tech/personal/whatever blog

Launched early June ‘09, the IIS 7 SEO toolkit is designed for web developers and administrators maintaining huge websites. A module that easily installs to you IIS 7 this toolkit gives you the ability to check your website for inconsistencies regarding SEO.

The toolkit has three main components:

1. Site Analysis
2. Sitemaps and Sitemap Indexes
3. Robots Exclusion

Of the three, I have only used Site Analysis so far. Even though being a third of the toolkit, the Site Analysis alone will give you enough insight into your website with considerable action on your part. If you don’t know anything about SEO, this toolkit will definitely overwhelm you. The Site Analysis will be going through every link in your site and evaluate it based on a number of SEO criteria. A quick analysis of my site would show you how many SEO standards I have already broken. Strange considering my site is small and I try my best to fill up every detail that I can with my Platinum SEO toolkit plugin for WordPress.

Let’s see how a standard Site Analysis would look like.

Running the analysis on my site would give you the initial Site Analysis Report Summary

These are basic SEO knowledge that everybody with a website should know. By the looks of it I’ve been skipping a lot of details when I’m putting up new posts.

You can then drill down to a specific entry to see how many of times you violated it.

The best part is when you don’t know that specific error, you can drill down and it will give you a description so that you won’t make the same mistake again.

And it will even show you where in the code your error is. From here you can then base your next steps to resolve this “problem”. I found this really helpful especially since I assumed everything would work out fine since I’m using WordPress and a number of its plugins. Apparently you still have to check some of the code within. So far I haven’t dissected it and I still rely on the plug-ins as I found this enough for my blogging needs. Obviously, the toolkit is designed for more than just blogs.

More screenshots of the SiteMap and Robots Exclusion

Sitemap

I’m satisfied with WordPress sitemap plug-ins and thus I don’t really care about this one.

Robots exclusion allows you to tell where the crawler should go to. WP has the same feature and I don’t know much about site crawlers yet to care.

Well that’s a quick intro to IIS 7 SEO Toolkit. Given more time I would definitely like to explore how they define the SEO criteria. There’s probably a document for this but as of now I can’t find any within the MS sites.

Again, this tool is not for everybody as not all has access to their IIS but for sure website admins would definitely benefit from this.

Links you need to read if you want to know more:

http://www.iis.net/extensions/SEOToolkit

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/639/using-iis-search-engine-optimization-toolkit/

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/643/iis-site-analysis—video-walkthrough/

Give me a shout out if you discover something interesting with the toolkit or if you found the docu.

~Eugene

For all Windows junkies out there. (and for those loving Mac fans) this is one feature that I’m really excited about. Working with tons of PCs and a lab environment, having one base image for you VHD is quite powerful. This saves time and energy from doing things over and over again. Yea yea, there are existing tools you can use to do this but this one is just better. There’s VMWare, VPC, and other virtualization technologies that you can use but booting from VHD!? Hell yea! (I’m not sure if VMware has something like it though)

This topic has been discussed in several blogs and I’ll be adding to those and linking the ones I found very useful.

Two main steps to get your VHD a bootin:

1. Prep your image via ImageX
2. BCDedit to make it show up upon boot.

This is not really a daunting task, the only problem is it would take quite some time. Installing Win 7 via copying the .wim file, Disk Management, getting it prepped via Image X. These steps are quite time consuming but! after you have set it up, you basically have a VHD that you can boot on and install all the stuff you want in it. This is really helpful for me as rather than having to install the common dev tools (Visual Studio, SQL) you would just have to copy your VHD to the host OS and bcdedit (just four lines) your VHD. The amount of time you’ll save is just amazing.

Two blogs that gets it done

http://blogs.technet.com/aviraj/archive/2009/01/17/windows-7-boot-from-vhd-first-impression-part-1.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/aviraj/archive/2009/01/18/windows-7-boot-from-vhd-first-impression-part-2.aspx

http://thelazyadmin.com/blogs/thelazyadmin/archive/2009/01/12/windows-7-boot-from-vhd.aspx

Follow the two blogs and you shouldn’t encounter any major problems. I’m looking at automating the BCDedit but the guid every VHD produces is unique. My simple workaround is just a batch file that has a variable for the guid. Quick and easy.

Much fun this is!

~Eugene

Attended my first “social media” event last Monday. It was more of a convenience as the event was held just a level down.

A lot of us has been hearing social media events where everything is organized via Twitter or Facebook. Marketing in the Social Age is one such event.

With main speaker Willy Foo (a renowned photographer in SG) we were up for a night of informational “marketing in the social age”

Speakers were

• Willy Foo (@willyfoo)
• Joe Augustin (@JoeAugustin) <- wasn’t present
• Keith Nakamura (@Sillikat)
• Derrick Koh (@derrickkoh70)
• Willy Lim (@willylim)

Quite  a diverse crowd and I was excited to hear what they have to share.

Willy Foo started with an overview of social media and how it is affecting us. Numbers from different social media sites and countries were also presented. Then the agony began. It was off to a good start but I think Willy talked too much about Facebook and it’s small intricacies. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one who felt it as others were tweeting about the bad experience and you can see some of attendees leaving early. I did gain a lot of insight from his experiments and would like to hear more. Willy is such an inventive guy as he does a lot of experiments with Facebook (and for sure other social media outlets). Other than that I wish he didn’t take the whole session as he spent more than two hours talking (quite unbelievable if you ask me) but you can really feel his passion and I hope to hear more talks from him.

Up next was Keith Nakamura from Microsoft, I personally know Keith and it’s interesting how he did his talk. Microsoft being portrayed as an evil empire isn’t always bad and he used this to his advantage. Good work Keith! You won a few fans that night! You can check out what he shared during that night here: Singapore Windows 7 Experience Group

Derrick Koh from Lenevo shared their experience with social media and how it his helping some of his sales people. Quite interesting how social media is helping big companies such as Microsoft and Lenevo.

Willy Lim from NetProfitQuest shared how they are helping SMEs engage social media engines. Some reactions were quite negative but I learned a lot from him. Fundamentals is the key!

The night was topped off with a panel discussion and some questions were raised. A good ending for the night as people tweeted their reactions and questions with the use of TwitterFall.

Overall, the first event of Marketing in the Social Age wasn’t that spectacular but for sure they will improve in the next one. I’ll be there and would be happy to here from you guys again.

You can join their Facebook group here: Marketing in the Social Age

See you in the next event!

~Eugene

Finally settled on a theme and just gave up on constantly editing the look and feel of my blog. Turns out that this will take forever and it’s becoming a tedious task that you just want to skip and forever bury in the deep recesses of your mind.

So for all of you aspiring bloggers like me who can’t blog his way out of a paper bag.

Setting Up Your Blog 101

1. Choose your blogging engine
   - tons and tons of options are out there. Choose wisely as you don’t want to start all over again. I choose WordPress because of its great community support and large user base. (Aside from personal tech support I get from fellow WP users)
2. Choose your theme wisely
   - Your theme is how you want to be portrayed. Of course aside from your posts, your theme is the first thing your potential readers would see. If it’s a cluttered mess then that’s what they’re going to think about you. Now you know why I choose a minamilist, almost empty and blank page. For me content is king and that’s what I want my readers to focus on, not ads, badges, blogrolls and other none sense you can see from the usual “personal blogs”
3. Take advantage of plug-ins
   - They are there for a reason. Obviously, you need readers aside from your family and friends, this is where SEO comes in. I’ll dedicate a few posts on this topic but essentially this is your number one tool to get people on to your site.
4. CONTENT!
   - What do you want your blog to be? Is it a personal blog that contains your innermost secrets? A tech blog that contains tips and guides on different technologies? A cash cow blog? Whatever your blog is about the number one thing you have to take into consideration is content. Without it you might as well not start a blog in the first place. People visit websites because of the information they can get out of it. As my blog evolves you’ll see a slew of topics that I will cover.

This is a short list on what you would need to put up a blog (definitely there are more ‘comprehensive’ guides out there). Watch out as I update and revise my blog and see what type of content I put out.

Just to set the tone, I don’t really own a Zune MP3 player but I do own a couple of iPods. Got me an iPod shuffle (2nd gen) and an iPod Mini (either 1st or 2nd) a long time ago and they’re still working. My mini is more than five years old and I just use it as a storage disk because the battery dies after a couple of hours. Five years ago I used the iTunes that came with it and it was a so-so for me. I didn’t really enjoy the UI, quite confusing setting it up and the inability to transfer files from one pc to another made me revert to good old Winamp with it’s useful plugins. Haven’t been using any other music player since then (A collegue laughed when she saw me using Winamp). Apparently I’ve been living under a rock for not trying out other players out there.

Come 2009 a friend gave me a Zune Pass and asked me to try it out. That Zune Pass commercial also got me curious. Being the law abiding citizen that I am (*wink* *wink*) it was quite fun being able to  have unlimited music for a month and getting to keep 10. I know that iTunes has changed in those five years and I know its UI has definitely changed according to Apple standards but damn…. the Zune UI looks great. Ok I got you confused now didn’t I? (or not) There’s Zune MP3 player and then there’s Zune their media player.

Red Zune

Black Zune

Zune

Minimalist white is the theme of the entire player with a hint of mixart, your album arts made into a mosaic, here and there. I just love the simple UI and how easy it is to figure out where everything is. The best part is when you get yourself a Zune pass, you can search for a multitude of songs and stream or download (with DRM of course) as many times as you want for a whole month. Within that month you can then choose ten songs that you want to keep for yourself.

Tried the search function with one of my favorite artists, Imogen Heap. I don’t have a copy of her first album I, Megaphone and I wanted to hear how much she has changed, so a quick search will get you all of her albums plus extra info on her. Surprise, surprise it also gave me one of her unheard of single (for me at least).

The Immy lover in me just says that Not Now But Soon is worth buying the Zune pass then and there. =)

My recent love for the The Cure got me excited. I knew they were old but I never realized that they have so many albums. Unlimited songs here I come!

Oh yea! I love Pictures of You!

Check out the other pictures below.

and when you’re playing/sleeping it shows you cool pictures of the band and some info.

And the best part of it all is mixart!

OK OK I didn’t deceive you with the title. Apparently, Microsoft only sells the Zune in the US but that’s not going to stop you from getting one right? So, few things you have to do to get the Zune Marketplace to work in your location and how to get the Zune player itself

1. Change your locale to United States (Control Panel -> Change country or region -> Current Location: United States)
2. Go to Zune.net then download the Zune 3.0 software
3. Register and remember to choose United States all the way

Now the Zune Pass itself is quite difficult to get and my friends say you can only buy it in the US. too bad You can always use your credit card to buy but having the physical Zune Pass card is just cool.

Now having one card won’t make me blog about it now would I? Thanks to Aimee for giving me a bunch! haha If you get a chance to go to the US or a friend is coming back, ask if he or she can buy you one at WalMart or one of those stores. Try it out and don’t be hatin.

ping back to yizhe http://cloudfex.com/cs/blogs/cloud/archive/2009/05/17/using-a-zune-pass-outside-of-usa.aspx Apparently it was a double pass as he was the one who went to US and bought the cards for Aimee. Thanks man!