Blogging

Popular posts created in 2009 from Absoblogginlutely.net

Following up from the previous post on most viewed pages of Absoblogginlutely.net in 2009, here are the most popular posts that were written in 2009. All but two of these are solutions to problems that I encountered during the 2009. Some of them were quick google searches, others were based on research and experience but hopefully the solutions have helped others in the same situation that I’ve been in.

  1. Firewall exception requirements for Symantec Endpoint Protection
  2. MYSql failed to install with the most recent install package
  3. Skype plugin caused firefox to slow down
  4. How to install 32bit print drivers on a Windows 64bit server
  5. Windows7 upgrade advisor failed to work
  6. Archiving an Exchange2007 mailbox using Powershell
  7. Fix to Exchange2003 NDR’s being delivered weeks after the mail failed.
  8. Granting Full access to a mailbox allowed me to export from Exchange 2007
  9. Fix to Out Of Office in Outlook 2007 failing
  10. My attempts at dual booting Windows 7 and Windows XP with Truecrypt on the original XP Installation disk

Popular posts in 2009 from Absoblogginlutely.net

In common with a lot of other bloggers I’m posting a top 10 list of the most popular pages from Absoblogginlutely.net in the year 2009. It is rather worrying that all of the pages are from posts I have done in previous years. Even more concerning is that a couple of the posts are about updating antivirus software from 2004 so it is a bit scary that people were coming across the same problem in 2009. Either people are 5 years behind upgrading their antivirus software or Symantec still haven’t fixed the issue 5 years later…..

  1. Manually removing Google Desktop – my most popular post each year and of all time. Originally posted April 2005.
  2. Instructions on how to setup Dell’s Open Manage Server Administrator alerts. Rather than manually typing in all of the settings to configure a server, I wrote a script to configure the server and setup alerts. The setup process went from about 30 minutes per server to less than 5 minutes. Originally posted November 2007.
  3. A zero day exploit for a Microsoft vulnerability had us all rushing around trying to patch our client servers in the middle of the day and before the patches were available on WSUS servers. I posted direct links to the 958644 patch as Windows Update was having issues in providing the url to the downloads due to the vast number of servers being checked worldwide. Having the blog entry made it very quick for me and obviously lots of other users to grab the patch at each client location. Originally posted October 2008 for a zero day exploit it is concerning this was so popular in 2009.
  4. My instructions on how to Fixing a Blackberry hanging during the activation process was also still popular. Originally posted November 2007.
  5. Back in 2006 there was a wireless vulnerability and I posted about my experiences about trying to obtain a current version of Dell’s wifi drivers for the Inspiron 610m. At the time the Dell driver package was  corrupt so a link to the Intel package was posted. Originally posted October 2006. I can understand why this page is popular as navigating the Dell website for drivers can be rather confusing. Driver downloads are not too bad, but management software and applications can be missing from the driver list or poorly named so it’s not obvious which cd image should be downloaded.
  6. A little know utility, clientdiag, for debugging wsus client issues was my next popular post. I still find myself having to use this utility so I’m not surprised it’s still popular.
  7. Due to feedback and experience with my Dell OMSA setup script, the Dell Open Manage Server Administrator setup script was updated and the original page updated to link to this one. I would have thought that this page should therefore have got more hits. I guess some people must be running an old version of my script! Originally posted November 2008 I now have a category specifically for OMSA
  8. Way back in 2003 I discovered an issue that when Symantec Antivirus was updated, the outlook addin would not be correctly updated and an error message about vpmsece.dll would be displayed when outlook was started. Originally posted October 2003, it is very scary that this issue is still being discovered by users. I have seen references to my solution on Symantec support forums and I got several comments requesting help with the simple solutions.
  9. I used to use Audible in 2004 and found a way to convert Audible data to mp3 so I could listen to the audio books on devices other than my mp3 player. Originally posted June 2004. I’m not sure if this solution is still a viable option (or if it is needed) as I don’t need Audible anymore.
  10. Users not having their home directory mapped at login and cryptic msgina 1010 errors turned out to be users saving their passwords in Internet Explorer to access other servers on the network. Originally posted July 2007 but this is a problem that could occur at any point in time.

Lifestream functionality is now working properly.

I’ve been playing around with Lifestream over the past few months and now have it working properly. It seems that there was a clash with the plugin upgrade notifier and as that didn’t work anyway, I disabled it and now the cron jobs run successfully and update my lifestream page – that pulls together all the various updates from various internet sites and blogs that I make.

Why I moved from MovableType to WordPress

I was asked in the comments why I migrated from MovableType to WordPress.  There were several reason why I decided to make the switch.  The primary reason was the incredibly long time it would take to publish a post in MT.  I could actually hit Post in MT, fire up a new web page, connect to my testing WP site, create a new post, enter the title, paste the content in, hit publish and then view the website. In the meantime MT would still be thinking about saving the original post.

The time taken to republish the site after a change such as a design change was so great that some of my older posts still had old styles as the republishing system would time out before it could complete the task.

One of the other things I really like about WordPress is the ease of upgrading the software to the latest version. Yes, WordPress has had more releases, but when it takes about 2 minutes to upgrade the system its really not a problem (especially now that there is an automatic upgrade function).  MovableType has also just released a new security release which is one of the reasons why I made the switch *now*.

I was also hoping that the spam filtering would be better on WordPress than MovableType. I’ve had several idiots spamming the blog with russian comments in MovableType – they wouldn’t get through but I would have to go and delete them. In the one day that I’ve had WordPress up I think I’ve had more spam comments get through to the spam queue, but again it was easy to delete them all – a “select all” option and then delete, followed by an “all done” about 3 seconds later.

Themes in WordPress seem to be a lot cleaner and there are a lot more themes out there to pick from – MT’s selection was pretty small. This wasn’t that much of an issue to me as I was pretty pleased with my existing theme in MT (and have had it copied by a few people so it couldn’t have been that bad!)
The big concern about switching from MT to WP is typically due to the fact that WP is database driven and therefore doesn’t have any of the pages (by default) saved on the machine so if the database is down, then so is the website.   This site doesn’t have that many visitors so I don’t see this as being that much of a problem and normally if the sql database is down, then its probably likely that the web server is going to be down too.

I’ve not looked at the various caching plugins as I doubt I’m going to need it, but it is nice to know this option is available.  I may switch it on later once I’ve got the site up and running and I’m not making many design changes to it.

For those of you interested, I will also be posting my experience about the upgrade and some hints and tips – the existing WordPress migration documentation is in dire need of being updated!

Now using WordPress!

I was hoping to get the switch from MovableType to WordPress up  and running for the 1st of January but I didn’t want to go live until I was ready and near a keyboard in case there was problem.  I’ve spent several hours this weekend getting the layout and stuff ok to go live. For those of you using feed readers to see this, you probably won’t see much difference although I have added a few options to the feedburner feeds and also include my delicious saves now. Do stop by the main website and let me know what you think though.  Any issues then let me know, most of the work and testing was done with firefox as that is what most of you use. There are a few cosmetic issues with internet explorer that I’ll work on over the next week or so.

I’ll also be posting some hints and tips on the migration steps too.

Podcamp Ohio is today.

Podcamp Ohio starts in just under 2 hours – I’m looking forward to it. Not sure how big or crowded it is going to be – there are 400 users on twitter following the podcamp ohio feed and they have made 280 tshirts so I’m guessing somewhere between 280 and 400 people 😉 If you are going be sure to say hello – if you are reading this blog you should be able to recognise me from the pictures I’ve posted on the blog before and the fact that I just got my tshirt from cafepress yesterday.

I’m going to PodCamp Ohio.

PodCamp Ohio, June 28, 2008 Mike Mcbride tipped me off about PodCamp Ohio – a free meet up in two weeks (6/28/08) for bloggers and podcasters. This is just down the road from me so I’m going to go. They are still in the planning stages but it sounds like it will be pretty good. Registration is requested so if you are planning to go then register and drop me a line. I’m going to try and get a tshirt made up pimping the blog, hopefully I’ll get a design done today and it’ll arrive by then.

I’m going to PodCamp Ohio.

PodCamp Ohio, June 28, 2008 Mike Mcbride tipped me off about PodCamp Ohio – a free meet up in two weeks (6/28/08) for bloggers and podcasters. This is just down the road from me so I’m going to go. They are still in the planning stages but it sounds like it will be pretty good. Registration is requested so if you are planning to go then register and drop me a line. I’m going to try and get a tshirt made up pimping the blog, hopefully I’ll get a design done today and it’ll arrive by then.

Popular posts from 2007

According to Google Analytics, the following are my most popular posts. Funnily enough, the post to Manually Remove Google Desktop had twice the number of hits to the Absoblogginlutely! home page.

  1. Manually removing Google Desktop
  2. Absoblogginlutely!
  3. Unknown error 0x80040600 – Outlook corrupt emails in deleted items.
  4. Clientdiag for troubleshooting WSUS
  5. Fixing vpmsece.dll errors in outlook (Symantec AV plugin problems). Interestingly I posted this in 2003!
  6. Audible to mp3 (how to conversion)
  7. Backup Exec jobs won’t run but go to queued.
  8. Spell Check not working in Word. Word hides the option in a very strange location.
  9. Svchost crash with 0x745f2780. Need to install a hotfix from Microsoft.
  10. Error 0x80096001 when trying to run Windows Updates

85% of my traffic came from search engines – 75% in total from Google. This shows I have great Google ranking but not many people stick around 🙁

I run a small site with only 61,000 unique visitors 2000 of whom are suprisingly on dialup, 45% of users use dsl or cable – no surprise there really.  Internet explorer accounts for 68% of users which I think is pretty large for a technical site. The 8 users who visited more than 200 times in the past year really need to learn the benefit of RSS feeds – if that is you and you need some help then let me know. 53% of users are in the USA, 13% in the UK.

Finally, as all good statistics are not complete with some sort of a graphic here is a map of visitors from the world – there are very few locations that haven’t visited – Madagascar was one that I could actually recognise from the map.

Vistors to Absoblogginlutely.net in 2007

Welcome to 2008

Happy New Year everyone – I hope you all had a good evening. This is a quick post to announce my new blog, Absoblogginlutely! – IRL (IRL stands for In Real Life) and this will continue my no techie posts. I have had several users say that my main blog is too technical but they would still like to keep up to date with the news so feel free to head on over. I have been working on some of the content and posts over the Christmas break, but you’d be surprised as there doesn’t look like there is actually much there at the moment but the About Me page and the Contact Me page will make an appearance on this blog eventually.
There will be some cross posted content where appropriate, but this blog will focus on more of the Tech content and IRL will contain other things. This year I also intend to work on my photography skills and related content to that will be on IRL.