So you want to perfect your blog, get that traffic, make your ratings rocket, and eat off the fat of the land. Well, we can’t claim we’re experts in that field, but here’s some things we have noticed in our time blogging..
There’s three kinds of posts. You need them all, even if it doesn’t look like it. They don’t bring equal traffic, they’re not all as easy to write, and some take longer than others, but you have to do it if you want to succeed.
America Online. Once the world’s single largest ISP and for many the first step into the glorious world of the internet. Now AOL is just a burden; after refusing to innovate, lower costs, or provide newer services, America Online is feeling the pain. And it hurts.
AO(Hel)l may have been the biggest and the baddest 10 years ago, but today AOL is on the brink of extinction. Just yesterday AOL announced they would no longer charge “it’s existing subscribers for online email and premium instant messaging” to all its broadband users across America. Bit of a shock actually, since we don’t think they even have any “You’ve got Mail” users any more.
So you Want to Overclock that Conroe?
Intel [[INTC]] finally has its new line of Conroe processors out, and no matter who or where you ask, they’ve done quite a good job with them. On the other side of the court AMD is readying its own AM2 line for release, with the FX-64 promising quite a punch.. While we haven’t been lucky enough to receive prototypes of either of these two product lines, our product analysts have been hard at work studying the reviews conducted by other big names in the hardware review industry. As such, this isn’t a review, rather it’s more of an analysis of these next generation CPUs, the technology behind them, and what it means for overclockers and bleeding-edge enthusiasts today.
Many people love the ease and security of using Internet Information Services 6 server on Windows 2003. Adding PHP and ASP support is a cinch, and in no time at all, IIS 6 can serve anything you throw at it – except JSP files of course. By no stretch of imagination is getting JSP running invisibly with IIS 6 an easy job, and here’s the best way to do it.
In this guide, we’ll be using IIS 6 on Windows Server 2003 with SP1 installed, together with the Tomcat servlet engine (version 5.5.17 stable) to parse the JSP files that IIS may encounter. It covers all the prerequisites and how to get them up and running.
Firefox. You must have heard of it by now, you know, that really ‘cool’ browser that sees itself taking over the world of internet surfing in 5 to 10 years. Yes, that’s the one.
If I were to ask ‘What’s their logo?,’ of an average Firefox user, the answer you’d expect (and can safely bet your money on) would be “A red fox around a globe” except, of course, for the fact that isn’t. Well, yes, that is a globe, but that logo has never actually featured a red fox!
What you see above isn’t a fox. Sure, it may look like one, but it isn’t. As a matter of fact, it has nothing to do with a red fox or a brown fox, and if you had said ‘red raccoon’ or ‘tiny and very-colorful panda’ you would have been a lot closer to the truth.
What better way to celebrate our brand-spanking-new download system than to write code — lot’s of code!? It’s a party, with a new version of NeoSmart Technologies’ highly popular EasyBCD utility, the very best Windows Vista bootloader modification tool; and a (very) long-awaited version 3.0 of CHMOD-Win, the Windows/Linux ACL client!
Java. It’s that old language that runs code in a highly bloated virtual machine at slow speeds and terrible performance, especially on the Web. On a local PC, a Java’s just pure slow, but on the web Java can be a real headache. However, it has its benefits too — or so we thought. There are only two reasons someone would use Java in a website today: they wanted to write a complex program/script really quick and they needed it to just work regardless of browser or platform. After all, Java is Java, no matter if you’re on Windows, Linux, or Mac; or use Firefox, Opera, or even Internet Explorer… But it’s not!
First, to clarify: this isn’t an article about Java, and it especially isn’t an attack on Java, not today. This is about Opera 9, the wonderful and highly-innovative browser that can do anything and everything with less memory than its competitors and with much less time too. But it breaks Java.
WordPress has lost the domain that Akismet was hosted on — and SVN users are stuck. Since the domain is no longer valid, when your SVN client attempts to query it for the Akismet plugin (which is included via something know as “svn externals“), it gets a HTTP 501 error, and the entire SVN update fails. For some, that might be OK, if all you have on SVN is WordPress, your plugins just don’t get upgraded. No biggie.
Some of us however depend on SVN for a lot more than just WordPress. NeoSmart Technologies is such an example: we jumped on to this great CVS replacement the minute we heard about it — it’s that great. At NST, we have our Gallery, Blog, various small scripts, and most importantly, our download system on SVN. We don’t even use FTP anymore, just SVN the files from our side, SSH into the server, and update the repo. It’s that easy.
Microsoft has just released the latest installment of the Windows Vista pre-RC1 builds, with Vista Build 5472.5 making its way to TAP and Tech Beta tester today, and for once, MSDN Subscribers too.
Build 5472.5 is a standard FRE Staged build, only available in English at the moment, though Arabic, Japanese, and German builds may follow. At this point all the builds we are seeing seem to undergoing severe stages of heavy optimization: although faster code normally comes at the expense of larger files as a rule of thumb, this build of Windows Vista packs a punch performance-wise, but is only a 100 MB larger than its predecessor, Build 5456.
The fact that this build has been distributed to a very large segment of the beta testing population (MSDN and Tech Net subscibers are normally excluded from interim builds like this one) leads us to believe this is the real deal: the build that will be RC1 with a bit more time and some more optimizations. It is probably meant to provide a testing background for the new ‘Aero Express’ theme (see below for more).
Yeah, you read that right. To re-iterate: if you want to code a site and expect it to load even semi-reasonably in Internet Explorer 6 or 7, you probably don’t want to write it or even touch it in Microsoft’s Expression Web Designer. At any rate, not this version of Expression.
Expression Web Designer is very Web 2.0 compatible. It’s the only really big HTML interface that validates directly against the W3C standards, by default checking page-display compatiblity against CSS 2.1, instead of against FF, IE6, or something. It does a very good job at that too, but unfortunately, it’s far ahead of Microsoft’s time.