Mikes Blog

Nothing Witty To Say, Sorry!

So Long GoDaddy

clock March 1, 2008 10:42 by author Mike

Well, my 2 years are up being hosted on GoDaddy. When I started "playing" with the web (My background is standard Windows programming or Server Side programming on OpenVMS/Unix) I wanted somewhere cheap, that supported ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005. I had heard that GoDaddy were one of the biggest hosts in the world, after having a look, I signed up.

Whilst they have served me well, whenever I read up on issues with ISP's, GoDaddy is always top of the list. It seems that you can do most things with them, but its not easy. I have now moved Talk-PC onto http://www.aspnix.com  where I host all my other sites.  Whilst they went through a rough period quite a few months ago, I have had no reason to fault them, they are cheap, support all the latest ASP.NET upgrades almost as soon as they come out and have an excellent support capability.

 

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New Site, New Blog, Post More ??

clock January 20, 2008 10:56 by author Mike

Well, I have been promising myself for along time now that I was going to re-vamp Talk-PC to make it do what I really want to do instead of being a local site for PC problems.

It has served me well over the years, but now I intend to focus on writing software solutions to support the small business.  In re-vamping the site, I have also added a proper Blogging engine and am using it now.  Blog posts have been put on the back burner recently, due to my involvement with the London Boys to get a small business site designed and rolled out.  We are nearly complete, just a few minor tweaks to resolve.

 Also, now that I have a proper blogging engine, hopefully I can create blog entries from any computer, such as when I am away at technical conferences or working from Hotels.  My old site involved me hacking the ASP.NET code to create the blog - Not Ideal.

Btw, This BlogEngine.net site is hosted on GODADDY.COM.  I found a really usefull post on configuration of the application on GODADDY's Servers

http://www.codeplex.com/blogengine/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=13534

 

I hope this helps someone

 

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Warminster Highbury Youth FC Website

clock August 8, 2007 10:49 by author Mike
And another new site, since taking on the Secretary role of Warminsters Highbury Youth FC football team, the gent that had been managing their website has given up, so I offered my services (for free of course). I have been spending a considerable amount of time on the site, getting the content and site layout correct.
The site can be found Here.   I took the Microsoft Clubsite Starter kit, then basically removed all of it with the exception of the CSS and Site Navigation structure.  The reason for this was that I dont think our football club needed a members area or Events section.  It had a news section, but it didnt need what I think we needed.  So I added the provider logic from the Small Business website and now use XML for all my backend data (excluding pictures).  

To update the previous entry, I gave up on Community Server as a forum tool formy Wembley Forums site as it wasn't good enough for older browsers (could not add posts if you used IE6 and Win2K OS).  I am now using  Yet Another Forum.NET as my forum engine (An excellent .NET version of PHPBB forum software).  Highly recommended.  Now all I need to do is personalise it a bit more.

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Wembley Forum Site

clock June 16, 2007 10:49 by author Mike
Got another new site up and running, its the Wembley forum.  I have been thinking around this idea for a few weeks now and decided to have a pop at it.  I am using an Open Source Forums software called Community Server to provide the forums.  My intention is to provide forums that visitors to Wembley Stadium can use to get information, record memory of great events or ask questions or even buy and sell tickets (informally of course).

The site is upand running, but I am still having problems with the email account activation and alsoI have to remove a lot of the standard Community Server advertisements that come with the forums software "out of the box" as it were.  So still a few more late nights to go yet then.   

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Starter Kit Problems

clock May 9, 2007 10:48 by author Mike

I have recently been setting up a site for my local badminton club Tuesday Badminton Club based in Warminster.  The site is based upon a Microsoft starter kit that anyone can download and configure/customise to their own requirements from Club Starter Kit.  After running it locally on my development laptop, I decided to put it live.  The FTP upload was fine, I had already set up an SQL Server 2005 database with my ISP and updated the connection strings accordingly. The next thing was to configure the membership tables. To do this, I followed this excellent guide from Sue Googe.  When I tried to access the site however, I got the default error page displayed.  So off went the "CustomErrors" element and I finally got the message "Invalid object name 'Announcements'.  Further digging (and I had to dig deep!) led to the fact that the club-add.sql script included in the Club Website is incorrect for setting up the club website.  This explains why it worked on my local laptop, as there was an ASPNETDB.MDF locally, it must have been that the club-add.sql script did not match the included database.  You can download the correct scripts for deleting and re-creating the club starter kit databases from Microsoft.  Once you run These Scripts it all works as expected.

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Portfolio

clock May 5, 2007 10:47 by author Mike
Talk-PC are currently concentrating on building up a portfolio of quality business oriented websites that show the quality of our deliverables.

I am now concentrating all effort on websites for small business's, utilising the very latest Microsoft Technologies for website design, security and presentation.

The technology being used to develop the products is Visual Studio 2005, this includes the Website Server-side technology called ASP.NET and also the very latest AJAX for ASP.NET technology for web page refresh interactivity.  What you get with Visual Studio 2005 is the complete website development environment which is what is required for dynamic business websites.  Its all very well using Frontpage (Or even dare I say MS Word) to design your masterpiece, but what do you doif you want to allow people to "login" to your site.  Will they support different roles and page access based upon the logged in users role (i.e. A low level user just gets access to the basic pages, whereas a higher level user can access more pages and the webmaster or site administrator can access all of the administrative functions as defined).

When I first started this business, I used Frontpage for my customers websites and though this has worked well for the content of those sites (Jan Klakus, West Beach, Andrich, Bath House).  My most recent sites have been written using Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET technology.  In fact my very first site (Talk-PC) was written using Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET as a learning exercise. To be honest it does not really utilise many (if any) of the advanced capabilities that are provided with ASP.NET, but we all have to start somewhere.

So, back to subject.  My current work in progress is 2 websites using ASP.NET.  Firstly, a local business, WF Curtis and secondly the Warminster Tuesday Night Badminton Club.  Once I have these sites completed, my portfolio will be growing in the direction that I am concentrating in.  Now, less waffling and get back to getting those sites up and running fully.

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Work-Sleep Websites

clock April 17, 2007 10:45 by author Mike
Well so much for regular updates to this web log. I seem to be getting worse at it! My Warminster-Online site is up and running well now. I get on average 90 page loads per day which I think is reasonable considering. I am finding that I am the only one entering the services into it though. Maybe I ought to do some kind of advertising in the local area. In my day job I am writing lots of C# for a Windows Application for the MoD. So, C# code in the daytime, websites and ASP.NET in the evenings. Kinda like nirvana if your that way inclined. Got a couple more websites in the pipeline, will update more when I have firm committment to proceed with them. If anyone is interested in learning Web site design and/or Windows application programming, then you could do a lot worse than visiting the new Microsoft Beginner Developer Learning Center This is a new site and having looked at some of the resources available, I am highly impressed, the blurb says that it will take you from a novice to becoming a "Software Developer". Unsure whether any job interviewer would agree, but its a very good start if nothing else (And its free).

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Warminster-Online

clock February 26, 2007 10:44 by author Mike
Done a bit of work with my London pals, but not so much as we had thought! Nevertheless, I have been spending my time looking at Content Management Systems such as DotNetNuke. These are sites that we set up on the web servers, but you as the user have complete control over the content within the sites. This saves you having to contact the webmaster or web author each time you wish a change to be made to your site. The CMS sites are complex to understand if you wish to modify or make them more bespoke, but DotNetNuke has one very large advantage over most others. Its Free!
Living in Warminster, I also very recently bought the Warminster-Online domain and have now just this evening finished setting the site up and getting it on-line. My intention is that it become the online presense for Warminster and surrounding villages if you are looking for business services of any kind. The site was originally a "Starter Kit" site from Microsoft and I have modified to meet the needs that I felt the site needed. Now all I need is to get some traffic and interest!!! Wish me luck on that one please.

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Work from London

clock November 28, 2006 10:43 by author Mike
Been a while, I know. But over the last 3 weeks, I have got involved with a couple of guys in London doing some Website projects. They are Tim from GTTechnicalSupport and Rob from Rob Neal Creative Media. Between us, we have a lot of the bases covered, Tim is the IT guy, rolling out Hardware, intranet systems and all the additional gubbins that this entails.  Rob is the graphics man, check out his site, he knows how to drive Photoshop.  My role
is the "Programmer".  I interface with both and provide the engine for the websites.  We currently have 2 projects on the go and I will link to them
once they are complete (Currently one is unstarted and the other is a local shabby looking site hosted in my laptop, awaiting Robs magic touch).

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Migration of Posts

clock September 9, 2006 10:42 by author Mike
You may or may not know (Or care!), but previously to setting up Talk-PC, I had another BLOG running that was hosted on BLOGGER.COM. Here
I intend to migrate all of the posts from that blog into this in slow time. Seems no point in having 2 Blogs, especially what one is completely your own and the other is "owned" by someone else. A lot of the posts are quite technical in nature, due to my main job of work, however you may or may not find them interesting. You decide.  All the new old!! posts are dated on or before 20th February 2006. 
...
Update 20 Jan 2008:  All  posts now migrated to BlogEngine.NET.  Hopefully last migration

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