Jim Becher

Oomph Examples

Jim Becher - Untangle the Web — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:59:44 GMT

I have been working with the oomph tool kit and see how this can be a valuable tool. It can work well for corporate sites and areas where people need to share contact and events. It really does make the process of posting an event easy and allowing for a great way for people to add these events to their calendars (multiple types).

It also makes adding a contact to your contact list simple.

Take a look at these examples:

Contact Example: www.tilde32.com/contact.aspx

Event Example: Blog: http://jimiz.net/blog

The Oomph icon or microformat icon will show in the upper left of a site that contains microformat information.

There is a codeplex project for oomph: http://codeplex.com/oomph

Also some information on Mix Labs: http://visitmix.com/Lab/Oomph

Keywords and spending (useful site)

Jim Becher - Untangle the Web — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:33:38 GMT

I stumbled upon this site that is pretty interesting. It shows some detail that I was looking for on how sites market keywords and some possible spending trends. It is somewhat accurate. I was able to benchmark the site against a few of the clients that I have done work with.

(Keyword spy) http://www.keywordspy.com/overview/domain.aspx?q=jimiz.net

I put a link to look at my blog. You will notice that I don't pay for any keywords for this blog (ha ha), that is because I don't make money off this blog. But it does a good job of showing some competitors, though I would laugh that none of the referenced sites I could do any kind of competition with. But for a public facing site or an ecommerce site this is a pretty valuable tool.

Windows 7 Backup

Jim Becher - Untangle the Web — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 04:20:07 GMT

I had the chance to try out the built in backup from windows 7. Not bad, I may have to start using that instead of the scripts and tools I currently use. I was impressed with what I saw, so I setup the backup and will try it for a few weeks.

Here is a great article showing all the steps. I found it was pretty straight forward to use with my network share.

http://lifehacker.com/5144757/first-look-at-windows-7s-backup-and-restore-center

What sites do you visit? Directly.

Jim Becher - Untangle the Web — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 04:30:42 GMT

I realized after a discussion at work today that I don't view news and information sites in a browser that often. I find that I use an RSS reader more than actually going to the sites. I did not think about this too much until a co-worker was discussing Twitter as a service does not get that much direct traffic (people going to their site) most twitter users use a 3rd party software or tool to tweet or follow people. I realized how true this was when I realized that I had not gone to www.twitter.com for a long time. I use my Iphone, digsby, or outtwit instead of going in a browser to twitter.

The same is true for most of the other sites I like. I use my RSS reader Google Reader to view most of my daily reading. I will post the blogs and sites I follow in another post. Today, I am interested in what people view in their browser.

I found that I enjoy a few sites directly (even though I may follow their blog):

Lifehacker (www.lifehacker.com)
Digg (www.digg.com)
woodtv (www.woodtv.com) - Local news - can't get school closings in RSS
news.google.com - for some reason I'd rather use this site than reader.

Other than those sites I use Google Reader to get info. Now don't get me wrong, I do search for sites, research, code and purchase on sites directly. However, I don't really view news or info other than in a reader.

So what sites do you browse to?

IIS 7 - Web application installer

Jim Becher - Untangle the Web — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:33:49 GMT

I love the new version of IIS. One of the great elements of Server 2008 is that it has IIS7 installed. A great aspect of the new IIS is that you can now run very common applications (wordpress, and photo gallery) on Windows. These applications are PHP based and typically are hosted on Linux Servers. IIS 7 allows for you to host these applications on Windows with some great performance

A new tool from Microsoft allows you to install all of these applications with little or no configuration.
(Web Application Installer) http://www.microsoft.com/web/channel/products/WebApplicationInstaller.aspx

Applications: DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti CMS, osCommerce, phpBB, WordPress

Give it a try. Works on Vista sp1 and Server 2008

Ring Tones

Jim Becher - Untangle the Web — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 14:39:44 GMT

I am not a big fan of ring tones. My cell phone is normally the old fashion ring of the 50's and on vibrate. I was reading some blogs this morning and came across this url http://www.makeownringtone.com/ and gave it a try. I'm not sure I'll use the ring tone I made but, it was fun and would be a better alternative than purchasing the 4 dollar ring tones from the carriers.

Windows 7 - Migration

Jim Becher - Untangle the Web — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 01:37:26 GMT

I finally made the full migration over to windows 7. It is fast and uses less memory than Vista. I now am running it on my primary machine. I was on Vista x64 and I have found Windows 7 x64 to be more responsive.

To make the migration work I used a drive image software and a spare hard drive. I first installed Win 7 on a smaller 60 gig drive to make sure that my base applications worked (Visual studio 2008, SSH, IM, and other tools).

Once I was happy I made an image of that drive using Macrium Reflect (http://www.macrium.com/) The free version. This was a very easy program to use. I’ll post more on this later.

Once I had a valid image of the Win 7 build. I made an image of my larger drive 120gig vista drive and saved it to my USB drive. I then took the boot CD for Reflect and restored the Win7 image onto the 120 gig drive.

This was a painless process that I did over 2 days. I had a day where I was unable to do any work on the migration and had to use my Vista disk. So I am now a happy Win7 user.

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,migration

Win form vs web client

Jim Becher - Untangle the Web — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 05:13:03 GMT

The current project I am starting we are debating using a win form client vs a web client. I feel like I have done this argument (discussion) many times. In the past I have always felt that you had more control with a winform. Now with new tools such as ajax,jquery, and css, we are able to make our web applications seem like win forms. Which do you prefer? I realize that requirements drive decisions, but I would love to hear stories or thoughts?

SQL Server Embedded Edition

Jim Becher - Untangle the Web — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:27:24 GMT

Recently had a client have issues with their WSS site and needed to restore the content DB. I took a look at their server and could not find the DB's. After a little investigation we discovered that they had attached to the Embedded Edition of sql instead of the Standard edition that was installed.

What was strange about this is the way the embedded edition works. I could not attach to it in the SQL manager. After some searching I found this method of attaching to it.

\\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query

If you put this into the ServerName area it will connect. If you use the actual instance name for server name it will not work. If anyone knows some more about the above connection / server name it would be great if you could explain it.

On the same topic, it appears that WSS can run on the Embedded edition. However, I would not recommend it. To correct the situation we stopped the service. Grabbed the .mdf files and attached them to the standers SQL 2005 server instance and then ported WSS to use that Database instance.

Also, the instance name is listed as SERVERNAME\MICROSOFT##SSEE

IIS Administration - Online Tools

Jim Becher - Untangle the Web — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 18:37:16 GMT

I was recently asked what tools do I use on a regular basis. As I thought about the question I realized that I have a heavy load of links, apps, and tools that I use frequently for administration of my sites. I decided I would put a list of these tools together for other administrators. My next series will contain downloadable tools

Online tools - Tools that are available online to help with the administration of IIS and web servers. Please add comments or additional tools that I may have missed:

Netcraft - (www.netcraft.com) - allows you to see web server surveys and check popularity and uptime. Very useful when checking to see your sites uptime and also other sites technology and server

DnsStuff - (www.dnsstuff.com) - Great site for looking up your DNS information and WHOIS. Test and configure you DNS to see if it is running and functioning. Invaluable when setting up email systems and backup email systems.

Domaintools – (www.domaintools.com) – See what your site has to say. Check domain names, and information around your domain. SEO information and keywords.

Alexa – (www.alexa.com) – Site ranking and traffic usage. Very good for an administrator to see what traffic and usage is in comparison to other sites.

Google apps – (www.google.com/a) – One of the best ways to provide email for smaller clients

Google analytics – (www.google.com/analytics) – You can’t beat the price (free) a great stats and web analytics program.

Montastic - (www.montastic.com) – A free online tool that will monitor uptime and notify you when site is unavailable

Google Webmaster tools – (www.google.com/webmasters/tools) – Submit your site, find out stats on when your site is crawled.

Webmaster tools – (www.iwebtool.com/tools/) – Great listing of tools for a webmaster to use.

Port80 Software – (www.port80software.com/tools/testyoursite.asp) – Check your site (IIS) for compression and cache.

IIS Compression - Walk Through

Jim Becher - Untangle the Web — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 04:52:52 GMT

The team over at IISinformation.com has a great article on how to setup / configure compression on IIS 6.0

http://www.iisinformation.com/content/IIS60CompressionWalkThrough.aspx

SMTP and Vista

Jim Becher - Untangle the Web — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 13:26:00 GMT

As I progress with using Vista as my primary OS, I am finding some things that need to be addressed.

One of the items left out of vista is an SMTP server. In XP and older operating systems you can have this installed with IIS. However, vista does not include an smtp server.

You have a few options out there to download (http://softstack.com/freesmtp.html) or (http://www.smartertools.com/Products/SmarterMail/Free.aspx)

Steve (Steve Schofield) has a good post discussing this. I wish I would have done a search before I started looking all over vista to find the app to install.

I am upset that they did not include this in the app or give developers another option.

SMTP and Vista

Jim Becher - Untangle the Web — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 13:02:00 GMT

As I progress with using Vista as my primary OS, I am finding some things that need to be addressed.

One of the items left out of vista is an SMTP server. In XP and older operating systems you can have this installed with IIS. However, vista does not include an smtp server.

You have a few options out there to download (http://softstack.com/freesmtp.html) or (http://www.smartertools.com/Products/SmarterMail/Free.aspx)

Steve (Steve Schofield) has a good post discussing this. I wish I would have done a search before I started looking all over vista to find the app to install.

I am upset that they did not include this in the app or give developers another option.

IISreporter Version 2.0 Released - www.iisreporter.com

Jim Becher - Untangle the Web — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 18:32:00 GMT

IISreporter 2.0 is now available. Go and download (www.iisreporter.com/dl).

The free standalone version allows you to monitor the connections on your local IIS server. You can install on as many servers / machines you would like. A new IISreporter Command center version will be released in the next 2 weeks.

I have closed the source code, but the older version v1.7 is still available at sourceforge.net (source) or download at iisreporter.com.

The new version of IISreporter.com has been re-written in C# and .NET 2.0. Performance has been increased and new features have been added.

For more information go to http://www.iisreporter.com (screen shots)

Consuming a web service with httpget

Jim Becher - Untangle the Web — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 18:46:00 GMT

I have an application that I wrote that uses a web service to provide data back to a central app. I needed a windows sidebar gadget to consume the web service. However I noticed that when using javascript to consume the service I would get errors. I then realized that I had to enable my web service to allow for access via HTTP GET. This allows the web service URL to be accessed using a string with any parameters added to the string.

To enable this on your ASMX web service you just need a few parameters in the web.config. Inside the <System.web> settings.