants offering 3 extra months free, a free SQL database and free domain registration. In addition to the special promotion we also gave away a year of VPS hosting.
