In this post, I’m going to share how I created the custom links back to my blog as seen in my syndicated posts on SQLServerPedia.com.

I’m syndicating my all of my SQL Server related posts over at SQLServerPedia.com. Since I sometimes blog about topics other than SQL Server, I didn’t want to syndicate my entire feed. Fortunately, WordPress creates feeds at the category level. Just add “/feed/” to the end of your category page URL to get to the category feed. The feed for my SQL Server related posts was located at http://robboek.com/category/sql-server/feed/.

With the category feed URL in hand, I created a feed on FeedBurner that points to the category feed and is the feed I gave out for syndication. This enabled me to add special FeedFlare that only shows up on my syndicated posts.

Creating custom FeedFlare is easy. It’s just an XML file with some custom tags that you upload to your site. You then put the URL to the XML file in to FeedBurner to add your custom FeedFlare to your feed. For more information see the FeedFlare Developer Guide.

I created two FeedFlare units. The first just adds “Originally posted at robboek.com” and links to my blog. The second is a permalink to the original blog post.

robboek-com.xml

<FeedFlareUnit>
    <Catalog>
        <Title>robboek.com</Title>
	<Description>Originally posted at robboek.com</Description>
    </Catalog>
    <FeedFlare>
        <Text>Originally posted at robboek.com</Text>
        <Link href="http://robboek.com" />
    </FeedFlare>
</FeedFlareUnit>

post-permalink.xml

<FeedFlareUnit>
    <Catalog>
        <Title>Permalink</Title>
        <Description>Adds the permalink of posts to help verify as the original source</Description>
    </Catalog>
    <FeedFlare>
        <Text>Permalink: ${link}</Text>
        <Link href="${link}" />
    </FeedFlare>
</FeedFlareUnit>

UPDATE: I stopped using tweetbacks because they just weren’t that interesting.

I came across a post on Mashable today talking about Tweetbacks (A Tweetback is like a trackback or pingback from Twitter). The Mashable post linked to a post by Dan Zarrella who has an easy to implement script you can throw on your blog to insert the tweetbacks.

I tried out Dan’s script, but couldn’t get it to work and it killed the performance of my blog, probably because everyone else who read the Mashable post is trying it out too. Fortunately, there was a comment by Jeremy Hilton that linked to a version he wrote that you can host on your own site.

I installed Dan’s script and it worked. I changed his current version (0.2)  by moving the files to a subdirectory, adding links to twitter profiles, and right aligning the dates. In another comment Dan wrote that he was hard a work on a new version that will give more control over formatting. Thanks Dan!

Let me know what you think.

I’ve been running WordPress 2.7 for a few weeks now and I have been very happy with it so far. In this post I’ll share my thought process behind running WordPress on IIS7 and the details on how I have it setup.

I setup my first blog back in 2006 running on dasBlog. I was never really happy with it, mostly because I couldn’t find a theme I liked. I wrote a few posts, then when I changed hosting providers, I never setup the permissions correctly and was unable to post. It would have been an easy fix, but it became an excuse to not blog.

When I decided to start blogging again, I wanted something that would be easy to setup, and wouldn’t take a lot of effort to maintain. Since I’m a fan of Google’s offerings, I started off using Blogger. Unfortunately, I ran into some DNS limitations and couldn’t get things setup the way I wanted. I also checked out the hosted WordPress solution, but it was even more limited then Blogger.

I decided to use WordPress as my blogging platform because there is a very active community, lots of themes available, and because you there are plugins that allow you to add whatever features you want without any coding.

Since IIS7 has decent PHP support, I decided to use a Windows plan on GoDaddy.com. This will allow me to put .NET apps on my site down the road. I also have another site that I need to host that requires .NET and this keeps my hosting costs lower.

Installing WordPress 2.7 was pretty easy. I just had to create a MySQL database, upload the WordPress files and run through the setup.

Next, I had to get pretty permalinks working the way I wanted them. One way to do this would be to use Microsoft’s URL Rewrite Module. The problem is that GoDaddy doesn’t currently support the URL Rewrite Module (I’ve heard that they plan to support it soon). I ended up using the ManagedFusion Url Rewriter.

Setting Up the Managed Fusion Url Rewriter to work with WordPress

Download the ManagedFusion Url Rewriter files here.

If you don’t already have one, create a folder named “bin” at the root of your blog.

Copy ManagedFusion.Rewriter.dll and ManagedFusionRewriter.pdb into the bin folder you just created.

If you don’t have one, create a file named “web.config” in the root folder of your blog that looks like the one below, otherwise just add the info to your existing web.config.

web.config

<configuration>
    <system.webserver>
        <validation validateintegratedmodeconfiguration="false" />
            <modules runallmanagedmodulesforallrequests="true">
                <add type="ManagedFusion.Rewriter.RewriterModule, ManagedFusion.Rewriter" name="RewriterModule" />
            </modules>
            <handlers>
                <add type="System.Web.HttpForbiddenHandler, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" name="RewriterProxyHandler" path="RewriterProxy.axd" verb="*" precondition="integratedMode" />
            </handlers>
    </system.webserver>
</configuration>

Create a file named “ManagedFusion.Rewriter.rules” in the root folder of your blog. This will allow you to use .htaccess syntax to handle the Url Rewrites. I set mine up to remove the www from my hostname, remove index.php from the url, and redirect urls from my old blog to the new location.

ManagedFusion.Rewriter.rules

#  Managed Fusion Url Rewriter
#  http://managedfusion.com/products/url-rewriter/
#
#  Developed by: Nick Berardi
#       Support: support@managedfusion.com
#
RewriteEngine on
 
#
# Place Rules Below
#
 
# misc WordPress rewrites
RewriteRule ^/wp-login\.php$ /wp-login.php [L]
RewriteRule ^/wp-comments-post\.php$ /wp-comments-post.php [L]
RewriteRule ^/wp-admin/(.*)$ /wp-admin/$1 [L]
 
# deny access to evil robots site rippers offline browsers and other nasty scum
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Anarchie [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ASPSeek [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^attach [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^autoemailspider [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Xaldon\ WebSpider [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Xenu [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Zeus.*Webster [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Zeus
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]
 
# remove www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.robboek\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://robboek.com$1 [R=301]
 
# redirect old urls
RewriteRule ^/2008/12/blog-on-hold.html$ /2008/12/12/blog-on-hold/ [R=301]
RewriteRule ^/2008/11/google-chrome-wont-start-in-vista-x64\.html$ /2008/11/16/google-chrome-wont-start-in-vista-x64/ [R=301]
RewriteRule ^/2008/11/pass-community-summit-2008-events.html$ /2008/11/14/pass-community-summit-2008-events-calendar/ [R=301]
RewriteRule ^/2008/11/fort-stevens-camping-trip.html$ /2008/11/14/fort-stevens-camping-trip/ [R=301]
RewriteRule ^/2008/10/first-post.html$ /2008/10/10/first-post/ [R=301]
RewriteRule ^/blog/CommentView,guid,1d8cba50-0814-4c89-86df-eca669973e8e.aspx$ /2006/09/29/junctions-in-windows-vista/ [R=301]
RewriteRule ^/blog/2006/09/29/JunctionsInWindowsVista.aspx$ /2006/09/29/junctions-in-windows-vista/ [R=301]
 
# rewrite all nonexistent files and directories to use index.php for WordPress
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php$1

I also setup a custom 404 error page that will allow me to use the WordPress 404 page in my theme.

404.php

<?php
$qs = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
$pos = strrpos($qs, '://');
$pos = strpos($qs, '/', $pos + 4);
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = substr($qs, $pos);
$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
include('index.php');
?>

Plugins I’m using

DISQUS Comment System

The main reason I’m using DISQUS is because comment notification emails weren’t working for me with the default WordPress comments. It does add some nice functionality though, including threaded comments, comment spam protection, facebook connect integration and more. The other thing I liked about DISQUS is that all of my comments are synced in the WordPress database so if I ever want to stop using DISQUS, all I need to do is disable it.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

Redirects the RSS links over to my feed on FeedBurner.

Google Analyticator

Makes it easy to add Google Analytics tracking codes. It also has some nice features like disabling tracking for blog administrators.

Simple Google Sitemap

Generates an XML sitemap to give to the search engines. If you haven’t tried Google Webmaster Tools it’s worth a look.

WP-Syntax

Easy to use syntax highlighting code like you see in this post.

Other tweaks

I’m running the Revolution Code Grey theme, with a FriendFeed badge, a DISQUS comments widget and a and Twitter updates widget. The rest are just the standard widgets that come with WordPress.

I’m also using my blog as an OpenID using my Google account for authentication.

I’m running a self-hosted WordPress 2.7 blog on a GoDaddy.com IIS7 hosting plan. Today I was trying to setup my blog as an OpenID provider so I could use it to login to OpenID enabled sites like stackoverflow.

My first attempt was to use the WordPress OpenID plugin. Beside the fact that I couldn’t get it working, the plugin was really overkill for my needs. Since I’m using the DISQUS plugin for comments, I didn’t need OpenID support for those. I just wanted to be able to use http://robboek.com to log in to other sites.

Next, I tried phpMyID. phpMyID was pretty easy to setup and the test worked, but I couldn’t get it to let me login to stackoverflow. While trying to setup phpMyID, I noticed the link tags it had me insert into the template and figured that I should probably be able to point to another OpenID provider from my blog url and have that work. A little searching revealed this post that pointed me in the right direction.

Here are the steps to use your Google account as an OpenID Provider for your blog:

1. Go to http://openid-provider.appspot.com/ and login using your Google account. It will give you an OpenID sign-on in the form of:

   http://openid-provider.appspot.com/[your google email]

2. Add the following 2 lines to the <head> section of your template:

   <link rel="openid.server" href="[OpenID from step 1]" />
   <link rel="openid.delegate" href="[OpenID from step 1]" />

   As an example, the lines I added were:

   <link rel="openid.server" href="http://openid-provider.appspot.com/rob@robboek.com" />
   <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://openid-provider.appspot.com/rob@robboek.com" />

That’s all there is to it. Two easy steps and now I can use http://robboek.com to login to OpenID enabled sites.

I really want to start blogging. The trouble is, I can’t get things setup the way I want them. I had settled on using blogger but I really want to have my domain as http://robboek.com and not http://www.robboek.com. The trouble is, now I can’t have it hosted by google as you can’t add a CNAME to the root domain without messing things up. Next I though I would just create an A record to the ip address, but then my site goes down frequently. I was looking to use wordpress.com but to have a custom domain name there you have to use them for DNS.

My next idea is to use self-hosted wordpress. Now I need to find a good cheap hosting company. Preferably one that also supports ASP.NET and SQL Server. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. In the mean time I’m putting the blog on hold because I don’t want to worry about moving my content over.

Welcome to the first post on my second attempt at a blog. The first one failed miserably when I changed servers and was too lazy to fix a permissions issue.

This time, I’ve decided to use Blogger. I’ve been very happy with Google services so far, and when I came across a post by Jeff Blankenburg on using Blogger with ASP.NET, I figured I’d give it a shot.

After a few minutes to setup the blog and install Windows Live Writer, I’m off to the races. Wish me luck!