Converting from WordPress Blog to Blogger

This procedure will allow you to convert an existing WordPress blog over to Blogger.   The steps are fairly simple; however, can become time consuming and combersome when you have to transfer over the images from the previous blog site.

Security Enhancement Update – v2.610-S

Update v2.610-S brings with it a powerful security update feature to WSMS.  If there is an attempted to log into an account more than 5 times, the account is locked and the IP address is now blocked.

DNSTCWSMS Major Version 2.601 Roles Out

With this new update, there were a lot of changes made to the photo management and photo pages.   This was done to make things much easier to update your website.  Some of these changes include a new drag/drop interface that is not reliant on Java, but uses JQuery to upload a massive amount of photos and resize them as they are being uploaded.  Also, you can now rotate pictures through the photo editing page.

Configuring Word for Blog Posts

Microsoft Word 2003 and higher will allow you to place a blog post to Word Press if the blog server is configured to receive the blog post and if you have a valid username and password in order to make those posts.

In order to make this connection happen, you will need the following:

1. Username:
2. Password:
3. URL to blog site:

Once you have these items, perform the following to establish your blog posting account.

Note: You will only have to establish your account the first time you make a connection. From that point on, Word will store your username and password for you; however, it is a good idea to keep this information someplace in case your computer has to be reloaded.

1. Open Word and select File/New
2. Select New Blog Post
3. Click on Manage Accounts
4. Click on New
5. Select Word Press as your provider
6. Click Next
7. Enter the URL to the blog site (make sure you leave the xmlrpc.php on the end of the document)
8. Enter your username
9. Enter your password
10. Check Remember Password
11. Click OK
12. You should get a message that your account has been established.

From this point on, anytime you wish to publish a new blog post, your account will be configured and you can just type your message, select a category, and click publish when you are done.

We always recommend that you should have at least 1 photograph with each blog post and that you should always choose a category to place your blog post into.

Adding a Windows Server 2012 Domain Controller to an Existing Windows Server 2003 network

When looking for information on migrating server 2003 to 2012 I found this artical and I feel that it will be useful in the future. Here is the url to the page I found.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/canitpro/archive/2013/05/05/step-by-step-adding-a-windows-server-2012-domain-controller-to-an-existing-windows-2003-network.aspx

Encoding and Decoding for Ajax

One of the original issues with WSMS is that some special characters where not able to pass through the Ajax requests correctly due to special characters.  For example, if you used the "&" within your text boxes or within a link, everything after the "&" and include the "&" was removed when it would save the information to the database.

To fix this issue, the data must be URL (or URI) encoded before it is passed through the GET request, then it must be decoded before it is saved in the database; however, the problem is that it must be decoded within java script, then decoded within PHP.  This took a little bit of research and testing, but it does work.

Here is how to encode the data:

If you are receiving the data as variable v in java script:

var vout = encodeURIComponent(v);

Then pass the variable v=vout to the request.

On the PHP site, use the following:

$value = rawurldecode($_GET['v']);

This will then decode the data and you can store the variable $value within the database.

To see an example of this in action:

Within the dba section of panicd.com, look at the files

Encoding in Java Script:  dnstc_ajax.js under the function: saveFieldValue()

Decoding in PHP: location-sae-main-inforamtion-ajax-process.php

Slider Images

I needed some code to use as a standard sliding image rotator.  After testing out several downloads, I came to the conclusion that the following fits the needs for almost any web design project.  I have used it on several design projects already and wanted to document where I got the code from.
The link to the Basic jQuery Slider can be found here:

http://www.basic-slider.com/

It is very easy to setup and use.  It also has several options that you can customize.