Posted by Troy on October 27, 2008 under Web | 
This blog used to be hosted by WordPress up until about a week ago. The blog was called troyscott.wordpress.com. The WordPress site was great. Number one its free and WordPress is fairly easy to use and very configurable. But there were some drawbacks having it on the WordPress site like using Feed Burner and Google AdSense.
So I decided host my own WordPress site. About a year ago I signed up with Host Papa which came with the following features:
- 10 add-on domains
- 100 MySQL databases
- 1 TB of storage
- Fantasico (software installer that comes with cPanel)
Last month I registered my site name for about $20 with domain.ca. Last week I finally spent some time to transferring my blog from troyscott.WordPress.com to troyscott.ca. In order to do this I needed to export my current blog data from troyscott.wordpress.com and supply the named server info to domain.ca. You can export the blog by logging onto the WordPress Dashboard and then select Manage>Export:
Download the file to you local machine. Before I imported my old blog to troyscott.ca I used Fantasico to set up the WordPress blog application. I could of installed this myself and I won’t know if using Fantasico was a good idea until I try to upgrade my site to a newer release of WordPress. But if you want to get your blog up and running quickly or you are not comfortable installing the blog software your server I recommend using a product like Fantasico. In a matter of minutes my blog was up an running. Of course you can only use Fantasico if your web server provider has cPanel.
Once my blog was up and running I had an important decision to make. Do I keep my original blog on WordPress and simply re-direct the traffic to my new site or do I delete my old site. Well in my case I decided to delete my old site. However, the only reason I did this is that my old site had very low traffic (mostly do to the lack of blog posts and not SEO) and I wanted to learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In fact when my site was hosted at WordPress.com my SEO was very good. If your site already has a lot of traffic and subscribers I would leave it up and just include a post stating that your blog has moved.
Now its time to customize the site and focus on SEO and Google AdSense and most importantly its time to start blogging.
Troy
Posted by Troy on August 7, 2008 under Business Intelligence, SQL Server |
Microsoft announced yesterday that SQL Server 2008 has been released. RTM version of the software is available for download from the TechNet Plus Subscription site:
SQL Server 2008 - Downloads
If you don’t have a subscription for TechNet plus you can download a trial version:
SQL Server 2008 - Trial Versions
Here is a link to SQL Server 2008 Books Online to help you get started with the new product:
SQL Server 2008 - Getting Started
You can install SQL Server 2008 side by side with an earlier version or you can upgrade the existing database to the new release:
Upgrading SQL Server 2008
Troy
Posted by Troy on May 3, 2008 under Sony |
Well I finally went out and bought Grand Theft Auto IV for the PS3. Of course I was excited to starting playing the game on a Friday night while enjoying a couple of refreshing Heinekens. Unfortunately I ended up spending about an hour trying to get the game to work.
The game booted up fine and installed over 3 GB of data to the hard drive. Then there was a black screen with words Loading New Game….. . And that was it. I tried rebooting the system, and deleting and re-installing GTA IV but no luck.
I finally disconnected my internet connection and the game started working. Of course this is okay for single player gaming but in not much of a solution multi-player. According to the post below this issue does not effect 60 PS3 machines. The article also explains how to disconnect your internet settings:
http://forums.gametrailers.com/showthread.php?t=389388
This is the only technical issue I have experienced so far but I have only been playing for a couple of hours. Now I can focus on more important things like my GTA driving skills.
Troy
Posted by Troy on April 12, 2008 under Google, IT, Microsoft |
Installing the Google App Engine SDK for Windows is fairly straightforward. You can download the SDK here. Before installing it on Windows make sure you have python 2.5 installed:
http://www.activestate.com/solutions/python/
It is a free download from ActiveState. The Google App Engine SDK install will fail if python is not installed first.
By default the installer will install python in C:\Python2.5\ . Once the install is complete double click on the Windows Installer application for the SDK (GoogleAppEngine.msi).
By default it installs the SDK in :
C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\
But I prefer to have it installed at:
C:\google_appengine
After you set the directory for the SDK the installer should complete. Now you can go to the command line and go to the google_appengine directory.
The SDK comes with a simple application called guestbook. To see if your installation succeeded type the following from the google_appengine directory:
> dev_appserver demos/guestbook
You will then be prompted to check for updates on startup. Respond “n” for the test. If you have a firewall like Windows OneCare you may be prompted to allow python.exe to access the Internet. Click “Allow this program”.
You can now access the guestbook application by going to your browser and entering:
http://localhost:8080
Type something in the text box and click the button to try out the guest book application.
Troy
Posted by Troy on April 5, 2008 under IT |
Usually I use CVS for version control but in the last few months I have started using SVN. In windows most user’s use SVN Tortoise because it works well with OS but I prefer to have it integrated with my IDE. Below is a link to an IBM article which explains in detail how to setup SVN:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-ecl-subversion/
Here is a more recent update link for SVN:
http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.2.x
Troy
