Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Cool Stuff
Lonely? Waiting for someone to write about your site? Looking for Link-Love? Now you can buy link-love!
Oct 16th
Blogsvertise.com is a pretty interesting concept. You pay bloggers to write permanent blog articles about a page/product on your site. These articles get distributed, spidered and links all over and you get instant link love. What’s this mean? Hrm how about Increased PageRank, Trust, Brand Recognition and oh yes LINK LOVE BABY!
Let’s face it blogs are here to express personal opinions, provide a means of sharing your views, experiences and knowledge and ofcourse getting search engine placement for your websites and products. I’ve been testing out blogsvertise this weekend and I have to admit “I’m loving it”. The articles written so far are creative and very nicely done (not like the crap you find on my blog).
What’s the cost? Just $20! Yeap for 20 bucks you can head over to the link-love pimps and get some luvin’ Give it a try: www.blogsvertise.com
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.
Meet the Source Force — Free Training Virtual Labs — Free Toys!
Mar 23rd
SDN has a a new thing they've been doing for the past couple months called Source Force. Promoting a series of *FREE*, have you noticed I really like free, this blog should be renamed to "Jess's list of free and cool tools", Anyway a series of Free Virtual Labs on the MSDN site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/virtuallabs/. What's better than getting free training? Free toys! If you do a couple labs and submit evaluations you'll get a free limited edition action figure (I suspect there's some office in Redmond right now with a thousand of these little guys all lined up battling).So I can highly recommend the Training labs from Fritz Onion. I picked up one of Fritz's books on ASP.net and C# a couple years ago and find it one of my best most targetted and straight to the point books. His training is quite good and he really follows through with it including follow up items on his blog. Just one thing on the free toys, they're only available for the Months of Jan, Feb, Mar and Apr so better hurry while you can.
Free copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard and Free ASP.net 2.0 Training
Mar 13th
Microsoft, Dr. Dobbs and O'REILLY are offering Free ASP.net 2.0 training with courses for JSP, PHP and Coldfusion developers looking to migrate over to the dark side. To sweeten the pie you also get a nice pack of freebies, including a copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition, a 50% discount on a MCP exam and some other goodies. Regardless it's a good deal and the training sessions are awesome. Many of them are by Fritz Onion who is an awesome trainer and book author. http://www.learn2asp.net/Campaign.aspx has all the goodies.
/blog/ or /blogs/ or what? where do I go…
Aug 26th
So I setup my fancy blog and am good to go. So I announce to my fellow geeks "hey I got a blog" and here's the address: http://www.jesscoburn.com/blog/ but only one problem. My blog is actually at http://www.jesscoburn.com/blogs/ !!! DOH!!
Well, actually this isn’t a problem. By utilizing ISAPI-rewrite from helicontech (http://www.helicontech.com) I can rewrite this url and auto-magically redirect the urls.
So I created a file named httpd.ini in my root folder and in there I placed the following content:
[ISAPI_Rewrite]
RewriteRule ^/blog/(.*) /blogs/$1 [RP]
The [ISAPI_Rewrite] line says this is an ISAPI_Rewrite rule so pay attention (you need this).
The next line is the rule. It translates as follows: ^/blog/(.*) says grab any queries that (^) start with /blog/ and (.*) have anything after them and redirect them to /blogs/ and place the anything that was behind /blog/ back in there. The [RP] says issue this to the browser as a permanent redirect (appearantly search engines like this or so say the guys that translate the clay tablets that all things search engine are inscribed on.
