Scott Holden's Personal Blog : Hosting

Will it stick?

scottholden — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:17:22 GMT

I wish that I was better at posting more often, but alas I seem to go in waves. Most of it centers around wanting to post photos. So here goes…

I recently update my site: http://photos.airjockeys.com to Silverlight 2 RTM. I had been previously running on B2, so you may have noticed that my site was broken. Finally fixed.

I have also started posting to Flickr. http://Flickr.com/photos/airjockeys. The main reason that i wanted to do this was to get comments. I realized that I would never get around to creating a comment database on my own web site. Oh well.

Cheers,

Scott.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is out...

scottholden — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:29:33 GMT

And I have been hard at work designing and coding for airjockeys.com! I have used the latest release of Silverlight 2 Beta 2 to update pieces of my site.

For more information on Silverlight, see http://www.silverlight.net. Scott Guthrie's blog has some great information on this latest release.

Here are the pages that I have updated so far...

http://airjockeys.com

This is pretty close to the final version of this site. I pick up the last 5 posts on this block with the tag 'Photo' to display on the front page. This is the way I plan to let people know when I have new photos to look at.

http://photos.airjockeys.com

This is more of a place holder and some learning that I did for Silverlight development. This will be re-written shortly, but allows you to find all of my photo galleries.

http://photos.airjockeys.com/photoalbum.html#Detail,albums/2008/Maui%20HI/,gallery.xml,0

http://photos.airjockeys.com/photoalbum.html#Detail,albums/2007/Solu-Khumbu%20Trek/,gallery.xml,0

Here is the examples of the album view that I am trying to create. I still have lots of work, but this is already better than the old html and flash photo viewers that I have used. I hope to add comments and ratings, slideshows and other ways to view photos.

Cheers,

Scott.

Lightroom web galleries and IIS7

scottholden — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 04:42:31 GMT

I recently upgraded my web server for AirJockeys.com to be Windows Server 2008 running IIS7 (where previously I was running IIS6). The main reason for doing this was to be able to play around with new features, including ASP.NET 3.5 and hoping to get better manageability and diagnostics of the server.

Instead I found that my my photo galleries were busted. Time to debug. What I could determine was that I couldn't even load any of the images from the server. Huh? Unfortunately as exposed by my hosting provider, I don't seem to get any better manageability or diagnostics from the server. I needed to phone my hosting provider (GoDaddy) to see if they could help. They debugged it and indicated that it was because I was trying to load files from a 'bin' folder and that is not allowed. However they did not have a fix for me.

This is where my Microsoft connections came to the rescue. I know the Product Unit Manager for IIS and after a quick email, I had a fix. Here is the fix for everybody who doesn't know the PUM of the team. Thanks Bill!

You can remove the bin folder restriction by adding/updating the web.config in the root of your web server with the following:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<configuration>

<system.webServer>

<security>

<requestFiltering>

<hiddenSegments>

<remove segment="bin" />

</hiddenSegments>

</requestFiltering>

</security>

</system.webServer>

</configuration>

Now this is where IIS7 pays off! The distributed config system easily allows this override.

Scott.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Updating Web Site http://airjockeys.com

scottholden — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 15:40:49 GMT

Well, I finally figure it's time to give my site an overhaul. I tend to do some changes on a yearly basis, but really do a major overhaul once every 3 years or so. This time, I am going to re-write most of my site in Silverlight 2. This is a technology that I have been on the periphery at Microsoft--and help start down the mobile path. It is very cool. I can use my .NET coding skills and use the Expression tool suite to design.

Any ways, as of today, all I have updated is my home page on http://AirJockeys.com. Stay tuned for more.

Cheers,

Scott.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Blog style updated

scottholden — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 15:40:54 GMT

I finally got around to updating the blog style to be my own. It has pieces of the PoisonIvy blog theme, but I made it wider (820px), changed the background color and then a bunch about the title image and menu bar configuration.

Cheers,

Scott.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Re-published old blog entries here

scottholden — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 23:41:39 GMT

I have taken many of the old entries from my previous airjockeys.com blog and re-published them to here. It was a manual process and all the links are broken (since I changed domain names and from dasBlog to Community Server).

New jumping off point for photos

scottholden — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 16:54:05 GMT

As you may be able to tell, I am updating my web-site. This is going to be a process that takes a few months. But, there will definitely be a better experience in the end.

Here is a link to the new jumping off point for all photos now:

http://photos.airjockeys.com/

Cheers,

Scott.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Testing new domain, hosting, and community server

scottholden — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 06:11:52 GMT

I am now hosting on GoDaddy.com. So far my experience has been really good. In fact really great compared to my old hosting situation. I got this account and simply installed Community Server! I have been able to write my own ASP.NET AJAX applications...

Overall, this is a great experience. There are a few things that have been good and have bit me, but seeing that I am doing this now I am giving it a thumbs up. I have been struggling for two weeks with my old hoster to get some of this going including some impersonation issues and running out of disk space for the compile ASP.NET files! When I switched back to ASP.NET 1.1, things still didn't work.

Cheers,

Scott.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Test

scottholden — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 06:09:25 GMT

Ok...this is four times. I have had some major issues getting my servers configured in a way that is going to be good to manage. I think that I have it now. I now have two hosting accounts and two domain names.

I also spent time trying to get this to be blog.scottholden.name to no avail. Oh well.

Scott.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

new work blog

scottholden — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 22:33:27 GMT

I am back! Well, at least to announce that I have started another blog on MSDN. This is where I am going to put my .NET Compact Framework related posts. If there is a good reason to cross-post, let me know.

Scott.

More photoshop automation (jscript this time!)

scottholden — Tue, 11 May 2004 18:34:04 GMT

So I am going wild on automating my processes for web site generation with regards to photos. I really want to make it easy for me to post photos now and for future.

I have added a watermark to many of my photos! http://www.airjockeys.com/galleries/action.

The problem is that the watermark needs to be a range of colors for different pictures. So, I used Jscript to automate this process in photoshop. The steps:

1. I created my watermark with two different images: a black and a white version. Each image is a different layer in a PSD.

2. Assume that the current active image is the one to add the watermark to.

3. Open the watermark and compute the size. I do this as a percentage of the longest side of the image. This way, the watermark is exactly the same size for each photo on my site. Convert the watermark to the correct size (it is really large to begin with and I scale it down).

4. Determine a location that the watermark will go on the photo. Crop a copy of the photo and get a histogram of the cropping. I then can determine the normalized median (half the pixels in the histogram array);between 0 and 1. This gives me how light/dark the area is. 0 is darkest, 1 is lightest.

5. I then duplicate the correct watermark layer over to the photo and adjust opacity based on the normalized median. For example, between 0 and .33 I use a 30% opacity image and .44 to .50 I use a 50% opacity white image.

6. Move the watermark to the predefined location.

Of course, the watermark is many times not quite in the correct location and I just have to move it slightly. But overall this works pretty well and has definitely reduced my process while getting consistent results across photos.

Automating Photoshop for Web Site generation

scottholden — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 18:31:15 GMT

It is really cool what you can do to script photoshop. Since they want to allow VB scripting, there is a COM object provided so you can even use C#.

All you need to do is Add Reference in a C# project to the Adobe Photoshop CS COM object and voila, you have the "full" object model at your disposal. Unfortunately, not everything is strongly typed (use of Object parameters) and the documentation is poor, so it takes some trial and error. I found the JavaScript reference better than the VBScript reference.

Anyways, I now have a tool that uses my custom web gallery, generates the gallery and then automatically generates my backup picture size so that I don't have to scale on the client and have my photos not look quite as good. Since I want all of my galleries to the look the same, I just have a few configuration parameters for each gallery and I write out the gallery list using the XmlSerializer. This allows me to hand edit the xml to add/remove/modify galleries and then auto regenerate everything.

I guess I am removing all of the excuses to why I don't get new pics up in a timely manner ;) Next, on to automating the watermark and file info!

Scott.

progress

scottholden — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 18:15:01 GMT

I have spent much of the day updating more pieces of the site. I have added the kite surfer to the side of the blog, I have changed the upper graphic portions of the both the photo galleries and trip galleries to have a photo. This is a never ending process of the more I learn, the more I change. Soon I will just have to accept good enough and move on.

I also imported 7.5GB of video (probably about 30 minutes) worth of video from my White Grizzly trip and started the outline of a video "A Little Less Conversation".

And I have scanned a whole boat load of new photos to put in either the main photo gallery or trip gallery. To that end, I added a "Wildlife and Animals" gallery because of some photos of wildlife and pets.

website

scottholden — Sat, 17 Apr 2004 17:58:16 GMT

Now that I am in the process of updating my web site, I am also going and scanning all of the slides that I haven't got to in the last year. So look back soon because I should have more photos up on the site. Here is a cool shot of kite boarding from Maui until then.