Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
The Cool Stuff
Google Analytics is Free & Open!
Sep 3rd
In case you haven’t heard you no longer need an ‘invite’ or have to wait to get a google analytics account. It’s now open and free to anyone to instantly create an account.
Google analytics is the result of Google’s purchase of urchin, a pretty decent web stats (ok, fine analytics) which previously was pretty pricey if you wanted to deploy it on your site. The downside is code has to be loaded on every page and it then calls a link out to google and stores your data there. Honestly, I enjoy it. When comparing Google’s analytics to our own Smarterstats install, I think you’ll find they both have their advantages and disadvantages, however smarterstats I think provides more in depth information where google provides a nice overview.
If you don’t know where to find google or google analytics, it’s http://www.google.com/analytics
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.
Clustrmaps.com — This seems pretty cool.
Mar 2nd
If it worked there should be a little map up above that displays the geographic locations my visitors come from (so I guess it will just have a big red dot over where my office is since I'm probably the only person that comes here).
LightBox Module
Mar 2nd
There's 20 or so new community server modules that were released recently you can find details about them here: http://developer.communityserver.org/default.aspx/CS.FirstCSModuleContent One of hte modules uses a little piece of javascript called LightBox that just outright rocks. I'm in the process (when I can find the time) of writing a photo gallery based on it in C#. It's pretty easy actually. It seems this module may have a bug in it that keeps the image reloading time and time again but it's pretty cool. Below is an image of hasselhoff (no I'm not a huge knightrider fan or anything like that) but this is a pretty funny picture and well it's great for demoing apps like this so click on it and enjoy the magic that is lightbox. — Jess
