Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Web Technologies
Heading to Mix 08 Next week!
Feb 29th
I’m Vegas bound once again. . . . Seems I was just there in November?!?! This trip though is all business (yeah.. uh huh in Vegas . . . Keep telling yourself that Jess).
Anyway, looks like MIX has sold out once again but if you’re heading to Vegas and want to meet up feel free to drop me a note.
So far I know the following guys are heading to Mix:
- Myself & Carlos
- Hosters like ourselves and I hear guys from crystal, discount, etc.
- Microsoft Superstars like our buddies Joe Healy, Russ Fustino and Scott Hanselman.
- The guys from BVsoftware / BVcommerce.
- This is going to my first year attending MIX but I’m told it’s the event to be at for Web technologies on the Microsoft Platform (which is pretty much everyone).
- Oh and if you’re in South Florida and heading out, Joe has a great post on his DevFish ( ><<<(o>) site.
Free WordPress Themes from Appliedi.net
Dec 12th
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about anything so I thought I’d toss it out there that Applied Innovations has commissioned the design of 3 wordpress themes and are giving these away for FREE to the wordpress community. As everyone that reads my blog knows I’m a big advocate of wordpress as a blogging platform and appliedi.net fully supports wordpress hosting on our windows servers.
You can learn more about the wordpress themes at: http://www.appliedi.net/blog/2007/12/11/three-free-wordpress-themes/
There’s a new database option available for PHP, It’s called SQL2005
Oct 10th
Ever since Bill Staples first blogged about the collaborative work Microsoft was doing with Zend to improve PHP stability and performance on IIS, I’ve been giddy as a school girl. Having run a core component of the AppliedI.net infrastructure that makes use of PHP and MySQL on IIS7 and making use of FastCGI and the new Windows CGI friendly DLLs/builds it’s made me even more giddy, PHP simply zips along these days on our windows servers and I can’t wait to move my blog to a box running FastCGI. This week at ZendCon Bill announced some more good news: SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP.
From the Microsoft Data Blog:
The PHP Driver will deliver an API designed-to-enable reliable, scalable integration with SQL Server for PHP applications deployed on the Windows platform. Zend and Microsoft are working together with the PHP Community to ensure that the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP is a great offering for PHP developers and part of Zend’s core PHP offering.
So that’s the good news, the bad news is we have to wait one more day, because the download won’t be available until October 11th at: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/technologies/php/default.mspx
WordPress 2.3 and Windows Live Writer Beta 3 bring new stuff to bloggers
Oct 3rd
WordPress 2.3 was released on September 25th. This release of WordPress brought some great new features:
- Native tagging support (previously available through plug-ins)
- Plug-in update notifications.
- and some URL handling improvements
Earlier in September Windows Live Writer, Beta 3, was also released. This latest build of WLW brings with it:
- Insert Video dialog (previously available through plug-ins)
- Support for 28 additional languages
- Ability to print posts
- Improved image handling
Together WordPress and Windows Live Writer make an outstanding blogging platform, WordPress provides one of the most powerful open-source blogging engines available today and Windows Live Writer is hand’s down one of the easiest to use blog publishing tools.
Tagging in WordPress 2.3
Tagging isn’t new to WordPress bloggers as most have been using Jerome’s Keyword Tags or Ultimate Tag Warrior but now this functionality is built in. Looking for more information on tagging in WordPress 2.3 and how to implement some of my favorite features that used tagging brought me to the following great articles:
- How to add wordpress 2.3 tags to your current theme
- How to add wordpress 2.3 tags to your current theme part 2
These two articles do a good job of explaining tags and how to use them in your own themes. Since this is such a new feature, few themes support them today but it’s easy enough to implement them in your own blog, as I’ve done. In my blog I’ve added tags at the end of the blog article:
I still need to clean up how it’s displayed but you get the idea. You’re probably wondering why tags are so important. For me tags provide a way identify the key topics of an article and later when searching your blog for articles on particular topics you can search through the tags.
Creating tag clouds in WordPress 2.3
The new tagging feature also supports a user customizable tag cloud as seen on my blog:
For me, the tag cloud helps you identify what the common themes of a blog are and just what topics the author tends to write about. The code to implement my tagcloud would seem to be complex, right? Fortunately, is very simple:
<?php wp_tag_cloud(‘smallest=8&largest=16&’); ?>
Identifying Related Articles thanks to Tags
You’ll notice all these tags allow you to really identify what articles are related. To take this a step further, I’m using a plugin called: WP 2.3 Related Posts, to identify related articles on each blog post’s page:
By using this plug-in when a visitor comes to your site, say through a search engine, they’ll have an easily available list of related articles on the same topic that they can review. Thus making your blog more ‘sticky’ and visitor friendly.
Windows Live Writer and WordPress 2.3
So far I’ve only talked about WordPress tags and only mentioned Windows Live Writer. Well, the latest couple betas of Windows Live Writer really supported tags but we were crippled on how we could implement them. This has all changed. Ruhani Rabin, provides a great tutorial on how to enable tags support in WLW for WordPress:
In a nutshell you’ll download the wlwmanifest file and some images, upload it to your blog and then have WLW update your blog features. This will enable the new tagging features.
To add tags to your new blog post from within WLW, you’ll find the dialog box hidden at the bottom:
AppliedI.net and IIS7 on Windows Server Core 2008
Jun 7th
This week at Tech-Ed Bob Muglia announced that IIS7 would be supported as a role in Windows Server Core 2008. If you’re not familiar with Server Core, it’s a trimmed down version of Windows Server 2008 with just the bare minimum bits needed to run.
Over the past few months we’ve had the great pleasure here at Applied Innovations to work with Microsoft and the IIS team at Microsoft as one of the earliest IIS7 Early Adopters. During the beta testing of Longhorn we had the opportunity to test Server Core and below is a short video of Carlos Caneja and myself discussing our experience with IIS7 and Server Core with Microsoft’s own Mario Juarez and Eric Woersching (From the IIS Team).
(pictured above, Eric Woersching, Carlos Caneja, Jess Coburn and Mario Juarez)
(clicking on the image opens a silverlight player in a new window and streams the video from my website)
What Does IIS7 on Server Core Mean to Web Hosters?
For AppliedI.net, IIS on server core represents Microsoft
