Month: January 2012

You’re only as good as the tools you work with.  I’ve spent years refining the set of tools I work with, and these are among the best. From the basics of virus and forgotten password recoveries to the real issues like figuring out how to make a silent installer for critical applications during deployment, these are the tool you’ll need.  Well these and a thousand others that I’ll try to add as I have time.

First, NirSoft offers insane set of utilities to do basically anything you can imagine related to windows as it relates to passwords, viruses, data recover, networking, and all other things sysadmin.

When you need details on a single system, from chipset to windows key, update and antivirus status, etc, you can’t beat Belarc System Advisor for a quick scan. 

For larger or ongoing network based software asset management and system administration, SpiceWorks offers a fantastically comprehensive set of services to be configured at your discretion to monitor network traffic and connectivity, antivirus and windows patch application, and help desk ticketing. It’s awesome, and it’s FREE.

If you make webz, the W3Schools might just be your biggest asset.  The W3C is the group that determines and publishes standards for all kinds of programming languages, and most of the open web including HTML5, CSS3, and most of the languages that matter.  They also offer a SWEET web browser/hypertext editor called Amaya, as well as tons of other tools.

Need to figure out why you’re offline?  Here’s the definitive article on windows network troubleshooting.

Use the Windows Installer XML toolset to generate Windows Installer Packages.  Crucial on deployments.

Building your own ecommerce site with ZenCart is surprisingly easy.  If you’ve had any experience with HTML you can probably get the job done, but an understanding of PHP and especially includes and the ZenCart overrides system can be very helpful.

What you need to know before you start installing ZenCart:

1. creating a template of your own is a smart move, and can save you time by letting you switch back to default to isolate theme related issues.

2. You need to change the name of the admin directory for security, but here we’ll just refer to it as /admin.

3. There are other more robust CMS systems out there, but Zen Cart offers a focused community and product and can be a great choice if you want tight control over your site and a generally simpler code base than some of the more robust CMS.

4. Plan your module choices well.  Choosing modules relevant to your business is critical, and matching to your version is as well here.

5. Signup for the ZenCart forums!  People are very helpful, and if you are respectful and informative AFTER doing a few searches you’ll find a relevant thread to get guidance in.

If you’re convinced go ahead and hit their download page or check out this site I helped build with ZenCart.

I’ve seen this issue a couple of times in the past few months where Outlook seems to open and run normally (shows running in taskbar, systray, and task manager) but you can’t see it onscreen.

 

Basically the issue seems to bee that Outlook is stuck offscreen somewhere, as in on a 2nd monitor that isn’t connected or it’s on your “right” monitor when you’re only using a left monitor.

 

If you’ve tried outlook /safe to make sure an add in isn’t the cause of your issue and outlook.exe /resetnavpane and neither one has worked, you can try deleting the “office explorer” “frame” reg key.  After this is done, restart outlook and get back to work!

 

The first time I saw this issue the solution involved several steps of doing stuff to force changes to the outlook window’s behavior, and then finally I found this quick one-step fix of deleting the reg key: credit where it’s due- http://lallscreation.blogspot.com/2011/12/outlook-stuck-in-task-bar-opens-off.html#!/2011/12/outlook-stuck-in-task-bar-opens-off.html

In the last 14 days I’ve setup about 20 websites.  I’ve published 3 of the to the web, and 2 are in or near production.  The only interesting thing is that I’m a systems administration person, not a web developer.  I knew a little HTML from around y2k, and picked up a basic understanding of CSS before getting started with web matrix, but really knew a pretty limited amount about mySQL/apache/php configuration, and had gotten stuck on one or other of those phases more than once when I was working on side projects.  I’ve been looking for opportunities to add a new specialty, so I wanted to see what was around to help me work with the Windows 7 environment I know and love to test out all the poplar new CMS systems: Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, Orchard, Umbraco CMS, DotNetNuke, nopCommerce, etc.

So how is a sysadmin cranking out modern, dynamic, database driven sites like a banshee?  WebMatrix, free from Microsoft.  Seriously, it’s @!#$!@& sick: lightweight, and makes creating one of these sites a 5 minute point a click and fill out a form or two process.

I’m writing this from a dual core 1.6ghz laptop with no dedicated graphics and only 2gb ram.  Spotify is streaming some Phantogram for me, and web matrix is installing nopCommerce on the 2nd monitor I have the lappy driving.  Writing the post in live writer, outlook running so I get all my email, and a few torrents going in the background and still I’m getting respectable performance.

Check out web matrix, even if it’s just so you can quickly get a hands-on experience with some of the web platforms you hear people talking about and see jobs on CL for all the time.  You just might be blown away, and at the least you should appreciate being able to quickly setup a local development environment.

The last few months have given me the opportunity to work on a couple of SEO projects, and I’ve been really impressed with the results I’m getting with Drupal 7 (D7).  We launched http://death2flash.com last Thursday, and over the weekend I spent a couple hours setting up the feed aggregator to harvest a little bit of HTML5/CSS3/Flash sucks related content.  Today I checked to see if Google had found the site yet, and was thrilled to see it on google page 1!  I haven’t even started working on SEO and we’re already off to a great start.   Way to go Drupal!

Take a look and see where we’re landing now: https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&cp=14&gs_id=1e&xhr=t&q=death+to+flash