Blogger VS WordPress
April 23, 2006
Ok so you have decided to start a blog, and now you have to choose the blogging tool you love. One of the 2 most popular blogging tools are free and hosted for you, ready for you to use : Blogger and WordPress . It will just take a minute to sign up in both of them.
So lets go straight at the differences first and look at the details later:
- Worpress has categories and not Blogger
- Blogger allow full theme editing and not WordPress (not yet)
- Blogger, as a Google product makes it easy to access to Google services like adsense or google search
- Lots of usernames have been taken for blogger while much more are available for wordpress : it's lways nice to be able to choose the username (and by consequence the domain name) you like
- You can create pages with WordPress and not with blogger . It can be useful if you need to have parts of your blog dedicated to one subject. Pages provide you a very flexible way to build something that is a bit more like a site and not only a blog
- WordPress has integrated blog and feed statistics and not Blogger. But you can use the powerful google analytics with blogger by quicly modifying your theme.
However, it might not be as simple as it seems… Well you can have categories with Blogger although it's a it troublesome and although full theme editing is not available for wordpress , wordpress does provide a series of useul widgets for your sidebar like search, links, del.ico.us tags, statitics… that make it very easy to customize your blog.
So far i have been using both blogger (i have 3 blogs there) and wordpress and i feel that wordpress interface is suiting my needs better because it has categories and i need them as i like to post about a lot of different subjects. Another nice advantage of WordPress is that it is improving very steadily and regularly. Sidebar widgets have been introduced which allow some basic customization and more recently, blog and feed stats have become available too. It even seems that full theme editing will soon be available… So the verdict is go wordpress!
Here are some screen shots that will help show the differences between the 2 services :
| Posting with Blogger |  |
| Posting with WordPress |  |
| Blogger Dashboard |  |
| WordPress Dashboard |  |
| Theme editing with Blogger |  |
| Blog stats with Worpress (yes you see a lot of zeros i know) |  |
| Widgets with WordPress |  |
Note : I haven't talked about the excellent WordPress the software you install on own server here although it's obviously the most flexible option as it basically bring you the qualities of both wordpress and blogger.
IIS 7 looks cool
April 21, 2006
Finally something looking good regarding IIS administration and functionality. No need to dream about apache mod_rewrite anymore at night… as according to Scott Guthrie
IIS7 is a major upgrade of IIS, and will ship in both Windows Vista as well as Windows Longhorn Server. It includes a ton of new functionality, including some very rich integration with ASP.NET. This includes:
1) The ability to now have HttpModules and HttpHandlers participate in all requests to a server. You no longer need to map requests to the ASP.NET ISAPI in order to write managed modules that participate in requests. This makes building modules for flexible authentication, authorization, logging, url-rewriting, auditing, etc. super easy with .NET. You could even now have an ASP.NET HttpModule provide forms-authentication to a PHP or JSP page (in addition to .htm files and static files like images and movies).
So Scott Guthrie has a good summary of the new administration features which will allow us to administrate IIS ( aka "the black box of death" until now) much much more effectively.
Just look at how easy it is to get some information about IIS 7 request handling from .net :
As you can see in this article, there is now an easy .NET way to perform a lot of common tasks (much easier than doing it via ADSI or WMI). My favorite one is this code-snippet:
ServerManager iisManager = new ServerManager();
foreach(WorkerProcess w3wp in iisManager.WorkerProcesses) {
Console.WriteLine("W3WP ({0})", w3wp.ProcessId);
foreach (Request request in w3wp.GetRequests(0)) {
Console.WriteLine("{0} – {1},{2},{3}",
request.Url,
request.ClientIPAddr,
request.TimeElapsed,
request.TimeInState);
}
}In case you are wondering what it does, it is a simple command-line program that uses the new .NET APIs to query IIS7 to get a collection of all active worker processes on the computer, and then print out a list of all current requests being proceeded in each one — outputting the request's URL, the client-IP address of the remote user, as well as how long it has been executing, and how long it has been in its current state (for example: is it in the authentication module, authorization module, executing within the page, etc)
Some more information on IIS 7 upcoming administration features can be found here
bye bye IIS 6! Just hope IIS 7 won't follow IIS 6 and run on only one version of windows (Win 2003 Server for IIS 6 and potentially Vista for IIS 7)
Don’t be negative guys
April 21, 2006
Kathy Sierra has put together a great post which brought great comments in abondance. Her blog "creating passionate users" is one of my favorite by the way and you can see that passionate readers has a lot to do with passionate writers.
I knew that she and her "Head First" friends were extremely good at capturing and explainingtough subject as the excellent Head First books serie is showing , but Kathy is incridibely consistent at writing well thoughout and insightfull posts on her blog.
So this particlar post is about being aware of how a negative environnement can infuence your well being more deeply than you thought you could handle
one extract:
"If you want to accomplish something that demands determination and endurance, try to surround yourself with people possessing these qualities. And try to limit the time you spend with people given to pessimism and expressions of futility. Unfortunately, negative emotions exert a more powerful effect in social situations than positive ones, thanks to the phenomena of emotional contagion."
This sounds harsh, and it is, but it's his recommendation based on the facts as the neuroscientists interpret them today. This is not new age self-help–it's simply the way brains work.
If you have not switched to her blog alrady , note that there is much more to her article like an intersting look at happy people and how happiness and critical thinking are deeply linked.. have a good read!
Best tennis videos on the net
April 20, 2006
The best site by far to find your favorite tennis matches videos : http://www.geocities.com/rosaponselle/
You will find some gems there like :
The Houston semi final 2004 between Safin and Federer with one of the most thrilling tie break ever. Won 20-18 by Federer if i remember well.
The amazing win of Richard Gasquet in Monte Carlo quarter final against Federer , saving 3 match points and winning on a superb backend winner. One of the only 4 losses of Federer this year.
One of the best match of 2005 with the semi final between Safin on his way to the title and Federer. Safin was regarded at that time as the only serious challenger for Federer but he has been sadly away from the tennis courts for most of 2005 with a knee injury and has struggled to find his best level again.
and more!
The IT crowd highlights
April 20, 2006
Yes, the show featuring the tribulations of our favorite IT department may be finished , but channel4 has made availabe some highlights of the 6 episodes here . Not that much of an innovative show actually (appart from the fact that it is distributed online before television) compared to the amazing "the office" but the "geek" spirit is quite well captured and the show manages to remain funny even after re viewing it which is already excellent.
So if you are not one of those lucky UK users to access the channel4 site, the torrents selected are here to help:
episode 1 : Yesterday's jam : The first minutes with Jen's interview are just hilarious
episode 5 : The haunting of Bill Crouse
Consider using µTorrent by the way, one of the best torrent client around
Technorati tags : the it crowd comedy funny technology
The blog dimension
April 19, 2006
It has been quite a big topic recently, triggered by an article in the boston globe called blogs 'essential' to a good career. The fact of usefulness of blogging to help your carreer has been widely supported (obviously actually) by most proeminent bloggers like Scoble and others.
Well, it seems like a new trend where you will be expected to have some online presence kind of online presence , most likely via a blog, a bit like you were expected to have an email address 10 years ago.
On a more general discussion regarding blogging and how it can help your carreer. There has been a lot of good content recently on building your "personal brand" that will help you stand out of the crowd and get your dream job a Google.
One of my favourite blog coding horror pushes this idea where an active extra-work activity is essential to expand your -most wanted- skills outside your traditional area of expertise.
Mere competence in a technical discipline is not enough. That's the minimum required to keep your head above water. To have a personal brand, you must do something remarkable:
- lead a user group
- create a popular open-source project
- write a blog
- publish a book
- publish articles
- speak at conferences
Do whatever you like. Pick one, pick them all, or pick something that's not on this list.* As long as it's public, and it advances your skills, you're creating a personal brand. And that will help your career far more than technical chops ever will.
A good way to get started for those of us who don't have yet a book under print or a patent a our name is the blog of Rajesh Setti who pusblished the book life beyond code
Bu as he puts it:
Distinguishing yourself is your answer to rapid commoditization that is haunting almost all professionals in this global economy. Not distinguishing yourself is to subject yourself to the risk of eroding your market value almost on a daily basis.
The most important will be once again the hard found commitment.
Grand Slam coming soon?
April 19, 2006
I know you are all eagerly waiting for the French Open (end of May) to see whether Federer will be able to accomplish the – almost impossible – Grand Slam (4 Grand Slam titles in a row, each on a different surface) for the first time since Rod Laver in 1969.
So there are some nice warm up clay court tournaments coming this month with Monte Carlo currently to wet your appetite.
Technorati tags : tennis grand slam federer
Google Mobile search is quite smart
April 18, 2006
I was thinking the other day how nice it would be to be able to access any internet site with your mobile phone, using the exact same URL you use on your PC browser, not a dedicated WAP page. The idea would have involved a proxy (basically a box between your phone and the web site) to transform the web site content adequately to each phone based on the phone user agent (the identification of the phone model). By proxying the request made by the phone, we would be able to check the user agent against a user agent library like WURFL to determine its display capabilities, either WML or XHTML as well as its screen size in order to eventually resize the text and the images. With this information we would have then been ale to return to the phone a WML or an XHTML page instead of the classical HTML (not really XHTML compliant) used by most web pages at the moment.
So this proxy would transform HTML to XHTML or HTML to WML based on the phone characteristics. The operators could have used it to allow their subscribers to access all internet web pages without any phone/plan upgrade. This proxy could have also been used by large traffic web sites like yahoo.com, Microsoft.com… to allow mobile users to access their site.
So the first thing to do was of course to check the newly released Google mobile search in order to see what solution they implemented. I imagined they would have simply put a special WML page and XHTML page accessible for the phones. You would enter the traditional http://www.google.com in your mobile phone browser and would be directed to either the specific http://www.google.com/wml or http://www.google.com/xhtml page based on your phone user agent. Pretty simple.
You would then be stuck I thought (I didn’t think very far obviously) when you click on a search result. You would be directed to the html site which your phone browser would not be able to read.
Well not at all , Google is actually proxying ALL the pages you access from their search results. Which means any site will be converted to either WML or XHTML so that you can access the page on your phone, how nice is that?
For example, let’s try to search for Microsoft on http://www.google.com/xhtml using Microsoft Mobile Explorer:
Everything is fine so far, the URL is http://www.google.com/xhtml?q=microsoft&hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&btnG=Search&site=search&mrestrict=xhtml which is what we expected. The search results are displayed in xhtml as they should, But what happens we click on the first link? Do we go to the Microsoft.com site? Well yes… and no… You actually go to a Google generated page of the Microsoft.com web page. Look at the URL after clicking on the link : http://www.google.com/gwt/n?q=microsoft&site=search&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&mrestrict=xhtml&ct=res&cd=1&rd=1&u=www.microsoft.com/ Yes, you are still on a Google page ! and the Microsoft site is displayed properly in the XHTML your phone wants:
This is literally “The web viewed by Google”. Too bad for the proxy idea though, Google is already very well on it.
Technorati tags : mobile google search google mobile
Hello world!
April 17, 2006
Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!
