Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Personal News
Zachary Roberts’ designer cake
May 14th
I got word from my Aunt that my Cousin (Andy Roberts) and his son (Zachary Roberts) made a pretty cool cake and got featured in their local paper. I have to admit this is pretty awesome indeed. Not sure where they got the idea for such a gruesome cake but it’s way cool.
Kudos to Zach and his dad for the awesome job on the cake.
The evolution of AppliedI.net
May 11th
I was using the wayback machine at archive.org to review some of the old versions of the AppliedI.net website. Here’s one of the earliest versions. This was actually the second incarnation of www.appliedi.net:
This was from late 1999, note the emphasis on NT Hosting! 
Here’s what our site looked like in 2001. Some of the javascript features don’t display today but you get the general ideal.
What I like most about these early designs was some of the information on there. The earliest news on the site seems to have been from July of 99.
Here’s some of the early highlights
Rolling out advanced (for the day) mail services
This was running a very early version of imail actually and at the time very few shared hosting provides provided IMAP, LDAP or webmail access to their mail servers. We were quite proud to bring this out.
Among the earliest to offer Windows 2000 hosting
It’s funny, at the time Windows 2000 was scary for many companies and many enterprises didn’t adopt it. In fact, there was a huge urban myth floating around about how Microsoft would own all your data if you were on Windows 2000.
Yes we were Mobile web ready!
Y2K Ready? Yes we were!
Sharepoint? How about Office 2000 Server Extensions. Yeap had ‘em!
Developer Friendly? Yes, Even back then!
Eight years later our mission remains the same.
One of the most interesting things about our little digital excavation here is that since October of 1998, when Applied Innovations was but a clever idea and February of 1999 when it officially launched. The core values and mission of Applied Innovations has remained very much the same:
versatile, full-featured cost effective solutions for today’s entrepreneur and small to medium sized business.
Slight blog update.. Turns into Complete Change
Apr 13th
Turns out the redoable theme that I was using has a comment bug. When leaving comments about a particular post, it would leave the comment on the wrong post. So for instance if you were commenting on this post, it may show up on my 2D/3D Microsoft Live Maps Post instead. This was causing a bit of a confusion as you can imagine.
There was another problem with the redoable theme, I was getting comments that the black background text made for a bad user experience and that I should go with a white text. I spent a fair bit of time digging through themes to see if I could find a theme I liked and ended up finding that over at www.bloggingpro.com they actually made available a theme based off of their own design. If you blog and don’t regularly visit bloggingpro.com you’re missing out on a great resource. I highly recommend you check it daily. So a new look and feel is launched here but I have a feeling that I’m going to have a custom theme designed for my site before long.
I know things have been quiet on the blog recently and I apologize. We’re really growing and expanding these days and it leaves me little time to blog. We have some very very exciting new changes in place already that we haven’t announced and some even more exciting additions in the works.
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.
Introducing the Boynton Beach Chamber of Commerce Video
Jan 24th
Applied Innovations has long been recognized as a leading windows hosting provider with a global reach. We’ve been selected to power over 10,000 websites for clients across the globe as well as the United States. Unfortunately, we never really targeted our local market. South Florida is home to atleast 8 different hosting companies of equal or larger size. In fact, Verio and Valueweb are both headquartered just a short drive from our office.
Recently we began marketing our services more locally and it’s working extremely well. One of the things we did was join the Boynton Beach Chamber of Commerce. I got my start in engineering as an Electrical Engineer for Motorola Messaging when it based in Boynton Beach. When the time came to join a Chamber of Commerce the Boynton Chamber was an easy choice, having previously been home to such a major technology giant as Motorola.
The Boynton Beach chamber recently commissioned a video to be made spotlighting several of the local businesses and was asked to assist with the “internetizing” (my own term, coined by me, all rights reserved) of the video I recommended we use Google Videos. My role was nothing more than uploading the video to google.
Google Video was extremely easy to use. The company commissioned to create the video converted it to a MPEG4 at 15 FPS and the video came in just under 100MB. I uploaded this to google and within a few minutes the video was ready to view.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Boynton Beach Chamber of Commerce Video (please note this video is available on their site, I’m simply posting it here because I believe the Chamber does good work for the community and the area businesses)
