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  • Starting it back up again

    - by Mickey Gousset
    After a couple of year hiatus from blogging at Geeks With Blogs, I’m back!  I’m still blogging about Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 over at Team System Rocks (soon to undergo some major revisions), so expect to see some cross postings from there. Here though, I expect to focus on System Center technologies (mostly System Center Operations Manager and System Center Service Manager, with some of the others thrown in there too, as that is my day job now..  I’ll also use this blog to start tracking my foray into Windows Phone 7 development.  I’ve decided to go the game programming route first.

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  • Running WordPress on Windows Server

    A few days ago, I saw someone posted on Twitter a question about running WordPress on Windows Server. Since I had done this for a few sites, I responded with my thoughts and tips. Another suggested that I post those here, and so here I go. WordPress is a blogging/content-management platform that has been around for a while. It has been gaining more in popularity for general purpose content sites over the past year Id say, but is primarily seen as a blogging platform by most. Even though I use Subtext...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • How Do I Know the Memory Used by Apps

    - by user176890
    Is it possible to know the memory used by any apps running on my linux server? I'm using the following command to know how much memory used by php-fpm. ps -ylC php5-fpm --sort:rss | awk '!/RSS/ { s+=$8 } END { printf "%s\n", "Total memory used by PHP-FPM child processes: "; printf "%dM\n", s/1024 }' Given the command above, I want to know the memory used by all apps with an example output below: PHP-FPM: 2.3gb MySQL: 5gb nginx: 200mb dovecot: 100mb memcached: 573mb

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  • On OS X, what is pubsubagent and why does it connect so many places?

    - by Eric
    I use Little Snitch to monitor network connections on OS X, and I frequently see attempts by something called pubsubagent to connect to many varying sites. What is this program for and why does it use so many connections? According to this article it's used by .me sync to synchronize RSS feeds and bookmarks. But I don't have any RSS feeds. And if it's synching bookmarks, then why is it going to places like 'l.google.com' (and many more random ones) instead of just to .me?

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  • Django: reverse lookup URL of feeds?

    - by Santa
    I am having trouble doing a reverse URL lookup for Django-generated feeds. I have the following setup in urls.py: feeds = { 'latest': LatestEntries, } urlpatterns = patterns('', # ... # enable feeds (RSS) url(r'^feeds/(?P<url>.*)/$', 'django.contrib.syndication.views.feed', {'feed_dict': feeds}, name='feeds_view'), ) I have tried using the following template tag: <a href="{% url feeds_view latest %}">RSS feeds</a> But the resulting link is not what want (http://my.domain.com/feeds//). It should be http://my.domain.com/feeds/latest/. For now, I am using a hack to generate the URL for the template: <a href="http://{{ request.META.HTTP_HOST }}/feeds/latest">RSS feeds</a> But, as you can see, it clearly is not DRY. Is there something I am missing?

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  • WebClient DownloadStringCompleted Never Fired in Console Application

    - by azamsharp
    I am not sure why the callback methods are not fired AT ALL. I am using VS 2010. static void Main(string[] args) { try { var url = "some link to RSS FEED"; var client = new WebClient(); client.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(client_DownloadStringCompleted); client.DownloadDataCompleted += new DownloadDataCompletedEventHandler(client_DownloadDataCompleted); client.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri(url)); } catch (Exception ex) { Console.WriteLine(ex.Message); } } // THIS IS NEVER FIRED static void client_DownloadDataCompleted(object sender, DownloadDataCompletedEventArgs e) { Console.WriteLine("something"); } // THIS IS NEVER FIRED static void client_DownloadStringCompleted(object sender, DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e) { Console.WriteLine("do something"); var rss = XElement.Parse(e.Result); var pictures = from item in rss.Descendants("channel") select new Picture { Name = item.Element("title").Value }; foreach (var picture in pictures) { Console.WriteLine(picture.Name); Console.WriteLine(picture.Url); } }

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  • Lost in UTF-8 hell. (Django and Python)

    - by user140314
    I am working through the Django RSS reader project here. The RSS feed will read something like "OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — James Harden let". The RSS feed's encoding reads encoding="UTF-8" so I believe I am passing utf-8 to markdown in the code snippet below. The em dash is where it chokes. I get the Django error of "'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2014' in position 109: ordinal not in range(128)" which is an UnicodeEncodeError. In the variables being passed I see "OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) \u2014 James Harden". The code line that is not working is: content = content.encode(parsed_feed.encoding, "xmlcharrefreplace") I am using markdown 2.0, django 1.1, and python 2.4. What is the magic sequence of encoding and decoding that I need to do to make this work? Thanks.

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  • Firefox add-on tab-specific buttons and scripts, similar to Page Actions in Google Chrome

    - by Chetan
    I want to write a Firefox extension that acts exactly like the built-in RSS feed scanner (as an exercise). It should do the following: On each new page / tab load, it should scan the content of the page for RSS feeds If there are RSS feeds in the page, it should put a button in the location bar that the user can click On clicking the button, a speech bubble should appear under the button (the way a speech bubble appears under the bookmarks star when you click on it), with information on the feeds and buttons to subscribe to them So my main questions are: What is the process to run specific content scripts for specific pages? What is the process to use the results of those scripts to update the speech bubble for each location bar button for each tab? Basically, I'm trying to figure out how to do in Firefox what Page Actions are in Google Chrome. Please help! :)

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  • Rails messing up with HTTP POST Params

    - by Julien Genestoux
    Our app provides an API that people can use to submit URLs like this: curl -X POST http://app.local/resource -d'url=http://news.google.com/newshl=en&q=obama&um=1&ie=UTF-8&output=rss' Unfortunately, it seems that Rails messes up with this param. Any idea on how to fix this? See the log below : Processing ApplicationController#index (for 127.0.0.1 at 2010-06-08 19:03:09) [POST] Parameters: {"um"=>"1", "url"=>"http://news.google.com/newshl=en", "output"=>"rss", "q"=>"obama", "ie"=>"UTF-8"} I would expect the following : Parameters: {"url"=>"hhttp://news.google.com/newshl=en&q=obama&um=1&ie=UTF-8&output=rss"}

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  • Encoding gives "'ascii' codec can't encode character … ordinal not in range(128)"

    - by user140314
    I am working through the Django RSS reader project here. The RSS feed will read something like "OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — James Harden let". The RSS feed's encoding reads encoding="UTF-8" so I believe I am passing utf-8 to markdown in the code snippet below. The em dash is where it chokes. I get the Django error of "'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2014' in position 109: ordinal not in range(128)" which is an UnicodeEncodeError. In the variables being passed I see "OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) \u2014 James Harden". The code line that is not working is: content = content.encode(parsed_feed.encoding, "xmlcharrefreplace") I am using markdown 2.0, django 1.1, and python 2.4. What is the magic sequence of encoding and decoding that I need to do to make this work? Thanks.

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  • Regular expressions in python unicode

    - by Remy
    I need to remove all the html tags from a given webpage data. I tried this using regular expressions: import urllib2 import re page = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.frugalrules.com") from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, NavigableString, Comment soup = BeautifulSoup(page) link = soup.find('link', type='application/rss+xml') print link['href'] rss = urllib2.urlopen(link['href']).read() souprss = BeautifulSoup(rss) description_tag = souprss.find_all('description') content_tag = souprss.find_all('content:encoded') print re.sub('<[^>]*>', '', content_tag) But the syntax of the re.sub is: re.sub(pattern, repl, string, count=0) So, I modified the code as (instead of the print statement above): for row in content_tag: print re.sub(ur"<[^>]*>",'',row,re.UNICODE But it gives the following error: Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\beautifulsoup4-4.3.2\collocation.py", line 20, in <module> print re.sub(ur"<[^>]*>",'',row,re.UNICODE) File "C:\Python27\lib\re.py", line 151, in sub return _compile(pattern, flags).sub(repl, string, count) TypeError: expected string or buffer What am I doing wrong?

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  • Integrating HTML into Silverlight Applications

    - by dwahlin
    Looking for a way to display HTML content within a Silverlight application? If you haven’t tried doing that before it can be challenging at first until you know a few tricks of the trade.  Being able to display HTML is especially handy when you’re required to display RSS feeds (with embedded HTML), SQL Server Reporting Services reports, PDF files (not actually HTML – but the techniques discussed will work), or other HTML content.  In this post I'll discuss three options for displaying HTML content in Silverlight applications and describe how my company is using these techniques in client applications. Displaying HTML Overlays If you need to display HTML over a Silverlight application (such as an RSS feed containing HTML data in it) you’ll need to set the Silverlight control’s windowless parameter to true. This can be done using the object tag as shown next: <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%"> <param name="source" value="ClientBin/HTMLAndSilverlight.xap"/> <param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" /> <param name="background" value="white" /> <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50401.0" /> <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" /> <param name="windowless" value="true" /> <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50401.0" style="text-decoration:none"> <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/> </a> </object> By setting the control to “windowless” you can overlay HTML objects by using absolute positioning and other CSS techniques. Keep in mind that on Windows machines the windowless setting can result in a performance hit when complex animations or HD video are running since the plug-in content is displayed directly by the browser window. It goes without saying that you should only set windowless to true when you really need the functionality it offers. For example, if I want to display my blog’s RSS content on top of a Silverlight application I could set windowless to true and create a user control that grabbed the content and output it using a DataList control: <style type="text/css"> a {text-decoration:none;font-weight:bold;font-size:14pt;} </style> <div style="margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px;margin-right:5px;"> <asp:DataList ID="RSSDataList" runat="server" DataSourceID="RSSDataSource"> <ItemTemplate> <a href='<%# XPath("link") %>'><%# XPath("title") %></a> <br /> <%# XPath("description") %> <br /> </ItemTemplate> </asp:DataList> <asp:XmlDataSource ID="RSSDataSource" DataFile="http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/rss.aspx" XPath="rss/channel/item" CacheDuration="60" runat="server" /> </div> The user control can then be placed in the page hosting the Silverlight control as shown below. This example adds a Close button, additional content to display in the overlay window and the HTML generated from the user control. <div id="RSSDiv"> <div style="background-color:#484848;border:1px solid black;height:35px;width:100%;"> <img alt="Close Button" align="right" src="Images/Close.png" onclick="HideOverlay();" style="cursor:pointer;" /> </div> <div style="overflow:auto;width:800px;height:565px;"> <div style="float:left;width:100px;height:103px;margin-left:10px;margin-top:5px;"> <img src="http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/dwahlin/dan2008.jpg" style="border:1px solid Gray" /> </div> <div style="float:left;width:300px;height:103px;margin-top:5px;"> <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin" style="margin-left:10px;font-size:20pt;">Dan Wahlin's Blog</a> </div> <br /><br /><br /> <div style="clear:both;margin-top:20px;"> <uc:BlogRoller ID="BlogRoller" runat="server" /> </div> </div> </div> Of course, we wouldn’t want the RSS HTML content to be shown until requested. Once it’s requested the absolute position of where it should show above the Silverlight control can be set using standard CSS styles. The following ID selector named #RSSDiv handles hiding the overlay div shown above and determines where it will be display on the screen. #RSSDiv { background-color:White; position:absolute; top:100px; left:300px; width:800px; height:600px; border:1px solid black; display:none; } Now that the HTML content to display above the Silverlight control is set, how can we show it as a user clicks a HyperlinkButton or other control in the application? Fortunately, Silverlight provides an excellent HTML bridge that allows direct access to content hosted within a page. The following code shows two JavaScript functions that can be called from Siverlight to handle showing or hiding HTML overlay content. The two functions rely on jQuery (http://www.jQuery.com) to make it easy to select HTML objects and manipulate their properties: function ShowOverlay() { rssDiv.css('display', 'block'); } function HideOverlay() { rssDiv.css('display', 'none'); } Calling the ShowOverlay function is as simple as adding the following code into the Silverlight application within a button’s Click event handler: private void OverlayHyperlinkButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { HtmlPage.Window.Invoke("ShowOverlay"); } The result of setting the Silverlight control’s windowless parameter to true and showing the HTML overlay content is shown in the following screenshot:   Thinking Outside the Box to Show HTML Content Setting the windowless parameter to true may not be a viable option for some Silverlight applications or you may simply want to go about showing HTML content a different way. The next technique I’ll show takes advantage of simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript code to handle showing HTML content while a Silverlight application is running in the browser. Keep in mind that with Silverlight’s HTML bridge feature you can always pop-up HTML content in a new browser window using code similar to the following: System.Windows.Browser.HtmlPage.Window.Navigate( new Uri("http://silverlight.net"), "_blank"); For this example I’ll demonstrate how to hide the Silverlight application while maximizing a container div containing the HTML content to show. This allows HTML content to take up the full screen area of the browser without having to set windowless to true and when done right can make the user feel like they never left the Silverlight application. The following HTML shows several div elements that are used to display HTML within the same browser window as the Silverlight application: <div id="JobPlanDiv"> <div style="vertical-align:middle"> <img alt="Close Button" align="right" src="Images/Close.png" onclick="HideJobPlanIFrame();" style="cursor:pointer;" /> </div> <div id="JobPlan_IFrame_Container" style="height:95%;width:100%;margin-top:37px;"></div> </div> The JobPlanDiv element acts as a container for two other divs that handle showing a close button and hosting an iframe that will be added dynamically at runtime. JobPlanDiv isn’t visible when the Silverlight application loads due to the following ID selector added into the page: #JobPlanDiv { position:absolute; background-color:#484848; overflow:hidden; left:0; top:0; height:100%; width:100%; display:none; } When the HTML content needs to be shown or hidden the JavaScript functions shown next can be used: var jobPlanIFrameID = 'JobPlan_IFrame'; var slHost = null; var jobPlanContainer = null; var jobPlanIFrameContainer = null; var rssDiv = null; $(document).ready(function () { slHost = $('#silverlightControlHost'); jobPlanContainer = $('#JobPlanDiv'); jobPlanIFrameContainer = $('#JobPlan_IFrame_Container'); rssDiv = $('#RSSDiv'); }); function ShowJobPlanIFrame(url) { jobPlanContainer.css('display', 'block'); $('<iframe id="' + jobPlanIFrameID + '" src="' + url + '" style="height:100%;width:100%;" />') .appendTo(jobPlanIFrameContainer); slHost.css('width', '0%'); } function HideJobPlanIFrame() { jobPlanContainer.css('display', 'none'); $('#' + jobPlanIFrameID).remove(); slHost.css('width', '100%'); } ShowJobPlanIFrame() handles showing the JobPlanDiv div and adding an iframe into it dynamically. Once JobPlanDiv is shown, the Silverlight control host has its width set to a value of 0% to allow the control to stay alive while making it invisible to the user. I found that this technique works better across multiple browsers as opposed to manipulating the Silverlight control host div’s display or visibility properties. Now that you’ve seen the code to handle showing and hiding the HTML content area, let’s switch focus to the Silverlight application. As a user clicks on a link such as “View Report” the ShowJobPlanIFrame() JavaScript function needs to be called. The following code handles that task: private void ReportHyperlinkButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { ShowBrowser(_BaseUrl + "/Report.aspx"); } public void ShowBrowser(string url) { HtmlPage.Window.Invoke("ShowJobPlanIFrame", url); } Any URL can be passed into the ShowBrowser() method which handles invoking the JavaScript function. This includes standard web pages or even PDF files. We’ve used this technique frequently with our SmartPrint control (http://www.smartwebcontrols.com) which converts Silverlight screens into PDF documents and displays them. Here’s an example of the content generated:   Silverlight 4’s WebBrowser Control Both techniques shown to this point work well when Silverlight is running in-browser but not so well when it’s running out-of-browser since there’s no host page that you can access using the HTML bridge. Fortunately, Silverlight 4 provides a WebBrowser control that can be used to perform the same functionality quite easily. We’re currently using it in client applications to display PDF documents, SSRS reports and standard HTML content. Using the WebBrowser control simplifies the application quite a bit since no JavaScript is required if the application only runs out-of-browser. Here’s a simple example of defining the WebBrowser control in XAML. I typically define it in MainPage.xaml when a Silverlight Navigation template is used to create the project so that I can re-use the functionality across multiple screens. <Grid x:Name="WebBrowserGrid" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" Visibility="Collapsed"> <StackPanel HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch"> <Border Background="#484848" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Height="40"> <Image x:Name="WebBrowserImage" Width="100" Height="33" Cursor="Hand" HorizontalAlignment="Right" Source="/HTMLAndSilverlight;component/Assets/Images/Close.png" MouseLeftButtonDown="WebBrowserImage_MouseLeftButtonDown" /> </Border> <WebBrowser x:Name="JobPlanReportWebBrowser" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" /> </StackPanel> </Grid> Looking through the XAML you can see that a close image is defined along with the WebBrowser control. Because the URL that the WebBrowser should navigate to isn’t known at design time no value is assigned to the control’s Source property. If the XAML shown above is left “as is” you’ll find that any HTML content assigned to the WebBrowser doesn’t display properly. This is due to no height or width being set on the control. To handle this issue the following code is added into the XAML’s code-behind file to dynamically determine the height and width of the page and assign it to the WebBrowser. This is done by handling the SizeChanged event. void MainPage_SizeChanged(object sender, SizeChangedEventArgs e) { WebBrowserGrid.Height = JobPlanReportWebBrowser.Height = ActualHeight; WebBrowserGrid.Width = JobPlanReportWebBrowser.Width = ActualWidth; } When the user wants to view HTML content they click a button which executes the code shown in next: public void ShowBrowser(string url) { if (Application.Current.IsRunningOutOfBrowser) { JobPlanReportWebBrowser.NavigateToString("<html><body><iframe src='" + url + "' style='width:100%;height:97%;' /></body></html>"); WebBrowserGrid.Visibility = Visibility.Visible; } else { HtmlPage.Window.Invoke("ShowJobPlanIFrame", url); } } private void WebBrowserImage_MouseLeftButtonDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e) { WebBrowserGrid.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed; }   Looking through the code you’ll see that it checks to see if the Silverlight application is running out-of-browser and then either displays the WebBrowser control or runs the JavaScript function discussed earlier. Although the WebBrowser control’s Source property could be assigned the URI of the page to navigate to, by assigning HTML content using the NavigateToString() method and adding an iframe, content can be shown from any site including cross-domain sites. This is especially handy when you need to grab a page from a reporting site that’s in a different domain than the Silverlight application. Here’s an example of viewing  PDF file inside of an out-of-browser application. The first image shows the application running out-of-browser before the user clicks a PDF HyperlinkButton.  The second image shows the PDF being displayed.   While there are certainly other techniques that can be used, the ones shown here have worked well for us in different applications and provide the ability to display HTML content in-browser or out-of-browser. Feel free to add a comment if you have another tip or trick you like to use when working with HTML content in Silverlight applications.   Download Code Sample   For more information about onsite, online and video training, mentoring and consulting solutions for .NET, SharePoint or Silverlight please visit http://www.thewahlingroup.com.

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  • From Bluehost to WP Engine, My WordPress Story

    - by thatjeffsmith
    This is probably the longest blog post I’ve written in a LONG time. And if you’re used to coming here for the Oracle stuff, this post is not about that. It’s about my blog, and the stuff under the hood that makes it run, AKA WordPress. If you want to skip to the juicy stuff, then use these shortcuts: My Site Slowed Down How I Moved to WP Engine How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me Why WP Engine? I started thatJeffSmith.com on May 28th, 2010. I had been already been blogging for several years, but a couple of really smart people I respected (Andy, Brent – thanks again!) suggested that I take ownership of my content and begin building my personal brand. I thought that was a good idea, and so I signed up for service with bluehost. Bluehost makes setting up a WordPress site very, very easy. And, they continued to be easy to work with for the past 2 years. I would even recommend them to anyone looking to host their own WordPress install/site. For $83.40, I purchased a year’s worth of service and my domain name registration – a very good value. And then last year I paid $107.40 for another year’s services. And when that year expired I paid another $190.80 for an additional two year’s service in advance. I had been up to that point, getting my money’s worth. And then, just a few weeks ago… My Site Slowed to a Crawl That spike was from an April Fool's Day Post, I think Why? Well, when I first started blogging, I had the same problem that most beginner bloggers have – not many readers. In my first year of blogging, I think the highest number of readers on a single day was about 125. I remember that day as I was very excited to break 100! Bluehost was very reliable, serving up my content with maybe a total of 3-4 outages in the past 2 years. Support was usually very prompt with answers and solutions, and I love their ‘Chat now’ technology – much nicer than message boards only or pay-to-talk phone support. In the past 6 months however, I noticed a couple of things: daily traffic was increasing – woohoo! my service was experiencing severe CPU throttling – doh! To be honest, I wasn’t aware the throttling was occuring, but I did know that the response time of my blog was starting to lag. Average load times were approaching 20-30 seconds. Not good when good sites are loading in 5 seconds or less. And just this past week, in getting ready to launch a new website for work that sucked in an RSS feed from my blog, the new page was left waiting for more than a minute. Not good! In fact my boss asked, why aren’t you blogging on Blogger? Ugh. I tried a few things to fix the problem: I paid for a premium WordPress theme – Themify’s Grido (thanks to @SQLRockstar for the heads-up) I installed a couple of WP caching plugins I read every WP optimization blog post I could get my greedy little eyes on However, at the same time I was also getting addicted to WordPress bloggers talking about all the cool things you could do with your blog. As a result I had at one point about 30 different plugins installed. WordPress runs on MySQL, and certain queries running via these plugins were starving for CPU. Plugins that would be called every page load meant that as more people clicked on my site, the more CPU I needed. I’m not stupid, so I eventually figured out that maybe less plugins was better, and was able to go down to just 20. But still, the site was running like a dog. CPU Throttling, makes MySQL wait to run a query Bluehost runs shared servers. Your site runs on the same box that several hundred (or thousand?) other services are running on. If you take more CPU than they think you should have, they will limit your service by making you stand in line for CPU, AKA ‘throttling.’ This is not bad. This business model allows them to serve many, many users for a very fair price. It works great until, well, until it doesn’t. I noticed in the last week that for every minute of service, I was being throttled between 60 and 300 seconds. If there were 5 MySQL processes running, then every single one of them were being held in check. The blog visitor notice this as their page requests would take a minute or more to be answered. Bluehost unfortunately doesn’t offer dedicated server hosting, so there was no real upgrade path for me follow and remain one of their customers. So what was I to do? Uninstall every plugin and hope the site sped up? Ask for people to take turns on my blog? I decided to spend my way out of the problem. I signed up for service with WP Engine and moved ThatJeffSmith.com The first 2 months are free, and after that it’s about $29/month to run my site on their system. My math tells me that’s a good bit more expensive than what Bluehost was charging me – to the tune of about 300% more a month. Oh, and I should just say that my blog is a personal blog even though I talk about work stuff here. I don’t get paid for blogging, I don’t sell ads, and I don’t expense the service fees – this is my personal passion. So is it worth it? In the first 4 days, it seems to be totally worth it. Load times have gone from 20-30 seconds to less than 5 seconds. A few folks have told me via Twitter that they notice faster page loads. I anticipate this will indirectly lead to more traffic as Google penalizes you in search results if your site is too slow, and of course some folks won’t even bother waiting more than 5-10 seconds. I noticed right away that writing posts, uploading pictures, and just using the WordPress dashboard in general was much more responsive. So writing is less of a chore now, which means I won’t have a good reason not to write How I Moved to WP Engine I signed up for the service and registered my domain. I then took a full export of my ‘old’ site by doing a FTP GET of all my files, then did a MySQL database backup, exported my WordPress Theme settings to a .zip file, and then finally used the WordPress ‘Export’ feature. I then used the WordPress ‘Import’ on the new site to load up my posts. Then I uploaded the theme .zip package from Themify. Then I FTP’d the ‘wp-content’ directory up to my new server using SFTP (WP Engine only supports secure FTP – good on them!) Using a temporary URL to see my new site, I was able to confirm that everything looked mostly OK – I’ll detail the challenges and issues of fixing the content next – but then it was time to ‘flip the switch.’ I updated the IP address that the DNS lookup tables use to route traffic to my new server. In a matter of minutes the DNS servers around the world were updated and it was time to see the new site! But It Was ‘Broken’ I had never moved a website before, and in my rush to update the DNS, I had changed the records without really finding out what I was supposed to do first. After re-reading the directions provided by WP Engine and following the guidance of their support engineer, I realized I had needed to set the CNAME (Alias) ‘www’ record to point to a different URL than the ‘www.thatjeffsmith.com’ entry I had set. Once corrected the site was up and running in less than a minute. Then It Was Only Mostly Broken Many of my plugins weren’t working. Apparently just ftp’ing the wp-content directory up wasn’t the proper way to re-install the plugin. I suspect file permissions or file ownership wasn’t proper. Some plug-ins were working, many had their settings wiped to the defaults, and a few just didn’t work again. I had to delete the directory of the plug-in manually via SFTP, and then use the WP Dashboard to install it from scratch. And here was my first ‘lesson’ – don’t switch the DNS records until you’ve completely tested your new site. I wasn’t able to navigate the old WP console to review my plug-in settings. Thankfully I was able to use the Wayback Machine to reverse engineer some things, and of course most plug-ins aren’t that complicated to setup to begin with. An example of one that I had to redo from scratch is the ‘Twitter @Anywhere Plus’ plugin that I use to create the form that allows folks to tweet a post they enjoyed at the end of each story. How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me I actually signed up with another provider first. They ranked highly in Google searches and a few Tweeps recommended them to me. But hours after signing up and I still didn’t have sever reyady, I was ready to give up on them. They offered no chat or phone support – only mail and message boards. And the message boards were rife with posts about how the service had gone downhill in the past 6 months. To their credit, they did make it easy to cancel, although I did have to do so via email as their website ‘cancel’ button was non-existent. Within minutes of activating my WP Engine account I had received my welcome message and directions on how to get started. I was able to see my staged website right away. They also did something very cool before I even got started – they looked at my existing site and told me by how much they could improve its performance. The proof is in the web pudding. I like this for a few reasons, but primarily I liked their business model. It told me they knew what they were doing, and that they were willing to put their money where their mouth was. This was further evident by their 60-day money back guarantee. And if I understand it correctly, they don’t even take your money until after that 60 day period is over. After a day, I was welcomed by the WP Engine social media team, and was given the opportunity to subscribe to their newsletter and follow their account on Twitter. I noticed their Twitter team is sure to post regular WordPress tips several times a day. It’s not just an account that’s setup for the sake of having a Twitter presence. These little things add up and give me confidence in my decision to choose them as my hosting partner. ‘Partner’ – that’s a lot nicer word than just ‘service provider,’ isn’t it? Oh, and they offered me a t-shirt. Don’t ever doubt the power of a ‘free’ t-shirt! How awesome is this e-mail, from a customer perspective? I wasn’t really expecting any of this. Exceeding expectations before I have even handed over a single dollar seems like a pretty good business plan. This is how you treat customers. Love them to death, and they reward you with loyalty. But Jeff, You Skipped a Piece Here, Why WP Engine? I found them on one of those ‘Top 10′ list posts, and pulled up their webpage. I noticed they offered a specialized service – they host WordPress installs, and that’s it. Their servers are tuned specifically for running WordPress. They had in bolded text, things like ‘INSANELY FAST. INFINITELY SCALABLE.’ and ‘LIGHTNING SPEED.’ And then they offered insurance against hackers and they took care of automatic backups and restores. The only drawbacks I have noticed so far relate to plugins I used that have been ‘blacklisted.’ In order to guarantee that ‘lightning’ speed, they have banned the use of the CPU-suckiest plugins. One of those is the ‘Related Posts’ plugin. So if you are a subscriber and are reading this in your email, you’ll notice there’s no links back to my blog to continue reading other related stories. Since that referral traffic is very small single-digit for my site, I decided that I’m OK with that. I’d rather have the warp-speed page loads. Again, I think that will lead to higher traffic down the road. In 50+ days I will need to decide if WP Engine is a permanent solution. I’ll be sure to update this post when that time comes and let y’all know how it turns out.

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  • Stay Tuned for Relaunch

    - by Shyam Bajaj
    In the coming days, the Oracle Health Sciences team will be relaunching Health Sciences Connect. Stay tuned! In the meantime, interact with us directly via:  Twitter - Follow and converse with Oracle Health Sciences leaders - simply Tweet to us by adding @OracleHealthSci before your question or comment.  Facebook - Stay in the know with industry thought leadership pieces from Oracle Health Sciences  YouTube - Watch interviews with heads of Oracle Health Sciences and industry leaders  RSS Feed - Subscribe to us from your browser or RSS reader for industry and company updates   For updated Oracle Health Sciences product and organization information, please visit us at www.oracle.com/healthsciences.

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  • How to Convert News Feeds to Ebooks with Calibre

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    Setting up your ebook reader to receive bundles of articles from web sites that interest you is a great way to add functionality and great content. Read on as we show you how to turn the RSS feeds from your favorite sites into ebooks. If you’re a fan of the easy-on-the-eyes digital reading experience provided by your ebook reader, it only seems natural to set up your ebook reader to receive feeds from your favorite news sources so you can enjoy even more content. In this tutorial we’ll be walking you through a simple way to shuttle hand picked content to your ebook reader. HTG Explains: Why Linux Doesn’t Need Defragmenting How to Convert News Feeds to Ebooks with Calibre How To Customize Your Wallpaper with Google Image Searches, RSS Feeds, and More

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  • flash twitter and facebook widgets

    - by NorthPole
    I'm stuck with a crappy digital signage platform that only renders .html and .swf files (and rss feeds) No customization of rss, only way to show something dynamic in a pretty way is to use flash. The question: is there any way to embed javascript in swf files or somehow have facebook and twitter flash plugins? I looked for ready-made swf widgets for the job but didn't find any, if there is any flash widget that serves a facebook and/or twitter feed please give me a link. (sorry if the question is out of context but these things usually run a stripped-down browser to display everything so its pretty much a web page run from a file and not a web server)

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  • Finally found a replacement for my.live.com&hellip;

    - by eddraper
    As I had alluded to before, the transition of http://my.live.com/ to http://my.msn.com/ caused me serious grief. I've been an RSS addict for many, many years and I found the my.live.com UI to be the ultimate RSS reader and gateway to the web. It had been my home page for a long time.  My.msn has a LONG way to go before it matches the elegance and performance of my.live. The site I ended up going with is http://www.netvibes.com/ .   It’s the closest thing I could find that could do four column tiles with a reasonable amount of information density .  I’d still prefer a lot less “chrome” and better use of space, but it’s as close as I’m going to get… One feature I really do like about netvibes, is the pagination feature.  The built in feed reader is also quite nice… All-in-all, I’d recommend netvibes…

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