ISAPI_Rewrite Rules for WordPress on IIS
January 31, 2006
This seems like a no-brainer post. Not sure why I didn’t think of it before. These are the ISAPI_Rewrite rules that I am using for this WordPress installation running on Windows 2003 and IIS to get clean/pretty URLs:
The rules above summarize the various ISAPI_Rewrite forum threads related to WordPress. I really like the product and have had no issues and in general the support forum is great. However, as popular as we might like to think WordPress is, I don’t think they care because they really haven’t put forth much of an effort to really understand what the various posters are trying to accomplish. Here’s hoping that this helps.
How’s that for a short post to make up for the previous book I just wrote? Hope it helps. I don’t guarantee it is complete, but it seems to be working pretty well. Drop a note in the comments if I’m missing anything.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Custom logo from The Logo Company
January 30, 2006
I have wanted to personalize this site for a long time with some graphics and/or colors that are unique to me and this site. Unfortunately, my graphics ability is limited to cropping, resizing, opacity and some cool border effects!. None of those do much to help you from being accused of plagiarism. Even if you do flip AND rotate the image! On top of that, the best I could do for color was to leverage existing color schemes that I had found on other sites.
I really thought I was onto something when I whipped out some ebay templates with graphics in the headers. I could pick some representative image and work it into my header and I would finally have the a site that truly represented me. Or maybe not. They weren’t my pictures and I didn’t want to have my kids plastered on the site, so I was stuck again.
A couple months ago, the desire to have my own identity for this site was getting pretty strong. I was vaguely aware of online services that offer custom logo design but I was concerned about the price (I assumed it was hundreds of dollars) and skeptical of quality. A quick Google search turned up lots of options for custom logo design. My concerns about price were warranted because the sites I was looking at started at $300 for a custom logo. Their sample galleries looked nice, but there was no way I could justify that price. I was able to find cheaper options, but there were plenty of warnings on various forums about not going down the discount logo route for a variety of reasons. Summed up best with “You get what you pay for.”
I was about to give up the thought of having my own logo when I noticed a small blurb on one site1 touting that they had finished 2nd in a recent Wired magazine test of online logo design firms. Of course, that immediately prompted the question: I wonder who was #1? A little digging turned up the actual Wired article (not much of an article really; this review is already longer).
The highest rated site was The Logo Company. According to the review, you could get a logo for $75. However, on their site, their $75 package was now $99 due to the increased traffic from Wired. To compensate though, they were offering unlimited revisions. With it being under $100 and offering unlimited revisions, there really wasn’t much too lose.
So I signed up. The actual sign-up process involved answering a number of questions related your site/product and any preferences or info that you could give them to get them started. In retrospect, I understand that you aren’t really supposed to give the creative people too much information lest you pollute their creative process. I didn’t know that before I filled out the form and the Please state your creative strategy field was filled with a long rambling description of this site, the family etymology behind the name, the current slang derivatives, and Dreamy Smurf (aka Astro Smurf). See the About page for more info (yes, as of the date of this post, there is no additional info there to help demystify the origins of the name for this site, but this just builds up the suspense for you and pressure for me to finish it).
Wow! This is long. And I haven’t even gotten to the logos or my experience yet!
Note: I’m only going to mention turn-around times here and the reason for that is that I had no deadlines or immediate need for the logo. I specified up front that there was no rush on my part. If anything, they were probably annoyed at my turnaround times since it was around the Christmas holidays (not that I think they were sitting around saying “I sure wish Matt would get back to us on those SwoofWare proofs. I just can’t sleep knowing it isn’t done.”). I dragged the whole thing out for a month and a half. With that said, everything pretty much turned around in 3-4 days once I got it to them.
Initial Designs
I was pleasantly surprised with the results of the initial designs. I ended up with seven different proofs. It was pretty apparent that a couple of the designs were done by the same artist. Even more apparent was the blatant clipart (OK, maybe not clipart, but pretty bad nonetheless) attempt that everyone warns you about. See if you can spot it.
What’s interesting to me is that I was very specific in stating that I wanted something iconic/symbolic that was clean and simple. Something along the lines of any of the following logos:
.
I specifically said that while it might be fun to try to incorporate the Smurfy definition of Swoofs, I didn’t want that. Somebody didn’t listen. And I thank them for that. While I liked the clean looks of the other logos, there was something about the little swoof-like guys I liked. My kids liked it best too, so that made it a little easier. So, thanks to whichever designer took a chance and went with the three characters (Of course, they might just have not read all the way through my initial request).
1st Revision
As much as I liked the caricatures, I really didn’t like the colors or fonts. In addition, I wanted to see about getting a little blue incorporated into the background circle behind the swoofs (ala Basecamp):
In addition to the colors and font change, I requested that the line through the characters be removed. But even more subtle than that, the artist change the position of the hands. They went from flared out to kind of extended along the body. I liked that much better and made sure to point that out as a keeper.
2nd Revision
Once I saw the blue background in the circle, I decided I didn’t like it and that there was enough blue from the characters in that area. In addition, I saw the green gradient in the bottom of the circle as a potential issue (you know, for when I get famous and need t-shirts, hats, mouse pads, etc.) and just wanted to go solid all the way around.
I thought we would be pretty much done by the time I got these proofs back. However, the artist threw in one last little change to tempt me with. All along, I had been wondering about the middle guy only having one eye. It bugged me at first and I wanted to stick with the artist’s original idea of only having one eye so I never mentioned it. And for good reason. While I wanted to see what it looked like, I really didn’t want to have to make the choice between the two. The logical part of me says that if the left and right guys are facing out and only show one eye, then the middle guy has to show two. The other part told me to go with the creative instincts of the artist and not to worry about the one-eyed guy in the middle. So that’s what I did. Of course it took me two weeks to finally decide that way (granted, I got sidetracked by Christmas and New Years during that process).
3rd Revision
We should have been through by this point. I was happy with the colors, the background circle and the one eye vs. two eyes dilemma. However, all through the previous iterations, I was nit-picking various alignment issues. I was hopeful that they would have caught on and double-checked everything for this version, but there were some things that I thought were 1-2 pixels off.
So I sent it back for one more round of touch-ups.
4th Revision
Which brought me to the final revision for my approval.
I had no changes at this point, so I gave them the OK to wrap up the files and send it to me.
Final
Here is a higher-quality image of the final version:
Deliverables
The zip file that I received with my final version contained the following:
1 x High Resolution Tif 300dpi(CMYK color) for just about any off-line
professional printing.1 x JPG in grayscale for trademark registration if required.
3 x JPG in RGB color x 3 sizes (Normal, medium and small)for home/office
printing or web design work.1 x vector based eps file which is your master editable file for professional
printing and professional design work.1 x Transparent PSD for professional web design work.
Summary
Would I do this again? Yes! I think I got quite the nice little logo for $99 for my site. My only complaint about the process is that it felt a little like a black box: I submitted inputs and they spit out outputs. Which is the way you have to do it at that price. The thing that I missed was hearing the reasoning behind some of the artist’s choices (stick with one eye because…) and there really was no validation of my ideas to say whether they were good or not (although by providing subtle changes to provide guidance helped). This is what Ian Landsman got when he worked with a designer for his new logos for UserScape. I don’t have the money or need to put that much into my logo for this site thought.
The most important thing that I would mention is that you should try to find a deal that offers unlimited revisions for the price. In researching this article, I found one site that offered a logo with one revision for $69. I would not have been as happy with this logo if it had only had one revision.
Hope someone gets some benefit out of this article. Let me know if anyone actually makes it to the end! I was going to introduce the new logo at the same time as a new site design, but that might not happen for a little while. Hopefully I’ll have time after I get recurrence exceptions implemented for MyHomePoint.
1. Even though I didn’t go with the The Logo Loft, one thing that I thought was a nice touch was including an About page with real pictures of their location and employees. And even including all of the artist’s email addresses. With many services out there (including The Logo Company) you really don’t know how they are farming the work out.
Popularity: 7% [?]
My name is Matt Smith
January 26, 2006
I’ve been meaning to get to this for a while now (actually pretty much all of my posts could start that way).
From Jakob Nielsen’s article Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes:
Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author.
The first item on his list points out the fact that all sites should have some type of “About” page so that people can learn a little about the person writing the article. It’s a subtle way to build trust between the author and the reader.
It’s a simple matter of trust. Anonymous writings have less credence than something that’s signed. And, unless a person’s extraordinarily famous, it’s not enough to simply say that Joe Blogger writes the content. Readers want to know more about Joe.
I totally agree with him. And I think he actually wrote it with me in mind. (Actually Jake, my name is Matt, not Joe. But I guess you couldn’t have known that since I never had an About page) I’ve had this domain and site up for a while and have posted the occasional blurb here and there and didn’t really care that I almost completely anonymous. Mainly because I didn’t have any traffic worth caring about. I mean I do “care” about you, but there were just so few of you for the longest time that I really didn’t think you cared. But now I am beginning to see that you do care. Thanks! So, in return I give to you: About me and this site. As of this writing though, it’s only about me. Sorry, it takes a lot of effort to be witty. I’ll get to the site stuff later.
The second item on his list gripes about not having an author photo.
It offers a more personable impression of the author. You enhance your credibility by the simple fact that you’re not trying to hide. Also, users relate more easily to somebody they’ve seen
I agree with his logic but I kind of disagree with his personal implementation. Come on, do we really need a 4064×2704 image of Jakob Nielsen looking back at you? Yes, I know. He probably gets requests all the time for those types of images for all the magazines he’s been in and part of being a usability expert means making it easy for people to find what they need. But 4064×2704?
If you really have a need to see a picture of me, you can try checking our About page over at MyHomePoint. I’ll spare you the hi-res version (for now!).
Yay! Two items off his list!
Popularity: 3% [?]
Community Server 2.0 Beta 3 released!
January 24, 2006
Rob Howard and the gang at telligent just released CS 2.0 Beta 3 of Community Server.
Here is list the covers the majority of the checkins during the Beta 3 milestone….
3,769 files changed or were added from Beta 2 to Beta 3 (12/16 - 1/23)
See the announcement above for a summary of the changes that are encompassed in this release.
Of course, the biggest drawback to them releasing Beta 3 today is that we just rolled out Beta 2 last Friday on MyHomePoint … after spending 10-15 hours to customize it! I’ll probably have to go back through a re-do everything. I knew that was going to happen though and am not complaining. Shouldn’t be too bad though since I’ll just do a diff on our install and the original Beta 2 files to identify our changes and then I’ll just try to incorporate those changes into the new files. At least that’s my plan unless someone else has another suggestion?
When we started getting serious about implementing Community Server for our blog and forum platform for MyHomePoint, I was faced with the same situation we all face: Go with the stable release or tempt fate and go with not only a new x.0 version but do it with the beta! Granted there is always the option of holding out 6 months for the stable x.1 release, but who doesn’t like to live dangerously! Anyway, the one thing I was most nervous about in going with Beta 2 was whether or not I could tweak everything the way I wanted without the source code. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well separated all the pages, controls and skins worked together to pretty much allow you complete flexibility to skin/style almost every aspect to whatever degree you wanted. And once I figured out how things were organized (which surprisingly enough is similar to how we have MyHomePoint architected [hmm.. could it be because we loosely based some of our high-level architecture on earlier versions of the original forums.asp.net code?] it really didn’t take too long to get everything changed. The thing I enjoyed most was having div tags with unique attributes that could be targeted directly from the style sheets.
Anyway, not sure when I’ll have a chance to update MyHomePoint but I can’t wait to download it and try it out.
Good work guys!
Popularity: 3% [?]
Terminal server has exceeded maximum number of allowed connection
January 6, 2006
I’m hosting this site and many other small sites from a web server at my house over DSL with a static IP address. For the most part, it is just me doing the server administration and tinkering. However, every now and then Brian needs to get on the box to do some configuration of his sites. Unfortunately, lately he has been getting plagued with the “Terminal server has exceeded maximum number of allowed connection” message when he tries to connect with Remote Desktop. Of course, I’m to blame because I typically have a Remote Desktop connection from my desktop at home and from my desktop at work. Since I tend to do little changes here and there between tasks, I usually leave Remote Desktop connected so that I can jump in and out. Especially if I’m making changes to WordPress, I’ll leave the text editor and file explorer open for a couple days in a row.
However, due to our pending release of MyHomePoint and the fact that Brian is carrying the majority of the weight right now, he needs access to the server more and more these days to do releases, testing, etc. And of course, he keeps getting denied access to the server due to my bad habits. I knew there was a limit on the number of connections allowed and I’m sure that there was a way to control the expiration of those sessions. Of course, a quick check on Microsoft’s site found this Knowledge Base article: Error Messages Generated When Logging on with Terminal Services Client. Of course, the description didn’t really give me much more to go on to solve the problem:
Description: The user is attempting to log on to a Terminal Server in Remote Administration mode, but the server has reached its connection limit. Terminal Servers in Remote Administration mode allow a maximum of 2 concurrent sessions, active or disconnected.
After a little more digging and Googling, I ran across a forum thread with some more information and some solutions.
First, if your two primary connections to the server are locked out, you can still access the server console from your command line with the following command:
(Of course you would replace 0.0.0.0 with the correct IP address of the server) This will essentially give you a third remote connection to the server. You should probably only use this connection to jump in and kick off existing connections. If bad habits got you into the problem in the first place, the last thing you need is for your contingency connection to be locked as well. You can delete existing connections by going to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Terminal Services Manager. Once that window opens, expand the This Computer node in the left-hand panel. The next node should be an entry for your server. Click on your server name and notice that the panel on the right-hand side has tabs for Users, Sessions, and Processes. Click on the Users tab and you should see all existing connections. Some of the icons for the connections may be greyed-out to indicate that the session has expired. These are the sessions that are taking up connections unnecessarily. Right-click on the user/session that is no longer needed and select “Log Off” from the bottom of the list. This kills that user/session and frees up the connection. The other options (like Disconect) don’t actually free up the connection.
The second bit of interesting information from the thread was you can configure the settings on terminal server to manage the connections in a variety of ways. You do that through Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Terminal Services Configuration. Select the Connections folder from the left panel. In the right panel you should see the available connection types. Most likely there will be an entry for RDP-Tcp (Microsoft RDP 5.2). Right-click on that entry and select Properties. Select the Sessions tab and you will see a number of options related to sessions. All of my dropdowns were set to Never, which explained why they never timed-out. To solve our problem, I checked the ‘Override user settings‘ option and set ‘End a disconnected session’ and ‘Idle session limit’ to 15 minutes. I left the ‘Active session limit’ at Never since as long as you are actively using the connection, then I don’t really care how long you’ve been on.
I know these settings apply to Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition. They may or may not apply to other versions. I hope the details in this article help someone out!
Popularity: 100% [?]
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