Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Random Youtube Thought
Youtube, now owned by Google, only has “add to Yahoo” links on their RSS page. Was there a previous deal in place with Yahoo to have these links shown, or has Youtube just been slow to pimp their new overlords and change it to “add to Google”?
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
ISAPI Rewrite for Expression Engine
I use Expression Engine (or EE) for many of my blogs, and I mostly use a WIMP setup (and I know the LAMP users love that acronym).
WIMP = Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP
LAMP = Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP
While I do have a LAMP box, I also use SQL Server and .NET, so a couple of my WIMP boxes are a bit more than well… WIMP-y, for lack of a better term.
EE has a nasty default URL. It would look something like this:
yourfunkydomain.com/index.php?/templategroup/templatename/article-title
Most people want to get rid of the /index.php? and I can’t blame them.
IIS doesn’t have mod_rewrite for URL rewriting, but there is ISAPI Rewrite and it’s very powerful, if not on par with mod_rewrite. I’ve posted my methods in the past for when I used Wordpress and decribed them when I added an All Posters front to hockeyfights.com.
I was reading the EE forums on pmachine.com today and saw someone asking specifically about getting rid of the /index.php? with ISAPI Rewrite and IIS and thought I’d post my method here:
First, it’s helpful to read the wiki entry about removing posts from your URLs.
Second, go into your control panel and remove index.php from any of the urls defined for your blog.
Third, in the control panel set “Force URL query strings” to no.
Fourth, get your httpd.ini file ready to go with this code:
[ISAPI_Rewrite]
RewriteRule (/(?:template1|template2|trackback|member|search|P\d{1,8}).*) /index.php?$1 [I,L]
That’s it 
I’m using what the wiki entry describes as the inclusion method because I use many other directories that aren’t associated with EE and I don’t want anything related to them. For someone like me who only has a few templates per domain, it’s not a big deal. For someone who might use many template groups and names, it’ll be a little more work, or they might want to look into using another method.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
AIM Bounced Email: Pimp Us
At the top of a bounced email I received was this:
Reason: Remote host said: 550 We would love to have gotten this email to xxxxx@aim.com. But, your recipient never logged onto their free AIM Mail account. Please contact them and let them know that they’re missing out on all the super features offered by AIM Mail. And by the way, they’re also missing out on your email. Thanks.
I’m not sure if this gets sent if the screenname doesn’t exist at all, or only those screennames that are taken, but don’t have active emails.
Pretty creative way to encourage users to activate their email accounts: have others do it for you.
My assumption is the most common bounce is from one AIM user trying to email another within AIM and this message in the bounce email could cause one person to IM another and ask why they can’t email them.