Do you ever feel like you are endlessly repeating the same day? I do, every time I attend a kickoff meeting with a new client. Each time I find myself covering the same old issues from explaining the client’s role, to encouraging investment in content. I find it incredibly frustrating and this is what ultimately led me to write the Website Owners Manual.

This is not a criticism of clients, however. There is so little information that clearly defines their role. Sure, there is no shortage of material on usability, accessibility, online marketing and copywriting, but who has the time to read all of it?

The problem is that the client does need to have a very broad understanding (certainly more than can be communicated in a single article), however I have found that understanding certain key issues can make an enormous difference to the efficiency of a client.

What follows is a list of the 5 things that I believe will have the biggest impact on a client’s site. At least they should, if the client understands them and chooses to implement them.

1. The client is the secret to a successful website
I have worked on hundreds of websites over the past 15 years and each site’s success or failure has always been attributed to the quality of the client.
As web designers we, of course, like to emphasis our role in the process. This is what justifies our fee, however we can ultimately only point our clients in the right direction. It is their decisions that shape the site and their commitment that defines its long term future.
As web designers, I believe we need to clearly communicate to the client the importance of their role and dispel the misconception that they can hire a web designer and walk away.
Not only do we need to emphasis the importance of their role, we also need to define the extent of it.


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Often you need to test email and if it's working. With these commands you can test email flow at a very granular level to determine what's broken and where.

Scenario:
Your domain: mydomain.com
Domain you wish to send to: theirdomain.com

1. Determine the mail server you're sending to.

* Open a CMD prompt
* Type NSLOOKUP
> set q=mx
> theirdomain.com
Response:
Non-authoritative answer:
theirdomain.com MX preference = 50, mail exchanger = mail.theirdomain.com

2. Connect to their mail server


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WMIC (Windows Management Instrumentation Command-Line) is a potent tool that often doesn't see much use due to the lack of (easily accessible) documentation available. More information can be found on WMIC here: technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb742610.aspx. We’ll be using WMIC with domain admin credentials to crawl through a list of nodes (PCs/Laptops) and uninstall an example program without interrupting the user.


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I've been a small business consultant for about 8 years and I've done a hundred of these kinds of migrations and got the process down to where it's almost invisible to the users.

Here's the setup:
Single server that is a DC, DNS, DHCP and WINS server. Also hosts all file shares (user directories and shared folders) and printer shares.
You've purchased a new server and want to move everything over to the new server. Here's how:
1. Build your new server

First thing, build you new server with the latest Windows 2003 software (we'll stay on 2003 as that's the most common right now). We'll call the old server OLDDC and the new one NEWDC.
Give yourself a large C: partition, at least 25gb. The rest of can be partitioned into the D: drive. I don't like to create a lot of partitions because they just cause more overhead for little purpose. ALWAYS keep your OS and data separate though!
As for the server, most places up through 100 users can easily get by with a single RAID controller running RAID5. You'll see plenty of debate over this (RAID6, RAID10, etc) but I've had good luck with this configuration. 4gb of RAM for Windows Standard.

2. Promote the server to be the DC


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Ever wanted to monitor your customers servers using 1 Spiceworks «master» in your own office, without installing Spiceworks at all your clients? Read on, here is how I did it.

Pros and Cons:

— First off, we are going to be using a dedicated machine with Server 2003 installed.

— We will be using a RRAS VPN Dial Up Adapter to connect to our clients. These can be permanent connections and DNS settings can be applied. A normal VPN connection will drop the line when you log-off from the server.

Here is the hard and bad one:
— All your clients should be running on different IP subnets.
e.g. You: 10.0.0.x, Client: 10.0.1.x, Client 2: 10.0.2.x, etc. I know this is going to be hard when you already have a lot of clients, or large client networks, but I could not find another way.

— We will use an RDP session to open and use the Spiceworks console on the dedicated server from your workstation. You could try to setup Terminal Services, but I have not tested this. I just use Remote Desktop for administration.
Because of the limitations of RRAS and SBS you WILL be able to open Spiceworks on your workstation using your webbrowser, but you WILL NOT be able to ping the DNS name or remote control a client. For full functionality you should use the RDP session to the server.

— Last of I tested this and use this on Small Business Server to Small Business Server networks. Now SBS does not support trust domains and stuff, so there will not be another way than use the RDP session.
If anybody has some extra information to make this work, I would be very pleased if you drop me a note.


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These are three scripts that will make the locking down of USB so much easier.
The issue I had was that I could not track what company information was leaving on USB keys. Yes Windows 7 has some neat stuff with BitLocker but I need it locked down now.
IntelliAdmin has some tools for turning off USB Keys but what about when users need them to perform their job? Ie. Download photos, use HSDPA / Wireless Cards? The solution?
Make the drives read only. This means that the users can bring in their information or use wireless cards and download photos but cannot write back to devices.

There are two VBscripts for these:


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In today’s development environment: faster is better.

Present-day buzzwords and buzz terms like «rapid application development», «Asynchronous JavaScript and XML» (we can’t even wait for web pages reload anymore) and «Agile» gives you an insight of the fast-paced world we live in.

But getting things done rapidly does not mean working faster and harder — it's just working smarter. You will find 10 general, developing time-saving tips to cut down on your development time.

1. Use frameworks

Frameworks abstract regular code to provide you a structure and foundation for fast developing web applications.

A example of a framework is Ruby on Rails, a web application development framework for the Ruby language. By providing pre-made functions of code (for example — user input validation methods) — not only do you save time from writing your own code in Ruby — but you’re also assured that the packages have already been tested and inspected by other developers, saving you trouble in extensive testing as well as potential bugs due to the lack of testing.


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If you are running your NSLU2 on a USB flash key, there are a number of
things you might want to do in order to reduce the wear and tear on the
underlying flash device (as it only supports a limited number of writes).

• The ext3 filesystem per default writes metadata changes every five
  seconds to disk. This can be increased by mounting the root filesystem
  with the commit=N parameter which tells the kernel to delay writes
  to every N seconds.


• The kernel writes a new atime for each file that has been read which
  generates one write for each read. This can be disabled by mounting the
  filesystem with the noatime option.


• Both of the above can be done by adding e.g.
  noatime,commit=120,... to /etc/fstab. This can also be
  done on an already mounted filesystem by running the command:
  

  mount -o remount,noatime,commit=120 /

  
  


• The system will run updatedb every day which creates a
  database of all files on the system for use with the locate
  command. This will also put some stress on the filesystem, so you might
  want to disable it by adding
  

  exit 0

  
  early in the /etc/cron.daily/find script.


• syslogd will in the default installation sync a lot of log files to
  disk directly after logging some new information. You might want to change
  /etc/syslog.conf so that every filename starts with a -
  (minus) which means that writes are not synced immediately (which increases
  the risk that some log messages are lost if your system crashes). For
  example, a line such as:
  

  kern.*                          /var/log/kern.log

  
  would be changed to:
  

  kern.*                          <span class="input">-</span>/var/log/kern.log

  
  You also might want to disable some classes of messages altogether by
  logging them to /dev/null instead, see syslog.conf(5) for
  details.


• In addition, syslogd likes to write — MARK -- lines to log
  files every 20 minutes to show that syslog is still running. This can be
  disabled by changing SYSLOGD in /etc/default/syslogd so
  that it reads
  

  SYSLOGD="-m 0"

  
  After you've made any changes, you need to restart syslogd by running
  

  /etc/init.d/syslogd restart

  
  


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Query is awesome. I've been using it for about a year now and although I was impressed to begin with I'm liking it more and more the longer I use it and the more I find out about it's inner workings.

I'm no jQuery expert. I don't claim to be, so if there are mistakes in this article then feel free to correct me or make suggestions for improvements.

I'd call myself an «intermediate» jQuery user and I thought some others out there could benefit from all the little tips, tricks and techniques I've learned over the past year. The article also ended up being a lot longer than I thought it was going to be so I'll start with a table of contents so you can skip to the bits you're interested in.

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• You must get indexed by the search engines, most offer a method to submit your site, however its FAR better to simply get a linkback from another website. Let them find you naturally.


• Keep the text between the title tags under 60 chrs — This will help you get the most out of your keywords [Google tails off titles on the serps at about 60 chrs]


• Avoid using dynamic URLs (eg: www.example.com/index.php?id=123) use static looking links instead (eg: www.example.com/example-articles.html) — Also avoid PHP session IDs and unnecessary variables.


• If your site has multiple (sub)domains, and they have the same content, point them to one domain.


• Register your domains for longer than a year — spammers usually only buy domains for 1 or 2 years.


• Larger, older sites are better, as they score high in search engines.


• In search engines “the-word” usually registers as “the word”, so where possible use — (dash) instead of _ (underscore) in your URLs


• Choose a domain that will be most relevant to you, either your name (product, company, business, etc) or descriptive (eg: search-engine-optimisation-example.com)


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