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• should i link to a blog site or install my own blog engine?

  - by dc

  we're setting up a company blog. Our technology stack is .NET. Should we just use blogger/wordpress for the blog and redirect to it from our site? or should i install a blog engine directly on our site (e.g. blogEngine.NET)? some considerations i'd like feedback on are: 1.SEO - if you host your blog on wordpress/blogger instead of installing it on your site - will you get better page rankings? (if the content was the exact same) 2.scalability - i've read that dotNetBlogEngine doesnt scale well on web farms etc. our website is setup to be stateless. 3.security - presumably a hosted blog site has the advantage of having regular security updates. how easy is it to keep an installed blog engine patched? 4.examples of installed blog engines - dotNetBlogEngine seems to be the best but has a couple of limitations. can anyone suggest another one (n/a if you're advice is to host the blog on blogger/wordpress) 5.any other comments/issues/concerns we should be aware of? thanks for your feedback!

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• nginx- Rewrite URL with Trailing Slash

  - by Bryan

  I have a specialized set of rewrite rules to accommodate a mutli site cms setup. I am trying to have nginx force a trailing slash on the request URL. I would like it to redirect requests for domain.com/some-random-article to domain.com/some-random-article/ I know there are semantic considerations with this, but I would like to do it for SEO purposes. Here is my current server config. server { listen 80; server_name domain.com mirror.domain.com; root /rails_apps/master/public; passenger_enabled on; # Redirect from www to non-www if ($host = 'domain.com' ) { rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 permanent; } location /assets/ { expires 1y; rewrite ^/assets/(.*)$ /assets/$http_host/$1 break; } # / -> index.html if (-f $document_root/cache/$host$uri/index.html) { rewrite (.*) /cache/$host$1/index.html break; } # /about -> /about.html if (-f $document_root/cache/$host$uri.html) { rewrite (.*) /cache/$host$1.html break; } # other files if (-f $document_root/cache/$host$uri) { rewrite (.*) /cache/$host$1 break; } } How would I modify this to add the trailing slash? I would assume there has to be a check for the slash so that you don't end up with domain.com/some-random-article//

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• nginx 301 redirect to subfolder on primary domain

  - by 187j3x1

  sorry for my poor english. i just set up wordpress on my vps, so far its the only item on my site. there for seo reason, i think is better redirect all primary domain to the blog folder. primary domain is example.com wordpress is at example.com/blog what i want is rewrite www.example.com and example.com to example.com/blog. googled got some scripts, and make some change paste into nginx config file. here is: #301 redirect www to non-www server { server_name www.example.com; location = / { rewrite ^/(.*) http://example.com/$1 permanent; } } #301 non-www to subfolder server { server_name example.com; location = / { rewrite ^/(.*) http://example.com/blog$1 permanent; } } it works at some degree, successfully redirect to example.com/blog. the only problem is i get 404 not found error. then i only make nginx redirect www to example.com/blog. ok, this time i can access blog page. i know there is something wrong in the non-www to subfolder script. but do not how to fix it :(

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• Ubuntu server crashes; need help figuring how to figure out why

  - by neezer

  I have a 768 Slice at slicehost.com running Ubuntu Server 8.04.2 LTS (hardy) with a LAMP stack on it that periodically crashes, though why I am not sure. From what I can tell, there is a process that basically goes rogue and consumes all the memory on the slice, suffocating all the other programs running until the whole thing comes to a grinding halt, and I have to do a hard reboot of the slice to get it back up and running again. I can't detect any pattern for this (it seems to happen about once a month, more or less). Here's a screenshot of my console during the last crash: I would assume that a possible cause might a PHP script or an apache configuration rule that might cause the crash if triggered? How would I be able to find out which one is the offending one? I've checked and rechecked all my PHP scripts, and running them doesn't seem to trigger the crash. I've also been able to log on to my system during a crash and see what's running (with top), but I can't tell how the offending process was started, so I can't trace the root of the problem! I know my description is overly generic, but unfortunately my expertise in tracking down the source of these glitches is very limited. If you need any additional information about my system in order to help me figure this out, please let me know in the comments, and I will append it to the question. My only other lead as to the culprit here is Wordpress, which we have installed on this server. Here are the details: Wordpress 3.0.3 with the following plugins installed and activated: Addmarx - Bookmark/Share/Email Dropdown, Akismet, All in One SEO Pack, Animated Banners, Automatically publish highlights of any website, directly to your Blog, Broken Link Checker, CMS Dashboard, Collapsing Categories, Status Updater, SubHeading, Ultimate Google Analytics, VastSubCat, WP-CMS Post Control, and WP Super Cache

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• mod rewrite help

  - by Benny B

  Ok, I don't know regex very well so I used a generator to help me make a simple mod_rewrite that works. Here's my full URL https://www.huttonchase.com/prodDetails.php?id_prd=683 For testing to make sure I CAN use this, I used this: RewriteRule prodDetails/(.*)/$ /prodDetails.php?id_prd=$1 So I can use the URL http://www.huttonchase.com/prodDetails/683/ If you click it, it works but it completely messes up the relative paths. There are a few work-arounds but I want something a little different. https://www.huttonchase.com/prod_683_stainless-steel-flask I want it to see that 'prod' is going to tell it which rule it's matching, 683 is the product number that I'm looking up in the database, and I want it to just IGNORE the last part, it's there only for SEO and to make the link mean something to customers. I'm told that this should work, but it's not: RewriteRule ^prod_([^-]*)_([^-]*)$ /prodDetails.php?id_prd=$1 [L] Once I get the first one to work I'll write one for Categories: https://www.huttonchase.com/cat_11_drinkware And database driven text pages: https://www.huttonchase.com/page_44_terms-of-service BTW, I can flip around my use of dash and underscore if need be. Also, is it better to end the URLs with a slash or without? Thanks!

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• nginx- Rewrite URL with Trailing Slash

  - by Bryan

  I have a specialized set of rewrite rules to accommodate a mutli site cms setup. I am trying to have nginx force a trailing slash on the request URL. I would like it to redirect requests for domain.com/some-random-article to domain.com/some-random-article/ I know there are semantic considerations with this, but I would like to do it for SEO purposes. Here is my current server config. server { listen 80; server_name domain.com mirror.domain.com; root /rails_apps/master/public; passenger_enabled on; # Redirect from www to non-www if ($host = 'domain.com' ) { rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 permanent; } location /assets/ { expires 1y; rewrite ^/assets/(.*)$ /assets/$http_host/$1 break; } # / -> index.html if (-f $document_root/cache/$host$uri/index.html) { rewrite (.*) /cache/$host$1/index.html break; } # /about -> /about.html if (-f $document_root/cache/$host$uri.html) { rewrite (.*) /cache/$host$1.html break; } # other files if (-f $document_root/cache/$host$uri) { rewrite (.*) /cache/$host$1 break; } } How would I modify this to add the trailing slash? I would assume there has to be a check for the slash so that you don't end up with domain.com/some-random-article//

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• Nginx: Disallow index.html in URL

  - by Martin Vilcans

  We're generating a site consisting of only static files (using Assemble). Having the .html extension on URLs looks so nineties, so we generate every static HTML file in its own directory and call it index.html. For example, the url http://www.example.com/foo/bar/ is in the file /var/www/foo/bar/index.html. This works well, but there is one small thing nagging me: Now there are two possible URLs to the same resource: http://www.example.com/foo/bar/ (slash URL) http://www.example.com/foo/bar/index.html (index.html URL) By accident someone may link to the index.html form of the URL, which is bad for SEO and looks ugly (remember the nineties?). Is it possible in Nginx to give a 404 error on the index.html URL, but serve the slash URL? I tried this: location ~ /index\.html$ { return 404; } But it seems that Nginx does some internal rewrite of the slash URL to the index.html URL, and then matches this location so we get a 404 even on the slash URL. Note that to catch mistakes, we want index.html URLs to be an error, not just redirect to the slash URL.

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• Is there a limit to how many sites can be hosted on a single IP address when using HTTP Host Headers on Windows 2008?

  - by Kev

  For reasons that are lost in the mists of time, our older Windows (2000, 2003) servers have been configured with a "Administrative" IP address and three further "Hosting" IP addresses. There are also additional IP's for sites with SSL certificates. The "Administrative" IP address is where all our internal provisioning, monitoring and other such apps are bound to. We lock this down and don't permit access to it from the outside world (other than over our VPN). The three "Hosting" IP addresses are used for IIS website hosting (in conjunction with host headers). Historically, new site IP address allocations have been rotated through these three IP addresses. I'm not really sure why. I'm building a new batch of servers and I'm considering just having a single hosting IP address. Our servers can host up to 1200 sites on a single machine. Is there a technical limit to the number of IIS sites that can bind to a single IP address? Our Linux platform seems to do just fine with just a single shared IP + host headers. I initially thought this might be an SEO thing, but given that IPv4 address space conservation is paramount I hardly think Google or other search engines could reasonably penalise site rankings just because hundreds of sites hang off the same IP.

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• How to speed up request/response to django using apache or another solution?

  - by jbcurtin

  Hey all, I'm mainly a developer, but every now and again I jump into the sys-admin position. For the most part I've gotten away with deploying php and python apps using apache. I write today because I'm starting to research faster alternatives to apache, yet still have some of the core features I require like put and delete methods and the ability to connect to a socket via apache. ( This I have not tried, but might be a nice whistle if I ever employ comet on my apps. ) As you've probably guessed, I use javascript exclusively for all my websites utilizing deep linking for SEO support. The main areas that I'm looking to increase performance is the connection between the django apps and the web server to the client response. Every day I work my best to keep the smallest memory foot print as possible, however I am getting to the end of my rope when it comes to working with apache. In general, keep in mind that I'm just starting this research so I'm looking more for material to read then solutions at this moment. My main questions: Am I missing something about apache that makes it faster then everything else? What would be a good server environment to deploy just static files one? What are some of the leading open-source and paid alternatives?

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• htaccess hacked - i've deleted code and file - what next?

  - by user1762595

  My website was hacked recently. I think i've found the code that was added to the htaccess file, deleted it and then added script to prevent the htaccess file being accessed again. I've also deleted the php file that the hacked code refers to (common.php). What do i need to do next? I'm not a programmer or website developer but i really wanted to see if i could fix the problem myself as i've spent quite a few hours trying and don't give up easily. Here is the hacked code that i deleted; <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (google|yahoo) [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (google|yahoo) RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /$ [OR] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} (shtml|html|htm|php|xml|phtml|asp|aspx)$ [NC] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !common.php RewriteCond /home/httpd/vhosts/bluestardive.com/httpdocs/common.php -f RewriteRule ^.*$ /common.php [L] </IfModule> this code has to stay in the htaccess file as it redirects my url to seo friendly ones or the website errors, but has this code been hacked as well? # Apache search queries statistic module RewriteEngine On AddHandler php5-fastcgi .php .php5 # <contrexx> # <core_modules__alias> RewriteRule ^about-us$ /index.php?page=883 [L,NC] RewriteRule ^ausfluge-und-aktivitaten$ /index.php?page=800 [L,NC] RewriteRule ^bluestardive-news$ /index.php?page=919 [L,NC] RewriteRule ^bookings$ /index.php?page=911 [L,NC] RewriteRule ^diveresort$ /index.php?page=879 [L,NC] RewriteRule ^diving$ /index.php?page=880 [L,NC] RewriteRule ^excursions-and-activities$ /index.php?page=881 [L,NC] RewriteRule ^galerie$ /index.php?section=gallery [L,NC] RewriteRule ^oceannight$ http://www.bluestardive.com/index.php?page=906 [L,NC] RewriteRule ^philosophy$ /index.php?page=846 [L,NC] RewriteRule ^reservation$ /index.php?page=917 [L,NC] RewriteRule ^reservierung$ /index.php?page=918 [L,NC] RewriteRule ^resort$ /index.php?page=798 [L,NC] # </core_modules__alias> # </contrexx> many thanks for any help Claire

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• SQLAuthority News – TechEd India – April 12-14, 2010 Bangalore – An Unforgettable Experience – An Op

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd India was one of the largest Technology events in India led by Microsoft. This event was attended by more than 3,000 technology enthusiasts, making it one of the most well-organized events of the year. Though I attempted to attend almost all the technology events here, I have not seen any bigger or better event in Indian subcontinents other than this. There are 21 Technical Tracks at Tech·Ed India 2010 that span more than 745 learning opportunities. I was fortunate enough to be a part of this whole event as a speaker and a delegate, as well. TechEd India Speaker Badge and A Token of Lifetime Hotel Selection I presented three different sessions at TechEd India and was also a part of panel discussion. (The details of the sessions are given at the end of this blog post.) Due to extensive traveling, I stay away from my family occasionally. For this reason, I took my wife – Nupur and daughter Shaivi (8 months old) to the event along with me. We stayed at the same hotel where the event was organized so as to maximize my time bonding with my family and to have more time in networking with technology community, at the same time. The hotel Lalit Ashok is the largest and most luxurious venue one can find in Bangalore, located in the middle of the city. The cost of the hotel was a bit pricey, but looking at all the advantages, I had decided to ask for a booking there. Hotel Lalit Ashok Nupur Dave and Shaivi Dave Arrival Day – DAY 0 – April 11, 2010 I reached the event a day earlier, and that was one wise decision for I was able to relax a bit and go over my presentation for the next day’s course. I am a kind of person who likes to get everything ready ahead of time. I was also able to enjoy a pleasant evening with several Microsoft employees and my family friends. I even checked out the location where I would be doing presentations the next day. I was fortunate enough to meet Bijoy Singhal from Microsoft who helped me out with a few of the logistics issues that occured the day before. I was not aware of the fact that the very next day he was going to be “The Man” of the TechEd 2010 event. Vinod Kumar from Microsoft was really very kind as he talked to me regarding my subsequent session. He gave me some suggestions which were really helpful that I was able to incorporate them during my presentation. Finally, I was able to meet Abhishek Kant from Microsoft; his valuable suggestions and unlimited passion have inspired many people like me to work with the Community. Pradipta from Microsoft was also around, being extremely busy with logistics; however, in those busy times, he did find some good spare time to have a chat with me and the other Community leaders. I also met Harish Ranganathan and Sachin Rathi, both from Microsoft. It was so interesting to listen to both of them talking about SharePoint. I just have no words to express my overwhelmed spirit because of all these passionate young guys - Pradipta,Vinod, Bijoy, Harish, Sachin and Ahishek (of course!). Map of TechEd India 2010 Event Day 1 – April 12, 2010 From morning until night time, today was truly a very busy day for me. I had two presentations and one panel discussion for the day. Needless to say, I had a few meetings to attend as well. The day started with a keynote from S. Somaseger where he announced the launch of Visual Studio 2010. The keynote area was really eye-catching because of the very large, bigger-than- life uniform screen. This was truly one to show. The title music of the keynote was very interesting and it featured Bijoy Singhal as the model. It was interesting to talk to him afterwards, when we laughed at jokes together about his modeling assignment. TechEd India Keynote Opening Featuring Bijoy TechEd India 2010 Keynote – S. Somasegar Time: 11:15pm – 11:45pm Session 1: True Lies of SQL Server – SQL Myth Buster Following the excellent keynote, I had my very first session on the subject of SQL Server Myth Buster. At first, I was a bit nervous as right after the keynote, for this was my very first session and during my presentation I saw lots of Microsoft Product Team members. Well, it really went well and I had a really good discussion with attendees of the session. I felt that a well begin was half-done and my confidence was regained. Right after the session, I met a few of my Community friends and had meaningful discussions with them on many subjects. The abstract of the session is as follows: In this 30-minute demo session, I am going to briefly demonstrate few SQL Server Myths and their resolutions as I back them up with some demo. This demo presentation is a must-attend for all developers and administrators who would come to the event. This is going to be a very quick yet fun session. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Lunch with Somasegar After the session I went to see my daughter, and then I headed right away to the lunch with S. Somasegar – the keynote speaker and senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. I really thank to Abhishek who made it possible for us. Because of his efforts, all the MVPs had the opportunity to meet such a legendary person and had to talk with them on Microsoft Technology. Though Somasegar is currently holding such a high position in Microsoft, he is very polite and a real gentleman, and how I wish that everybody in industry is like him. Believe me, if you spread love and kindness, then that is what you will receive back. As soon as lunch time was over, I ran to the session hall as my second presentation was about to start. Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm Session 2: Master Data Services in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Business Intelligence is a subject which was widely talked about at TechEd. Everybody was interested in this subject, and I did not excuse myself from this great concept as well. I consider myself fortunate as I was presenting on the subject of Master Data Services at TechEd. When I had initially learned this subject, I had a bit of confusion about the usage of this tool. Later on, I decided that I would tackle about how we all developers and DBAs are not able to understand something so simple such as this, and even worst, creating confusion about the technology. During system designing, it is very important to have a reference material or master lookup tables. Well, I talked about the same subject and presented the session keeping that as my center talk. The session went very well and I received lots of interesting questions. I got many compliments for talking about this subject on the real-life scenario. I really thank Rushabh Mehta (CEO, Solid Quality Mentors India) for his supportive suggestions that helped me prepare the slide deck, as well as the subject. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: SQL Server Master Data Services will ship with SQL Server 2008 R2 and will improve Microsoft’s platform appeal. This session provides an in-depth demonstration of MDS features and highlights important usage scenarios. Master Data Services enables consistent decision-making process by allowing you to create, manage and propagate changes from a single master view of your business entities. Also, MDS – Master Data-hub which is a vital component, helps ensure the consistency of reporting across systems and deliver faster and more accurate results across the enterprise. We will talk about establishing the basis for a centralized approach to defining, deploying, and managing master data in the enterprise. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The day was still not over for me. I had ran into several friends but we were not able keep our enthusiasm under control about all the rumors saying that SQL Server 2008 R2 was about to be launched tomorrow in the keynote. I then ran to my third and final technical event for the day- a panel discussion with the top technologies of India. Time: 5:00pm – 6:00pm Panel Discussion: Harness the power of Web – SEO and Technical Blogging As I have delivered two technical sessions by this time, I was a bit tired but  not less enthusiastic when I had to talk about Blog and Technology. We discussed many different topics there. I told them that the most important aspect for any blog is its content. We discussed in depth the issues with plagiarism and how to avoid it. Another topic of discussion was how we technology bloggers can create awareness in the Community about what the right kind of blogging is and what morally and technically wrong acts are. A couple of questions were raised about what type of liberty a person can have in terms of writing blogs. Well, it was generically agreed that a blog is mainly a representation of our ideas and thoughts; it should not be governed by external entities. As long as one is writing what they really want to say, but not providing incorrect information or not practicing plagiarism, a blogger should be allowed to express himself. This panel discussion was supposed to be over in an hour, but the interest of the participants was remarkable and so it was extended for 30 minutes more. Finally, we decided to bring to a close the discussion and agreed that we will continue the topic next year. TechEd India Panel Discussion on Web, Technology and SEO Surprisingly, the day was just beginning after doing all of these. By this time, I have almost met all the MVP who arrived at the event, as well as many Microsoft employees. There were lots of Community folks present, too. I decided that I would go to meet several friends from the Community and continue to communicate with me on SQLAuthority.com. I also met Abhishek Baxi and had a good talk with him regarding Win Mobile and Twitter. He also took a very quick video of me wherein I spoke in my mother’s tongue, Gujarati. It was funny that I talked in Gujarati almost all the day, but when I was talking in the interview I could not find the right Gujarati words to speak. I think we all think in English when we think about Technology, so as to address universality. After meeting them, I headed towards the Speakers’ Dinner. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Speakers Dinner The Speakers’ dinner was indeed a wonderful opportunity for all the speakers to get together and relax. We talked so many different things, from XBOX to Hindi Movies, and from SQL to Samosas. I just could not express how much fun I had. After a long evening, when I returned tmy room and met Shaivi, I just felt instantly relaxed. Kids are really gifts from God. Today was a really long but exciting day. So many things happened in just one day: Visual Studio Lanch, lunch with Somasegar, 2 technical sessions, 1 panel discussion, community leaders meeting, speakers dinner and, last but not leas,t playing with my child! A perfect day! Day 2 – April 13, 2010 Today started with a bang with the excellent keynote by Kamal Hathi who launched SQL Server 2008 R2 in India and demonstrated the power of PowerPivot to all of us. 101 Million Rows in Excel brought lots of applause from the audience. Kamal Hathi Presenting Keynote at TechEd India 2010 The day was a bit easier one for me. I had no sessions today and no events planned. I had a few meetings planned for the second day of the event. I sat in the speaker’s lounge for half a day and met many people there. I attended nearly 9 different meetings today. The subjects of the meetings were very different. Here is a list of the topics of the Community-related meetings: SQL PASS and its involvement in India and subcontinents How to start community blogging Forums and developing aptitude towards technology Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar User Groups and their developments SharePoint and SQL Business Meeting – a client meeting Business Meeting – a potential performance tuning project Business Meeting – Solid Quality Mentors (SolidQ) And family friends Pinal Dave at TechEd India The day passed by so quickly during this meeting. In the evening, I headed to Partners Expo with friends and checked out few of the booths. I really wanted to talk about some of the products, but due to the freebies there was so much crowd that I finally decided to just take the contact details of the partner. I will now start sending them with my queries and, hopefully, I will have my questions answered. Nupur and Shaivi had also one meeting to attend; it was with our family friend Vijay Raj. Vijay is also a person who loves Technology and loves it more than anybody. I see him growing and learning every day, but still remaining as a ‘human’. I believe that if someone acquires as much knowledge as him, that person will become either a computer or cyborg. Here, Vijay is still a kind gentleman and is able to stay as our close family friend. Shaivi was really happy to play with Uncle Vijay. Pinal Dave and Vijay Raj Renuka Prasad, a Microsoft MVP, impressed me with his passion and knowledge of SQL. Every time he gives me credit for his success, I believe that he is very humble. He has way more certifications than me and has worked many more years with SQL compared to me. He is an excellent photographer as well. Most of the photos in this blog post have been taken by him. I told him if ever he wants to do a part time job, he can do the photography very well. Pinal Dave and Renuka Prasad I also met L Srividya from Microsoft, whom I was looking forward to meet. She is a bundle of knowledge that everyone would surely learn a lot from her. I was able to get a few minutes from her and well, I felt confident. She enlightened me with SQL Server BI concepts, domain management and SQL Server security and few other interesting details. I also had a wonderful time talking about SharePoint with fellow Solid Quality Mentor Joy Rathnayake. He is very passionate about SharePoint but when you talk .NET and SQL with him, he is still overwhelmingly knowledgeable. In fact, while talking to him, I figured out that the recent training he delivered was on SQL Server 2008 R2. I told him a joke that it hurts my ego as he is more popular now in SQL training and consulting than me. I am sure all of you agree that working with good people is a gift from God. I am fortunate enough to work with the best of the best Industry experts. It was a great pleasure to hang out with my Community friends – Ahswin Kini, HimaBindu Vejella, Vasudev G, Suprotim Agrawal, Dhananjay, Vikram Pendse, Mahesh Dhola, Mahesh Mitkari,  Manu Zacharia, Shobhan, Hardik Shah, Ashish Mohta, Manan, Subodh Sohani and Sanjay Shetty (of course!) .  (Please let me know if I have met you at the event and forgot your name to list here). Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Community Leaders Dinner After lots of meetings, I headed towards the Community Leaders dinner meeting and met almost all the folks I met in morning. The discussion was almost the same but the real good thing was that we were enjoying it. The food was really good. Nupur was invited in the event, but Shaivi could not come. When Nupur tried to enter the event, she was stopped as Shaivi did not have the pass to enter the dinner. Nupur expressed that Shaivi is only 8 months old and does not eat outside food as well and could not stay by herself at this age, but the door keeper did not agree and asked that without the entry details Shaivi could not go in, but Nupur could. Nupur called me on phone and asked me to help her out. By the time, I was outside; the organizer of the event reached to the door and happily approved Shaivi to join the party. Once in the party, Shaivi had lots of fun meeting so many people. Shaivi Dave and Abhishek Kant Dean Guida (Infragistics President and CEO) and Pinal Dave (SQLAuthority.com) Day 3 – April 14, 2010 Though, it was last day, I was very much excited today as I was about to present my very favorite session. Query Optimization and Performance Tuning is my domain expertise and I make my leaving by consulting and training the same. Today’s session was on the same subject and as an additional twist, another subject about Spatial Database was presented. I was always intrigued with Spatial Database and I have enjoyed learning about it; however, I have never thought about Spatial Indexing before it was decided that I will do this session. I really thank Solid Quality Mentor Dr. Greg Low for his assistance in helping me prepare the slide deck and also review the content. Furthermore, today was really what I call my ‘learning day’ . So far I had not attended any session in TechEd and I felt a bit down for that. Everybody spends their valuable time & money to learn something new and exciting in TechEd and I had not attended a single session at the moment thinking that it was already last day of the event. I did have a plan for the day and I attended two technical sessions before my session of spatial database. I attended 2 sessions of Vinod Kumar. Vinod is a natural storyteller and there was no doubt that his sessions would be jam-packed. People attended his sessions simply because Vinod is syhe speaker. He did not have a single time disappointed audience; he is truly a good speaker. He knows his stuff very well. I personally do not think that in India he can be compared to anyone for SQL. Time: 12:30pm-1:30pm SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance I really had a fun time attending this session. Vinod made this session very interactive. The entire audience really got into the presentation and started participating in the event. Vinod was presenting a small problem with Query Tuning, which any developer would have encountered and solved with their help in such a fashion that a developer feels he or she have already resolved it. In one question, I was the only one who was ready to answer and Vinod told me in a light tone that I am now allowed to answer it! The audience really found it very amusing. There was a huge crowd around Vinod after the session. Vinod – A master storyteller! Time: 3:45pm-4:45pm Data Recovery / consistency with CheckDB This session was much heavier than the earlier one, and I must say this is my most favorite session I EVER attended in India. In this TechEd I have only attended two sessions, but in my career, I have attended numerous technical sessions not only in India, but all over the world. This session had taken my breath away. One by one, Vinod took the different databases, and started to corrupt them in different ways. Each database has some unique ways to get corrupted. Once that was done, Vinod started to show the DBCC CEHCKDB and demonstrated how it can solve your problem. He finally fixed all the databases with this single tool. I do have a good knowledge of this subject, but let me honestly admit that I have learned a lot from this session. I enjoyed and cheered during this session along with other attendees. I had total satisfaction that, just like everyone, I took advantage of the event and learned something. I am now TECHnically EDucated. Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar After two very interactive and informative SQL Sessions from Vinod Kumar, the next turn me presenting on Spatial Database and Indexing. I got once again nervous but Vinod told me to stay natural and do my presentation. Well, once I got a huge stage with a total of four projectors and a large crowd, I felt better. Time: 5:00pm-6:00pm Session 3: Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep Dive into Spatial Indexing Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 I kicked off this session with Michael J Swart‘s beautiful spatial image. This session was the last one for the day but, to my surprise, I had more than 200+ attendees. Slowly, the rain was starting outside and I was worried that the hall would not be full; despite this, there was not a single seat available in the first five minutes of the session. Thanks to all of you for attending my presentation. I had demonstrated the map of world (and India) and quickly explained what  Geographic and Geometry data types in Spatial Database are. This session had interesting story of Indexing and Comparison, as well as how different traditional indexes are from spatial indexing. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Due to the heavy rain during this event, the power went off for about 22 minutes (just an accident – nobodies fault). During these minutes, there were no audio, no video and no light. I continued to address the mass of 200+ people without any audio device and PowerPoint. I must thank the audience because not a single person left from the session. They all stayed in their place, some moved closure to listen to me properly. I noticed that the curiosity and eagerness to learn new things was at the peak even though it was the very last session of the TechEd. Everybody wanted get the maximum knowledge out of this whole event. I was touched by the support from audience. They listened and participated in my session even without any kinds of technology (no ppt, no mike, no AC, nothing). During these 22 minutes, I had completed my theory verbally. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 After a while, we got the projector back online and we continued with some exciting demos. Many thanks to Microsoft people who worked energetically in background to get the backup power for project up. I had a very interesting demo wherein I overlaid Bangalore and Hyderabad on the India Map and find their aerial distance between them. After finding the aerial distance, we browsed online and found that SQL Server estimates the exact aerial distance between these two cities, as compared to the factual distance. There was a huge applause from the crowd on the subject that SQL Server takes into the count of the curvature of the earth and finds the precise distances based on details. During the process of finding the distance, I demonstrated a few examples of the indexes where I expressed how one can use those indexes to find these distances and how they can improve the performance of similar query. I also demonstrated few examples wherein we were able to see in which data type the Index is most useful. We finished the demos with a few more internal stuff. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Despite all issues, I was mostly satisfied with my presentation. I think it was the best session I have ever presented at any conference. There was no help from Technology for a while, but I still got lots of appreciation at the end. When we ended the session, the applause from the audience was so loud that for a moment, the rain was not audible. I was truly moved by the dedication of the Technology enthusiasts. Pinal Dave After Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers new spatial data types that enable you to consume, use, and extend location-based data through spatial-enabled applications. Attend this session to learn how to use spatial functionality in next version of SQL Server to build and optimize spatial queries. This session outlines the new geography data type to store geodetic spatial data and perform operations on it, use the new geometry data type to store planar spatial data and perform operations on it, take advantage of new spatial indexes for high performance queries, use the new spatial results tab to quickly and easily view spatial query results directly from within Management Studio, extend spatial data capabilities by building or integrating location-enabled applications through support for spatial standards and specifications and much more. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Dinner by Sponsors After the lively session during the day, there was another dinner party courtesy of one of the sponsors of TechEd. All the MVPs and several Community leaders were present at the dinner. I would like to express my gratitude to Abhishek Kant for organizing this wonderful event for us. It was a blast and really relaxing in all angles. We all stayed there for a long time and talked about our sweet and unforgettable memories of the event. Pinal Dave and Bijoy Singhal It was really one wonderful event. After writing this much, I say that I have no words to express about how much I enjoyed TechEd. However, it is true that I shared with you only 1% of the total activities I have done at the event. There were so many people I have met, yet were not mentioned here although I wanted to write their names here, too . Anyway, I have learned so many things and up until now, I am not able to get over all the fun I had in this event. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2010 The Next Days – April 15, 2010 – till today I am still not able to get my mind out of the whole experience I had at TechEd India 2010. It was like a whole Microsoft Family working together to celebrate a happy occasion. TechEd India – Truly An Unforgettable Experience! Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

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• SQLAuthority News – TechEd India – April 12-14, 2010 Bangalore – An Unforgettable Experience – An Op

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd India was one of the largest Technology events in India led by Microsoft. This event was attended by more than 3,000 technology enthusiasts, making it one of the most well-organized events of the year. Though I attempted to attend almost all the technology events here, I have not seen any bigger or better event in Indian subcontinents other than this. There are 21 Technical Tracks at Tech·Ed India 2010 that span more than 745 learning opportunities. I was fortunate enough to be a part of this whole event as a speaker and a delegate, as well. TechEd India Speaker Badge and A Token of Lifetime Hotel Selection I presented three different sessions at TechEd India and was also a part of panel discussion. (The details of the sessions are given at the end of this blog post.) Due to extensive traveling, I stay away from my family occasionally. For this reason, I took my wife – Nupur and daughter Shaivi (8 months old) to the event along with me. We stayed at the same hotel where the event was organized so as to maximize my time bonding with my family and to have more time in networking with technology community, at the same time. The hotel Lalit Ashok is the largest and most luxurious venue one can find in Bangalore, located in the middle of the city. The cost of the hotel was a bit pricey, but looking at all the advantages, I had decided to ask for a booking there. Hotel Lalit Ashok Nupur Dave and Shaivi Dave Arrival Day – DAY 0 – April 11, 2010 I reached the event a day earlier, and that was one wise decision for I was able to relax a bit and go over my presentation for the next day’s course. I am a kind of person who likes to get everything ready ahead of time. I was also able to enjoy a pleasant evening with several Microsoft employees and my family friends. I even checked out the location where I would be doing presentations the next day. I was fortunate enough to meet Bijoy Singhal from Microsoft who helped me out with a few of the logistics issues that occured the day before. I was not aware of the fact that the very next day he was going to be “The Man” of the TechEd 2010 event. Vinod Kumar from Microsoft was really very kind as he talked to me regarding my subsequent session. He gave me some suggestions which were really helpful that I was able to incorporate them during my presentation. Finally, I was able to meet Abhishek Kant from Microsoft; his valuable suggestions and unlimited passion have inspired many people like me to work with the Community. Pradipta from Microsoft was also around, being extremely busy with logistics; however, in those busy times, he did find some good spare time to have a chat with me and the other Community leaders. I also met Harish Ranganathan and Sachin Rathi, both from Microsoft. It was so interesting to listen to both of them talking about SharePoint. I just have no words to express my overwhelmed spirit because of all these passionate young guys - Pradipta,Vinod, Bijoy, Harish, Sachin and Ahishek (of course!). Map of TechEd India 2010 Event Day 1 – April 12, 2010 From morning until night time, today was truly a very busy day for me. I had two presentations and one panel discussion for the day. Needless to say, I had a few meetings to attend as well. The day started with a keynote from S. Somaseger where he announced the launch of Visual Studio 2010. The keynote area was really eye-catching because of the very large, bigger-than- life uniform screen. This was truly one to show. The title music of the keynote was very interesting and it featured Bijoy Singhal as the model. It was interesting to talk to him afterwards, when we laughed at jokes together about his modeling assignment. TechEd India Keynote Opening Featuring Bijoy TechEd India 2010 Keynote – S. Somasegar Time: 11:15pm – 11:45pm Session 1: True Lies of SQL Server – SQL Myth Buster Following the excellent keynote, I had my very first session on the subject of SQL Server Myth Buster. At first, I was a bit nervous as right after the keynote, for this was my very first session and during my presentation I saw lots of Microsoft Product Team members. Well, it really went well and I had a really good discussion with attendees of the session. I felt that a well begin was half-done and my confidence was regained. Right after the session, I met a few of my Community friends and had meaningful discussions with them on many subjects. The abstract of the session is as follows: In this 30-minute demo session, I am going to briefly demonstrate few SQL Server Myths and their resolutions as I back them up with some demo. This demo presentation is a must-attend for all developers and administrators who would come to the event. This is going to be a very quick yet fun session. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Lunch with Somasegar After the session I went to see my daughter, and then I headed right away to the lunch with S. Somasegar – the keynote speaker and senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. I really thank to Abhishek who made it possible for us. Because of his efforts, all the MVPs had the opportunity to meet such a legendary person and had to talk with them on Microsoft Technology. Though Somasegar is currently holding such a high position in Microsoft, he is very polite and a real gentleman, and how I wish that everybody in industry is like him. Believe me, if you spread love and kindness, then that is what you will receive back. As soon as lunch time was over, I ran to the session hall as my second presentation was about to start. Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm Session 2: Master Data Services in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Business Intelligence is a subject which was widely talked about at TechEd. Everybody was interested in this subject, and I did not excuse myself from this great concept as well. I consider myself fortunate as I was presenting on the subject of Master Data Services at TechEd. When I had initially learned this subject, I had a bit of confusion about the usage of this tool. Later on, I decided that I would tackle about how we all developers and DBAs are not able to understand something so simple such as this, and even worst, creating confusion about the technology. During system designing, it is very important to have a reference material or master lookup tables. Well, I talked about the same subject and presented the session keeping that as my center talk. The session went very well and I received lots of interesting questions. I got many compliments for talking about this subject on the real-life scenario. I really thank Rushabh Mehta (CEO, Solid Quality Mentors India) for his supportive suggestions that helped me prepare the slide deck, as well as the subject. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: SQL Server Master Data Services will ship with SQL Server 2008 R2 and will improve Microsoft’s platform appeal. This session provides an in-depth demonstration of MDS features and highlights important usage scenarios. Master Data Services enables consistent decision-making process by allowing you to create, manage and propagate changes from a single master view of your business entities. Also, MDS – Master Data-hub which is a vital component, helps ensure the consistency of reporting across systems and deliver faster and more accurate results across the enterprise. We will talk about establishing the basis for a centralized approach to defining, deploying, and managing master data in the enterprise. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The day was still not over for me. I had ran into several friends but we were not able keep our enthusiasm under control about all the rumors saying that SQL Server 2008 R2 was about to be launched tomorrow in the keynote. I then ran to my third and final technical event for the day- a panel discussion with the top technologies of India. Time: 5:00pm – 6:00pm Panel Discussion: Harness the power of Web – SEO and Technical Blogging As I have delivered two technical sessions by this time, I was a bit tired but  not less enthusiastic when I had to talk about Blog and Technology. We discussed many different topics there. I told them that the most important aspect for any blog is its content. We discussed in depth the issues with plagiarism and how to avoid it. Another topic of discussion was how we technology bloggers can create awareness in the Community about what the right kind of blogging is and what morally and technically wrong acts are. A couple of questions were raised about what type of liberty a person can have in terms of writing blogs. Well, it was generically agreed that a blog is mainly a representation of our ideas and thoughts; it should not be governed by external entities. As long as one is writing what they really want to say, but not providing incorrect information or not practicing plagiarism, a blogger should be allowed to express himself. This panel discussion was supposed to be over in an hour, but the interest of the participants was remarkable and so it was extended for 30 minutes more. Finally, we decided to bring to a close the discussion and agreed that we will continue the topic next year. TechEd India Panel Discussion on Web, Technology and SEO Surprisingly, the day was just beginning after doing all of these. By this time, I have almost met all the MVP who arrived at the event, as well as many Microsoft employees. There were lots of Community folks present, too. I decided that I would go to meet several friends from the Community and continue to communicate with me on SQLAuthority.com. I also met Abhishek Baxi and had a good talk with him regarding Win Mobile and Twitter. He also took a very quick video of me wherein I spoke in my mother’s tongue, Gujarati. It was funny that I talked in Gujarati almost all the day, but when I was talking in the interview I could not find the right Gujarati words to speak. I think we all think in English when we think about Technology, so as to address universality. After meeting them, I headed towards the Speakers’ Dinner. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Speakers Dinner The Speakers’ dinner was indeed a wonderful opportunity for all the speakers to get together and relax. We talked so many different things, from XBOX to Hindi Movies, and from SQL to Samosas. I just could not express how much fun I had. After a long evening, when I returned tmy room and met Shaivi, I just felt instantly relaxed. Kids are really gifts from God. Today was a really long but exciting day. So many things happened in just one day: Visual Studio Lanch, lunch with Somasegar, 2 technical sessions, 1 panel discussion, community leaders meeting, speakers dinner and, last but not leas,t playing with my child! A perfect day! Day 2 – April 13, 2010 Today started with a bang with the excellent keynote by Kamal Hathi who launched SQL Server 2008 R2 in India and demonstrated the power of PowerPivot to all of us. 101 Million Rows in Excel brought lots of applause from the audience. Kamal Hathi Presenting Keynote at TechEd India 2010 The day was a bit easier one for me. I had no sessions today and no events planned. I had a few meetings planned for the second day of the event. I sat in the speaker’s lounge for half a day and met many people there. I attended nearly 9 different meetings today. The subjects of the meetings were very different. Here is a list of the topics of the Community-related meetings: SQL PASS and its involvement in India and subcontinents How to start community blogging Forums and developing aptitude towards technology Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar User Groups and their developments SharePoint and SQL Business Meeting – a client meeting Business Meeting – a potential performance tuning project Business Meeting – Solid Quality Mentors (SolidQ) And family friends Pinal Dave at TechEd India The day passed by so quickly during this meeting. In the evening, I headed to Partners Expo with friends and checked out few of the booths. I really wanted to talk about some of the products, but due to the freebies there was so much crowd that I finally decided to just take the contact details of the partner. I will now start sending them with my queries and, hopefully, I will have my questions answered. Nupur and Shaivi had also one meeting to attend; it was with our family friend Vijay Raj. Vijay is also a person who loves Technology and loves it more than anybody. I see him growing and learning every day, but still remaining as a ‘human’. I believe that if someone acquires as much knowledge as him, that person will become either a computer or cyborg. Here, Vijay is still a kind gentleman and is able to stay as our close family friend. Shaivi was really happy to play with Uncle Vijay. Pinal Dave and Vijay Raj Renuka Prasad, a Microsoft MVP, impressed me with his passion and knowledge of SQL. Every time he gives me credit for his success, I believe that he is very humble. He has way more certifications than me and has worked many more years with SQL compared to me. He is an excellent photographer as well. Most of the photos in this blog post have been taken by him. I told him if ever he wants to do a part time job, he can do the photography very well. Pinal Dave and Renuka Prasad I also met L Srividya from Microsoft, whom I was looking forward to meet. She is a bundle of knowledge that everyone would surely learn a lot from her. I was able to get a few minutes from her and well, I felt confident. She enlightened me with SQL Server BI concepts, domain management and SQL Server security and few other interesting details. I also had a wonderful time talking about SharePoint with fellow Solid Quality Mentor Joy Rathnayake. He is very passionate about SharePoint but when you talk .NET and SQL with him, he is still overwhelmingly knowledgeable. In fact, while talking to him, I figured out that the recent training he delivered was on SQL Server 2008 R2. I told him a joke that it hurts my ego as he is more popular now in SQL training and consulting than me. I am sure all of you agree that working with good people is a gift from God. I am fortunate enough to work with the best of the best Industry experts. It was a great pleasure to hang out with my Community friends – Ahswin Kini, HimaBindu Vejella, Vasudev G, Suprotim Agrawal, Dhananjay, Vikram Pendse, Mahesh Dhola, Mahesh Mitkari,  Manu Zacharia, Shobhan, Hardik Shah, Ashish Mohta, Manan, Subodh Sohani and Sanjay Shetty (of course!) .  (Please let me know if I have met you at the event and forgot your name to list here). Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Community Leaders Dinner After lots of meetings, I headed towards the Community Leaders dinner meeting and met almost all the folks I met in morning. The discussion was almost the same but the real good thing was that we were enjoying it. The food was really good. Nupur was invited in the event, but Shaivi could not come. When Nupur tried to enter the event, she was stopped as Shaivi did not have the pass to enter the dinner. Nupur expressed that Shaivi is only 8 months old and does not eat outside food as well and could not stay by herself at this age, but the door keeper did not agree and asked that without the entry details Shaivi could not go in, but Nupur could. Nupur called me on phone and asked me to help her out. By the time, I was outside; the organizer of the event reached to the door and happily approved Shaivi to join the party. Once in the party, Shaivi had lots of fun meeting so many people. Shaivi Dave and Abhishek Kant Dean Guida (Infragistics President and CEO) and Pinal Dave (SQLAuthority.com) Day 3 – April 14, 2010 Though, it was last day, I was very much excited today as I was about to present my very favorite session. Query Optimization and Performance Tuning is my domain expertise and I make my leaving by consulting and training the same. Today’s session was on the same subject and as an additional twist, another subject about Spatial Database was presented. I was always intrigued with Spatial Database and I have enjoyed learning about it; however, I have never thought about Spatial Indexing before it was decided that I will do this session. I really thank Solid Quality Mentor Dr. Greg Low for his assistance in helping me prepare the slide deck and also review the content. Furthermore, today was really what I call my ‘learning day’ . So far I had not attended any session in TechEd and I felt a bit down for that. Everybody spends their valuable time & money to learn something new and exciting in TechEd and I had not attended a single session at the moment thinking that it was already last day of the event. I did have a plan for the day and I attended two technical sessions before my session of spatial database. I attended 2 sessions of Vinod Kumar. Vinod is a natural storyteller and there was no doubt that his sessions would be jam-packed. People attended his sessions simply because Vinod is syhe speaker. He did not have a single time disappointed audience; he is truly a good speaker. He knows his stuff very well. I personally do not think that in India he can be compared to anyone for SQL. Time: 12:30pm-1:30pm SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance I really had a fun time attending this session. Vinod made this session very interactive. The entire audience really got into the presentation and started participating in the event. Vinod was presenting a small problem with Query Tuning, which any developer would have encountered and solved with their help in such a fashion that a developer feels he or she have already resolved it. In one question, I was the only one who was ready to answer and Vinod told me in a light tone that I am now allowed to answer it! The audience really found it very amusing. There was a huge crowd around Vinod after the session. Vinod – A master storyteller! Time: 3:45pm-4:45pm Data Recovery / consistency with CheckDB This session was much heavier than the earlier one, and I must say this is my most favorite session I EVER attended in India. In this TechEd I have only attended two sessions, but in my career, I have attended numerous technical sessions not only in India, but all over the world. This session had taken my breath away. One by one, Vinod took the different databases, and started to corrupt them in different ways. Each database has some unique ways to get corrupted. Once that was done, Vinod started to show the DBCC CEHCKDB and demonstrated how it can solve your problem. He finally fixed all the databases with this single tool. I do have a good knowledge of this subject, but let me honestly admit that I have learned a lot from this session. I enjoyed and cheered during this session along with other attendees. I had total satisfaction that, just like everyone, I took advantage of the event and learned something. I am now TECHnically EDucated. Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar After two very interactive and informative SQL Sessions from Vinod Kumar, the next turn me presenting on Spatial Database and Indexing. I got once again nervous but Vinod told me to stay natural and do my presentation. Well, once I got a huge stage with a total of four projectors and a large crowd, I felt better. Time: 5:00pm-6:00pm Session 3: Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep Dive into Spatial Indexing Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 I kicked off this session with Michael J Swart‘s beautiful spatial image. This session was the last one for the day but, to my surprise, I had more than 200+ attendees. Slowly, the rain was starting outside and I was worried that the hall would not be full; despite this, there was not a single seat available in the first five minutes of the session. Thanks to all of you for attending my presentation. I had demonstrated the map of world (and India) and quickly explained what  Geographic and Geometry data types in Spatial Database are. This session had interesting story of Indexing and Comparison, as well as how different traditional indexes are from spatial indexing. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Due to the heavy rain during this event, the power went off for about 22 minutes (just an accident – nobodies fault). During these minutes, there were no audio, no video and no light. I continued to address the mass of 200+ people without any audio device and PowerPoint. I must thank the audience because not a single person left from the session. They all stayed in their place, some moved closure to listen to me properly. I noticed that the curiosity and eagerness to learn new things was at the peak even though it was the very last session of the TechEd. Everybody wanted get the maximum knowledge out of this whole event. I was touched by the support from audience. They listened and participated in my session even without any kinds of technology (no ppt, no mike, no AC, nothing). During these 22 minutes, I had completed my theory verbally. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 After a while, we got the projector back online and we continued with some exciting demos. Many thanks to Microsoft people who worked energetically in background to get the backup power for project up. I had a very interesting demo wherein I overlaid Bangalore and Hyderabad on the India Map and find their aerial distance between them. After finding the aerial distance, we browsed online and found that SQL Server estimates the exact aerial distance between these two cities, as compared to the factual distance. There was a huge applause from the crowd on the subject that SQL Server takes into the count of the curvature of the earth and finds the precise distances based on details. During the process of finding the distance, I demonstrated a few examples of the indexes where I expressed how one can use those indexes to find these distances and how they can improve the performance of similar query. I also demonstrated few examples wherein we were able to see in which data type the Index is most useful. We finished the demos with a few more internal stuff. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Despite all issues, I was mostly satisfied with my presentation. I think it was the best session I have ever presented at any conference. There was no help from Technology for a while, but I still got lots of appreciation at the end. When we ended the session, the applause from the audience was so loud that for a moment, the rain was not audible. I was truly moved by the dedication of the Technology enthusiasts. Pinal Dave After Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers new spatial data types that enable you to consume, use, and extend location-based data through spatial-enabled applications. Attend this session to learn how to use spatial functionality in next version of SQL Server to build and optimize spatial queries. This session outlines the new geography data type to store geodetic spatial data and perform operations on it, use the new geometry data type to store planar spatial data and perform operations on it, take advantage of new spatial indexes for high performance queries, use the new spatial results tab to quickly and easily view spatial query results directly from within Management Studio, extend spatial data capabilities by building or integrating location-enabled applications through support for spatial standards and specifications and much more. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Dinner by Sponsors After the lively session during the day, there was another dinner party courtesy of one of the sponsors of TechEd. All the MVPs and several Community leaders were present at the dinner. I would like to express my gratitude to Abhishek Kant for organizing this wonderful event for us. It was a blast and really relaxing in all angles. We all stayed there for a long time and talked about our sweet and unforgettable memories of the event. Pinal Dave and Bijoy Singhal It was really one wonderful event. After writing this much, I say that I have no words to express about how much I enjoyed TechEd. However, it is true that I shared with you only 1% of the total activities I have done at the event. There were so many people I have met, yet were not mentioned here although I wanted to write their names here, too . Anyway, I have learned so many things and up until now, I am not able to get over all the fun I had in this event. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2010 The Next Days – April 15, 2010 – till today I am still not able to get my mind out of the whole experience I had at TechEd India 2010. It was like a whole Microsoft Family working together to celebrate a happy occasion. TechEd India – Truly An Unforgettable Experience! Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

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• Best WordPress Shopping Cart & Ecommerce Plugins

  - by Edward

  A versatile WordPress Shopping Cart plugin can help you create a feature-rich online store on your WordPress-powered website or blog. Some are so advanced that you can get your store up and running in minutes. Some plugins allow you to take ecommerce to a next level with their high end customization tools. Here is a list of best WP shopping cart plugins available: Cart66 One of the best WordPress plugin with lots of features, great quality and ease of use. It accepts few more payment getways such as PayPal Website Payments Standard, PayPal Website Payments Professional, PayPal Express Checkout, eProcessing Network etc. It has flexible design options, recurring payments for subscriptions, memberships, and payment plans, Easy PCI Compliance – Safe and Secure. It is fast and efficient, one can sell digital and physical products and support is good. Price: Standard $49 & Professional $99 Details Download StorePress StorePress is a WordPress theme, which is fully coded. It comes with scripts that can change a WordPress blog into a veritable e-commerce virtual store. With this great premium WordPress theme, one can start affiliate stores, or promote affiliate products. Price: Single $59.99 & Developer License $119.99 Details Download WordPress eStore Plugin This shopping cart plugin comes with easy checkout, ease of design and use, automatic instant digital product delivery, Next Gen gallery integration, autoresponder integration etc. It is a lightweight shopping cart and allows multi site license. This plugin offers an amazingly comprehensive toolkit that will ensure your online shop is almost just plug-and-play. Price: $49.99 Details Download Shoppers Press Shoppers press is a premium cart for Word Press that comes with 20+ to choose from and 20+ built in payment gateways. It features one-click setups, personalized user accounts, easy management tools, detailed sales tracking, promotional options, a variety of product import tools, and many more features Price:$79 Details Download WordPress Shopping Cart plugin The WordPress Shopping Cart plugin by Tribulant quickly and seamlessly integrates an online shop with a fully functional shopping cart interface into any WordPress website. It has easy to use interface, which enables set up of multiple products and categorize and organizing them into multiple product categories. It also has many more attractive features. Price: $49.99 Details Download WP e-commerce WP e-commerce is a free full-featured shopping cart plugin for WordPress. It is a full featured shopping cart and boasts of easy checkout. It offers a wide range of features including SSL compatibility, customization and merchandising, integrated payment processing solutions including manual payment, Google Checkout and PayPal Payments, and email marketing. It is wordpress and social networking integrated. It is customizable by use of PHP template tag, wordpress shortcode and widgets. Details Download YAK for WordPress YAK is an open source shopping cart plugin for WordPress. It associates products with weblog entries (in other words, posts), so the post ID also becomes the product code. It supports both pages and posts as products, handles different types of product through categories. YAK supports downloadable products, so any e-books, plugins, or zip files you’re marketing can be easily purchased and dowloaded. Details Download Market Press It is another shopping cart full of many features. It offers following features such as assign categories and tags to products to make them easy to find, stock tracking with alerts, order management/alerts, fully customizable email messages, full support for most major currencies, fully customizable store urls/slugs, customers can checkout without being a site user etc. Expensive, but good option for those who can afford it. Price: $17.42/month Details Download Shopp It is an excellent shopping cart plugin for Word Press. This plugin is extremely easy to install and use. It has a cleaner interface. The customer support is good. Use can easily customize the look of the cart by using its amazing features. Price: $55 Details Download Related posts:8 PHP Shopping Cart Software for Reliable Ecommerce Solution Shopping Cart SEO 8 Free Open Source Shopping Carts

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• Web.config WordPress rewrite rules next to Magento

  - by Flo

  I've installed Magento on IIS in folder: E:\mydomain\wwwroot (I already have it all running correctly). I have no deeper folder magento, I placed all files directly in the wwwroot folder, so: wwwroot\app wwwroot\downloader wwwroot\errors wwwroot\includes etc... UPDATE: since I'm on IIS my .htaccess is ignored completely and my web.config rules are used instead. Here's my web.config in folder e:\mydomain\wwwroot: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <configuration> <system.webServer> <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="Magento SEO: remove index.php from URL"> <match url="^(?!index.php)([^?#]*)(\\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))?" /> <conditions> <add input="{URL}" pattern="^/(media|skin|js)/" ignoreCase="false" negate="true" /> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" ignoreCase="false" negate="true" /> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" ignoreCase="false" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Rewrite" url="index.php/{R:0}" /> </rule> </rules> </rewrite> </system.webServer> </configuration> Next, I wanted to install WordPress. I unzipped all files in folder e:\mydomain\wwwroot\wordpress Browsed to www.mydomain.com/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php, where I configured everything for my database. Everything was installed correctly. I then navigate to http://www.mydomain.com/wordpress/wp-login.php where I type my credentials. I seem to be logged in and am redirected to http://www.mydomain.com/wordpress/wp-admin/ But there I receive an empty page. I enabled detailed error message in IIS following this article: http://www.iis.net/learn/troubleshoot/diagnosing-http-errors/how-to-use-http-detailed-errors-in-iis I also checkec with Fiddler and see that I receive a 500 error: GET /wordpress/wp-admin/ HTTP/1.1 Host: www.mydomain.com Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/29.0.1547.76 Safari/537.36 Referer: http://www.mydomain.com/wordpress/wp-login.php Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,nl;q=0.6 Cookie: wordpress_fabec4083cf12d8de89c98e8aef4b7e3=floran%7C1381236774%7C2d8edb4fc6618f290fadb49b035cad31; wordpress_test_cookie=WP+Cookie+check; wordpress_logged_in_fabec4083cf12d8de89c98e8aef4b7e3=floran%7C1381236774%7Cbf822163926b8b8df16d0f1fefb6e02e HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error Content-Type: text/html Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.14 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 12:56:03 GMT Content-Length: 0 My WordPress web.config in folder e:\mydomain\wwwroot\wordpress contains: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <configuration> <system.webServer> <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="wordpress" patternSyntax="Wildcard"> <match url="*"/> <conditions> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true"/> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true"/> </conditions> <action type="Rewrite" url="index.php"/> </rule></rules> </rewrite> </system.webServer> </configuration> I also want my WordPress articles to be available on www.mydomain.com/blog instead of www.mydomain.com/wordpress Ofcourse my admin links for Magento and Wordpress should also work. How can I configure my web.config files to achieve the above?

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• Silverlight Cream for March 31, 2010 -- #826

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Andrea Boschin, Radenko Zec, Andrej Tozon, Bobby Diaz, Brad Abrams, Wolf Schmidt, Colin Eberhardt, Anand Iyer, Matthias Shapiro, Jaime Rodriguez, Bill Reiss, and Lee. Shoutouts: Cigdem has a post up about here MIX10 Interviewing experiences: MIX10 SilverlightShow Interviews Ian T. Lackey has his material up from his talk Silverlight SEO at the St. Louis .Net Users Group Not Silverlight but definitely WP7 cool, Michael Klucher reports that there are New Windows Phone Samples on Creators Club Online Tim Heuer posted a survey: What tools are the minimum to get started in Silverlight? From SilverlightCream.com: A RoleManager to apply roles declaratively to user interface Andrea Boschin also has a new post at SilverlightShow discussing the use of a RoleManager in WCF RIA Services to apply user roles to elements of the UI... good stuff, Andrea. Virtualization in Silverlight 4 RC Radenko Zec has a post out at SilverlightShow where he explains UI and Data Virtualization then gives some examples of their use in Silverlight 4RC, and some issues as well. MS Word Mail Merge with Silverlight 4 COM Automation Andrej Tozon has a post up at SilverlightShow that I missed in the rush of MIX10. He's doing MailMerge with COM automation and Silverlight 4... actually prett cool stuff and all the source! KISS and Tell - MVVM and the ViewModelLocator Bobby Diaz is blogging about a very popular subject right now: ViewModelLocator. He's not showing production code, but it's a thought... check it out. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Validating Data I'm running behind, but Brad Abrams' next post in his series is about validating data in the business application. He also discusses setting up shared code validation. A One-stop Shopping XAML Namespace for Silverlight Client SDK Controls Wolf Schmidt at the Silverlight SDK has a post up highlighting the SL4 XAML namespace prefix. He starts with SL3 then demonstrates the feature's use in SL4. Binding a Silverlight 3 DataGrid to dynamic data via IDictionary (Updated) Colin Eberhardt has an update to his previous article of the same title. This one is a bug fix on an upgrade to SL3 and also an expansion of the previous post. Demo Apps from MIX10 on Windows Phone 7 Anand Iyer posted links to all the WP7 demos used at MIX10 and at least in the case of FourSquare, the source is on CodePlex. XAML Files for Location Visualizations in Silverlight and WPF Matthias Shapiro has graciously provided XAML for us for Silverlight and WPF for a bunch of different US maps... too cool, now we don't have to be asking 'where did you get that map?'... thanks Matthias! Theming in Windows Phone Jaime Rodriguez has a post up that deep-dives theming in general and demonstrates using it on WP7... end-user configurations and developer stuff. Space Rocks game step 7: Moving the ship It appears that in the heat of battle (blogging) I said Bill Reiss' Space Rocks game he's building is for WP7... obviously it's not, but it's a game folks... :) THis is Episode 7 and he's moving the ship now. SL4(RC) RichTextBox and Access Violation Lee has some code that looks like it should work for a RichTextBox in SL4RC, and it's throwing an error... see if you have a solution for him... or is it a bug? Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Measuring ASP.NET and SharePoint output cache

  - by DigiMortal

  During ASP.NET output caching week in my local blog I wrote about how to measure ASP.NET output cache. As my posting was based on real work and real-life results then I thought that this posting is maybe interesting to you too. So here you can read what I did, how I did and what was the result. Introduction Caching is not effective without measuring it. As MVP Henn Sarv said in one of his sessions then you will get what you measure. And right he is. Lately I measured caching on local Microsoft community portal to make sure that our caching strategy is good enough in environment where this system lives. In this posting I will show you how to start measuring the cache of your web applications. Although the application measured is built on SharePoint Server publishing infrastructure, all those counters have same meaning as similar counters under pure ASP.NET applications. Measured counters I used Performance Monitor and the following performance counters (their names are similar on ASP.NET and SharePoint WCMS): Total number of objects added – how much objects were added to output cache. Total object discards – how much objects were deleted from output cache. Cache hit count – how many times requests were served by cache. Cache hit ratio – percent of requests served from cache. The first three counters are cumulative while last one is coefficient. You can use also other counters to measure the full effect of caching (memory, processor, disk I/O, network load etc before and after caching). Measuring process The measuring I describe here started from freshly restarted web server. I measured application during 12 hours that covered also time ranges when users are most active. The time range does not include late evening hours and night because there is nothing to measure during these hours. During measuring we performed no maintenance or administrative tasks on server. All tasks performed were related to usual daily content management and content monitoring. Also we had no advertisement campaigns or other promotions running at same time. The results You can see the results on following graphic.   Total number of objects added   Total object discards   Cache hit count   Cache hit ratio You can see that adds and discards are growing in same tempo. It is good because cache expires and not so popular items are not kept in memory. If there are more popular content then the these lines may have bigger distance between them. Cache hit count grows faster and this shows that more and more content is served from cache. In current case it shows that cache is filled optimally and we can do even better if we tune caches more. The site contains also pages that are discarded when some subsite changes (page was added/modified/deleted) and one modification may affect about four or five pages. This may also decrease cache hit count because during day the site gets about 5-10 new pages. Cache hit ratio is currently extremely good. The suggested minimum is about 85% but after some tuning and measuring I achieved 98.7% as a result. This is due to the fact that new pages are most often requested and after new pages are added the older ones are requested only sometimes. So they get discarded from cache and only some of these will return sometimes back to cache. Although this may also indicate the need for additional SEO work the result is very well in technical means. Conclusion Measuring ASP.NET output cache is not complex thing to do and you can start by measuring performance of cache as a start. Later you can move on and measure caching effect to other counters such as disk I/O, network, processors etc. What you have to achieve is optimal cache that is not full of items asked only couple of times per day (you can avoid this by not using too long cache durations). After some tuning you should be able to boost cache hit ratio up to at least 85%.

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• Mandatory look back at 2010

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  Yeah, it's one of those posts, sorry. First, the mildly depressing: the most popular post on this blog this year with 47,000 hits was a post from last year about a fix to a bug in ASP.NET. A content-less post except for that link to the KB article that people should have found by going directly to the support site in the first place. Then, the really depressing: the second most popular post this year with 34,000 hits was a post from 2005 about how to display message boxes on a web page. I mean come on. This was kind of fun five years ago and it did solve one of the most common n00b mistakes VB programmers trying to move to the web were making. But come on, we've traveled about 4.7 billion miles around the Earth since then. Do people still do that kind of stuff? I should probably put a big red banner on top of this post. Oh [supernatural entity of your choice]. Hand me that gun, please. Third most popular post with 24,000 hits is from 2004. It's about how to set a session variable before redirecting. That problem has been fixed a long time ago. Oh well. Fourth most popular post. 21,000 hits. 2007. How to work around a stupid bug in ASP.NET Ajax 1.0. Fixed in ASP.NET 3.5? ASP.NET Ajax 1.0? Need I say more? The fifth one (20,000 hits) is an old post as well but I'm kind of fond of it: it's about that photo album handler I've been organically growing for a few years. It reminds me that I need to refresh it and make a new release. Good SEO title too. Back to insanity with the sixth one (16,000) that's about working around a bug in IE6. IE6. Please just refuse to pander to that browser any more. It's about time. Let's move on, please. Actually, the first post from 2010 is 15th in the list. We have a trio of these actually with server-side image resizing and FluentPath. So what happened? Well, I like the ad money, but not to the point that I'm going to write my stuff to inflate it. Actually I think if I tried I would fail miserably (I mean, I would fail worse). What really happened this year was new stuff: Orchard, FluentPath and the stuff with the Netduino. That stuff needs time to get off the ground but my hope is that it's going to be useful in the long run and that five years from now I'll be lamenting on how well those posts are still doing. So, no regret. 2010 was a good year. Oh, and I was on This Developer's Life this year! Yay! Anyways, thank you all for reading me. Please continue doing that. And happy 2011!

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• Get the Picture: Pinterest for Marketers

  - by Mike Stiles

  When trying to determine on which networks to conduct social marketing, the usual suspects immediately rise to the top; Facebook & Twitter, then LinkedIn (especially if you’re B2B), then maybe some Google Plus to hedge SEO bets.  So at what juncture do brands get excited about Pinterest? Pinterest has been easy for marketers to de-prioritize thanks to the perception its usage is so dominated by women. Um, what’s wrong with that? Women make an estimated 85% of all consumer purchases. So if there are indeed over 30 million US women active on it monthly, and they do 92% of the pinning, and 84% are still active on it after 4 years, when did an audience of highly engaged, very likely sales conversions become low priority? Okay, if you’re a tech B2B SaaS product like the Oracle Social Cloud, Pinterest may not be where you focus. But if you operate in the top Pinterest categories, which are truly far-reaching, it’s time to take note of Pinterest’s performance to date: 40.1 million monthly users in the US (eMarketer). Over 30 billion pins, half of which were pinned in the last 6 months. (Big momentum) 75% of usage is on their mobile app. (In solid shape for the mobile migration) Pinterest sharing grew 58% in 2013, beating Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. (ShareThis) Pinterest is the 3rd most popular sharing platform overall (over email), with 48% of all sharing on tablets. Users referred by Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy on e-commerce sites and tend to spend twice that of users coming from Facebook. (Shopify) To be fair, brands haven’t had any paid marketing opportunities on that platform…until recently. Users are seeing Promoted Pins in both category and search feeds from rollout brands like Gap, ABC Family, Ziploc, and Nestle. Are the paid pins annoying users? It seems more so than other social networks, they’re fitting right in to the intended user experience and being accepted, getting almost as many click-throughs as user pins. New York Magazine’s Kevin Roose laid it out succinctly; Pinterest offers a place that’s image-centric, search-friendly, makes things easy to purchase, makes things easy to share, and puts users in an aspirational mood to buy. Pinterest is very confident in the value of that combo and that audience, with CPM rates 5x that of the most expensive Facebook ad, plus (at least for now) required spending commitments and required pin review by Pinterest for quality. The latest developments; a continued move toward search and discovery with enhancements like Guided Search to help you hone in on what interests you, Custom Categories, and the rumored Visual Search that stands to be a liberation from text. And most recently, Pinterest has opened up its API so brands can get access to deeper insights into the best search terms and categories in which to play ball, as well as what kinds of pins stand to perform best in those areas. As we learned in our rundown this week of Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Marketing Industry Report, around 50% of marketers specifically intend on upping their use of Pinterest. If you’re a big believer in fishing where the fish are, that’s probably an efficient position to take. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Adam Lambert_Gorwyn, freeimages.com

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• Disneyland Inside Out on iPhone and Android

  - by Ryan Cain

  It's hard to believe October was the last time I was over here on my blog.  Ironically after getter the developer phone from Microsoft I have been knee deep in iPhone programming and for the past few weeks Android programming again.  This time I've spent all my non-working hours programming a fun project for my "other" website, Disneyland Inside Out.  Disneyland Inside Out, a vacation planning site for Disneyland in California, has been around in various forms since June 1996.  It has always been a place for me to explore new technologies and learn about some of the new trends on the web.  I recently migrated the site over to DotNetNuke and have been building out custom modules for DNN.  I've also been hacking things together w/ the URLRewrite module in IIS 7.5 to provide strong SEO optimized URLs.  I can't say all that has really stuck within the DNN model of doing things, but it has worked pretty well. As part of my learning process, I spent most of the Fall bringing Disneyland Inside Out to the iPhone.  I will post more details on my development experiences later.  But this project gave me a really great opportunity to get a good feel for Objective-C development.  After 3 months I actually feel somewhat competent in the language and iPhone SDK, instead of just floundering around getting things to work.  The project also gave me a chance to play with some new frameworks on the iPhone and really dig into the Facebook SDK.  I also dug into some of the Gowalla REST api's as well.  We've been live with the app in iTunes for just about 10 days now, and have been sitting in the top 200 of free travel apps for the past few days.  You can get more info and the direct iTunes download link on our site: Disneyland Inside Out for iPhone Since launching the iPhone version I have gotten back into Android development, porting the Disneyland Inside Out app over to Android.  As I said in my first review of iPhone vs. Android, coming from a managed code background, Android is much easier to get going with.  I just about 3 weeks total I will have about 85 - 90% of the functionality up and running in the Android app, that took probably 1.5 - 2x's that time for iPhone.  That isn't a totally fair comparison as I am much more comfortable w/ Xcode and Objective-C today and can get some of the basic stuff done much faster than I could in the fall.  Though I'd say some of the hardest code to debug is still the null pointer issues on objects that were dealloc'd too early in Objective-C.  This isn't too bad with the NSZoombies enabled for synchronous code, but when you have a lot of async, which my app does, it can be hairy at times to track exactly what was causing the issue.   I will post more details later, as I am trying to wrap up a beta of the Android app today.  But in the meantime, if you have an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad head on over to the site and take a look at my app.

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• Google Fetch issue

  - by Karen

  When I do a Google fetch on any of my webpages the results are all the same (below). I'm not a programmer but I'm pretty sure this is not correct. Out of all the fetches I have done only one was different and the content length was 6x below and showed meta tags etc. Maybe this explains other issues I've been having with the site: a drop in indexed pages. Meta tag analyzer says I have no title tag, meta tags or description even though I do it on all pages. I had an SEO team working on the site and they were stumped by why pages were not getting indexed. So they figure it was some type of code error. Are they right? HTTP/1.1 200 OK Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Content-Encoding: gzip Vary: Accept-Encoding Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:45:41 GMT Content-Length: 1054 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title></title> <script type="text/javascript"> function getCookie(cookieName) { if (document.cookie.length > 0) { cookieStart = document.cookie.indexOf(cookieName + "="); if (cookieStart != -1) { cookieStart = cookieStart + cookieName.length + 1; cookieEnd = document.cookie.indexOf(";", cookieStart); if (cookieEnd == -1) cookieEnd = document.cookie.length; return unescape(document.cookie.substring(cookieStart, cookieEnd)); } } return ""; } function setTimezone() { var rightNow = new Date(); var jan1 = new Date(rightNow.getFullYear(), 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0); // jan 1st var june1 = new Date(rightNow.getFullYear(), 6, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0); // june 1st var temp = jan1.toGMTString(); var jan2 = new Date(temp.substring(0, temp.lastIndexOf(" ") - 1)); temp = june1.toGMTString(); var june2 = new Date(temp.substring(0, temp.lastIndexOf(" ") - 1)); var std_time_offset = (jan1 - jan2) / (1000 * 60 * 60); var daylight_time_offset = (june1 - june2) / (1000 * 60 * 60); var dst; if (std_time_offset == daylight_time_offset) { dst = "0"; // daylight savings time is NOT observed } else { // positive is southern, negative is northern hemisphere var hemisphere = std_time_offset - daylight_time_offset; if (hemisphere >= 0) std_time_offset = daylight_time_offset; dst = "1"; // daylight savings time is observed } var exdate = new Date(); var expiredays = 1; exdate.setDate(exdate.getDate() + expiredays); document.cookie = "TimeZoneOffset=" + std_time_offset + ";"; document.cookie = "Dst=" + dst + ";expires=" + exdate.toUTCString(); } function checkCookie() { var timeOffset = getCookie("TimeZoneOffset"); var dst = getCookie("Dst"); if (!timeOffset || !dst) { setTimezone(); window.location.reload(); } } </script> </head> <body onload="checkCookie()"> </body> </html>

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• Framework for Everything - Where to begin? [Longer post]

  - by SquaredSoft

  Back story of this question, feel free to skip down for the specific question Hello, I've been very interested in the idea of abstract programming the last few years. I've made about 30 attempts at creating a piece of software that is capable of almost anything you throw at it. I've undertook some attempts at this that have taken upwards of a year, while getting close, never releasing it beyond my compiler. This has been something I've always tried wrapping my head around, and something is always missing. With the title, I'm sure you're assuming, "Yes of course you noob! You can't account for everything!" To which I have to reply, "Why not?" To give you some background into what I'm talking about, this all started with doing maybe a shade of gray hat SEO software. I found myself constantly having to create similar, but slightly different sets of code. I've gone through as many iterations of way to communicate on http as the universe has particles. "How many times am I going to have to write this multi-threaded class?" is something I found myself asking a lot. Sure, I could create a class library, and just work with that, but I always felt I could optimize what I had, which often was a large undertaking and typically involved frequent use of the CRTL+A keyboard shortcut, mixed with the delete button. It dawned on me that it was time to invest in a plugin system. This would allow me to simply add snippets of code. as time went on, and I could subversion stuff out, and distribute small chunks of code, rather than something that encompasses only a specific function or design. This comes with its own complexity, of course, and by the time I had finished the software scope for this addition, it hit me that I would want to add to everything in the software, not just a new http method, or automation code for a specific website. Great, we're getting more abstract. However, the software that I have in my mind comes down to a quite a few questions regarding its execution. I have to have some parameters to what I am going to do. After writing what the perfect software would do in my mind, I came up with this as a list of requirements: Should be able to use networking A "Macro" or "Expression system" which would allow people to do something like : =First(=ParseToList(=GetUrl("http://www.google.com?q=helloworld!"), Template.Google)) Multithreaded Able to add UI elements through some type of XML -- People can make their own addons etc. Can use third party API through the plugins, such as Microsoft CRM, Exchange, etc. This would allow the software to essentially be used for everything. Really, any task you wish to automate, in a simple way. Making the UI was as also extremely hard. How do you do all of this? Its very difficult. So my question: With so many attempts at this, I'm out of ideas how to successfully complete this. I have a very specific idea in my mind, but I keep failing to execute it. I'm a self taught programmer. I've been doing it for years, and work professionally in it, but I've never encountered something that would be as complex and in-depth as a system which essentially does everything. Where would you start? What are the best practices for design? How can I avoid constantly having to go back and optimize my software. What can I do to generalize this and draw everything out to completion. These are things I struggle with. P.s., I'm using c# as my main language. I feel like in this example, I might be hitting the outer limit of the language, although, I don't know if that is the case, or if I'm just a bad programmer. Thanks for your time.

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• Finalists for Community Manager of the Year Announced

  - by Mike Stiles

  For as long as brand social has been around, there’s still an amazing disparity from company to company on the role of Community Manager. At some brands, they are the lead social innovators. At others, the task has been relegated to interns who are at the company temporarily. Some have total autonomy and trust. Others must get chain-of-command permission each time they engage. So what does a premiere “worth their weight in gold” Community Manager look like? More than anyone else in the building, they have the most intimate knowledge of who the customer is. They live on the front lines and are the first to detect problems and opportunities. They are sincere, raving fans of the brand themselves and are trusted advocates for the others. They’re fun to be around. They aren’t salespeople. Give me one Community Manager who’s been at the job 6 months over 5 focus groups any day. Because not unlike in speed dating, they must immediately learn how to make a positive, lasting impression on fans so they’ll want to return and keep the relationship going. They’re informers and entertainers, with a true belief in the value of the brand’s proposition. Internally, they live at the mercy of the resources allocated toward social. Many, whose managers don’t understand the time involved in properly curating a community, are tasked with 2 or 3 too many of them. 63% of CM’s will spend over 30 hours a week on one community. They come to intuitively know the value of the relationships they’re building, even if they can’t always be shown in a bar graph to the C-suite. Many must communicate how the customer feels to executives that simply don’t seem to want to hear it. Some can get the answers fans want quickly, others are frustrated in their ability to respond within an impressive timeframe. In short, in a corporate world coping with sweeping technological changes, amidst business school doublespeak, pie charts, decks, strat sessions and data points, the role of the Community Manager is the most…human. They are the true emotional connection to the real life customer. Which is why we sought to find a way to recognize and honor who they are, what they do, and how well they have defined the position as social grows and integrates into the larger organization. Meet our 3 finalists for Community Manager of the Year. Jeff Esposito with VistaprintJeff manages and heads up content strategy for all social networks and blogs. He also crafts company-wide policies surrounding the social space. Vistaprint won the NEDMA Gold Award for Twitter Strategy in 2010 and 2011, and a Bronze in 2011 for Social Media Strategy. Prior to Vistaprint, Jeff was Media Relations Manager with the Long Island Ducks. He graduated from Seton Hall University with a BA in English and a minor in Classical Studies. Stacey Acevero with Vocus In addition to social management, Stacey blogs at Vocus on influential marketing and social media, and blogs at PRWeb on public relations and SEO. She’s been named one of the #Nifty50 Women in Tech on Twitter 2 years in a row, as well as included in the 15 up-and-coming PR pros to watch in 2012. Carly Severn with the San Francisco BalletCarly drives engagement, widens the fanbase and generates digital content for America’s oldest professional ballet company. Managed properties include Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and G+. Prior to joining the SF Ballet, Carly was Marketing & Press Coordinator at The Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, where she graduated with a degree in English. We invite you to join us at the first annual Oracle Social Media Summit November 14 and 15 at the Wynn in Las Vegas where our finalists will be featured. Over 300 top brand marketers, agency executives, and social leaders & innovators will be exploring how social is transforming business. Space is limited and the information valuable, so get more info and get registered as soon as possible at the event site.

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• Sitecore not resolving rich text editor URLS in page renders

  - by adam

  Hi We're having issues inserting links into rich text in Sitecore 6.1.0. When a link to a sitecore item is inserted, it is outputted as: http://domain/~/link.aspx?_id=8A035DC067A64E2CBBE2662F6DB53BC5&_z=z Rather than the actual resolved url: http://domain/path/to/page.aspx This article confirms that this should be resolved in the render pipeline: in Sitecore 6 it inserts a specially formatted link that contains the Guid of the item you want to link to, then when the item is rendered the special link is replaced with the actual link to the item The pipeline has the method ShortenLinks added in web.config <convertToRuntimeHtml> <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.ConvertToRuntimeHtml.PrepareHtml, Sitecore.Kernel"/> <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.ConvertToRuntimeHtml.ShortenLinks, Sitecore.Kernel"/> <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.ConvertToRuntimeHtml.SetImageSizes, Sitecore.Kernel"/> <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.ConvertToRuntimeHtml.ConvertWebControls, Sitecore.Kernel"/> <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.ConvertToRuntimeHtml.FixBullets, Sitecore.Kernel"/> <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.ConvertToRuntimeHtml.FinalizeHtml, Sitecore.Kernel"/> </convertToRuntimeHtml> So I really can't see why links are still rendering in ID format rather than as full SEO-tastic urls. Anyone got any clues? Thanks, Adam

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• How to perform a 301 redirect of all .php URLs to clean URLs?

  - by spacedatdusk

  My htaccess isn't quite working the way I want it to. I've seen some similar threads on here but they aren't quite what I need and I don't know enough yet about htaccess to modify the code to suit my needs. This is what I have working so far: I've got all non-www URLs redirecting to www URLs and I'm doing an internal rewrite of all URLs to the corresponding PHP file on the server. In the files I have relative links that are clean without any file extension on them. This is what I need to do yet: All the pages on my site are still accessible through URLs with .php on the end. For SEO reasons I want the URL's with .php to all do an external 301 redirect to the clean URL without the extension. Here's what I have in my htaccess file that's in the root folder on my server. Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301] I'd appreciate any help. Thanks in advance!

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• Open source Java CMS for Google App Engine?

  - by markvgti

  I am looking for an open source Java CMS (Web CMS, actually) to run on Google App Engine. I have looked at related older questions on this topic (What CMS runs on Google AppEngine?, CMS over Google App Engine, with SEO etc.) but the problem is that they all largely list Python-based CMSes. Plus these questions are pretty old, and since GAE is a fast-moving target, I thought it might be worthwhile to ask again. I want a CMS for creating some websites (for myself and for others), but would rather not start writing one from scratch. A "good" (very subjective, I know) open source WCMS allows me to start using a product, while still being able to add to/extend the product/project. On the one hand I am looking for a somewhat mature product/project, on the other hand it's easier to start contributing to the development cycle of a young product/project (conflicting, I know :-). Here are some features that would be preferable: [X]HTML/XML/CSS based templating Ability to create multiple blogs Galleries Ability to create a "Downloads" section (is this pretty much standard?) Separate management for digital assets (images, PDFs, binary files etc.) Roles like "Administrator", "Editor", "Contributor" etc. (or their equivalents) Ability to move/reorganize pages Export to PDF Reformat content for printing Is the CMS you are about to suggest especially well-suited to publishing an online book? My idea is that while the book may be offered as a downloadable eBook, the latest, most current version will be the one available on the website.

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