My second article for Windows AppStorm is out today. This one is a how to on using Ninite to quickly install many popular Windows applications. You can read the details at http://windows.appstorm.net/how-to/utilities/ninite-the-fast-way-to-install-windows-programs/
I’m now writing articles for the Windows side of the Appstorm family of sites. My first article is published and is a look at some changes and new features in the Photoshop CS6 beta.
http://windows.appstorm.net/reviews/photoshop-cs-6-what-you-need-to-know/
Yesterday I received an email reminding me that a domain name that I’d registered last February expires soon. Logging in to renew presents me with a list of all the domains I have. It’s a bit like walking down memory lane, the online equivalent of visiting somewhere you used to live. The domains range from my first domain registered back in the late 1990’s, and still live though not updated in a couple years. Most are in use and supporting live web sites for myself or for clients that I’ve consulted with.
More interesting are those just sitting there at the moment. I’ve learned to register a domain name when I get an idea after finding one no longer available when I went back a few years ago. Some are registered for projects on that someday/maybe list. These are the ones I’ll get to when time and priorities allow. Others remind me of projects that never came to pass. There’s a photography project that didn’t come about, but I later reused for something entirely different. There’s a side business that didn’t work out. Most are sitting there waiting for the day when they’ll be needed.
Some I wonder if I’ll ever use. A project I investigated a few years has little chance of coming to anything, but I still keep the domain name just in case. I’ve been surprised sometimes when an old name suddenly becomes useful. As I mentioned, a photography project that didn’t work out left me with a domain name that sat idle for a couple years before working perfectly for a completely different project last spring.
I also don’t let domains go because of a lesson from a friend. She owned a domain that she let expire. It was immediately snapped up by someone else and she’s not had the chance to get it back. There are ways to get them back, but the time and cost are not trivial and she’s never felt the urgency to pursue it. Still not having the domain limited her options and I don’t want to wind up in that same place.
In the end those unused domains are options. Having them gives me options and I like that.
A few notes from the recent move of about ten web sites from one server to another.
Plesk is a nice tool for managing web sites, but I’ve found the migration tool to be so quirky as to be useless. Last time I migrated servers I spent more time migrating than manually moving them would have taken. This time, I spent about two hours fighting the migration tool before doing a simple backup/restore through Plesk. Due to space limitations of old server I couldn’t migrate content through backup/restore, but a simple FTP took care of that. Worked much more smoothly and I had everything done in about four hours total.
There needs to be an easier way to move a database from one site to another. That took much of the time of the move and in the end I again found just moving the actual files to be the easiest method.
Logins also cause problems when you backup/restore or move the database file. The login is server level, but the details reside in the database. When you restore or attach, the two aren’t automatically connected. You can either delete the user in the database and recreate (not always possible or desirable) or use the sp_change_users_login stored procedure to link the two. I know that stored procedure is deprecated, but old habits die hard. The replacement is the ALTER USER command, but the stored procedure still works in Microsoft SQL 2008.
ASP still lives. Two of the sites run, and work quite well, as ASP pages. Out of the box Windows 2008 doesn’t provide much useful information for errors. You can fix that using two steps of the web site:
A lot of ASP pages use parent paths and these are not turned on by default in Windows 2008. This can be changed under the Virtual Application Settings –> Allow Parent Paths.
Always check the version of .NET the application is running under. Most problems come back to this. Next check any database connection string point to the correct server. About 90% of errors after a move are one of those two items.
Found an issue I’d not encountered before when installing SQL 2008 Express R2. It installed with dynamic ports by default. Likely related to the fact I installed SQL using the web platform and not installing directly. For info and changes to fix see http://serverfault.com/a/92288.