IDEAS

Many people watch for just the commercials, and most like me love the game and can’t wait until next season! At the party I attended, it was like Mystery Science Theater 3000 with everyone spitting out the opinion quickly and often I would say we had more thumbs down then up, and very few that I can remember today. Godaddy (the use of females tearing off dress shirts), Doritos (funny ones, especially the Doritos ninja), Hyundai (people carrying the car), Etrade (Talking babies still work), Jay Leno, Letterman and Oprah (have no clue what it was for, but was awesome to see).

But by far the best commercial was definitely the Google one, very clever, very simple, and pulls on your heart strings. I only remember seeing it once, and it was so memorable. If you can think of a better commercial let me know in the comments, but I think they ended up with the best bang for the buck commercial by far:

CNNMoney posted an article, America’s biggest ripoffs.

It costs 1/3 of a cent for carriers to send a message, but they can hit you with a 20-cent charge on pay-per-text plans. That’s a markup of 6,500%.

Movie popcorn, 900%: No surprise here, as theaters make little from ticket sales. “I consider myself working in concessions, not movies,” is a common refrain of owners.

‘”Free” credit reports: Just try it. The percentage markup between “free” and $179 a year doesn’t compute, even if you have advanced calculus.

Advil, 60%: Brand names are nice, “but the cheaper stuff works just as well.” Apparently, the name and “sleek packaging” work.

Restaurant wine, 500%: One restaurant explains away the difference by touting a “beverage team” that makes sure “the quality of the wine and experience exceeds our guests’ expectations.”

Textbooks: From 1986 to 2004, prices increased at “twice the rate of annual inflation.”

More bad deals from CNNMoney, America’s biggest ripoffs

This is a great first at Dale Carnegie.

If you need to move your wordpress site, like we just did, follow this link from Wordpress Codex to find out how: http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress

We ended up making 2 moves, one to a new subdomain on an different hosting provider and 2nd one to a subfolder within the new host and officially off of the root. In both cases, the directions given here worked!

New code has been added to the blog that I’ll share with our readers. This is a simple javascript code that will clear the default text out of an input field when you click your mouse into it. The default text will re-appear if nothing is typed in the box and you click out of it.

Just place this code anywhere inside your <input> tag:

onFocus="if (this.value=='Search') this.value='';" onblur="if (this.value=='') this.value='Search';"

Notice I highlighted the word “Search” – this is the only part of the code that you need to edit. Change “Search” to match the default value of your text field.

What do these statements mean?

• onFocus=”if (this.value==’Search’) this.value=”;” – If the field has the text “Search” in it, then the text will clear when you put your cursor on the field. However, If you typed text in the field, then clicked out, it will not clear when you click back in.
• onblur=”if (this.value==”) this.value=’Search’;” – If the field is left empty and you click out of the input box, then the default text “Search” will re-appear in the box. However, If you typed text in the field, then clicked out, your text will not clear.

In the end, your input code will look something like this:

<input name="s" type="text" id="s" value="Search" onFocus="if (this.value=='Search') this.value='';" onblur="if (this.value=='') this.value='Search';" />

Want to try it out? Just check out our search field at the top of the sidebar.

So you have subversion (SVN for short), and the built-in dreamweaver support for SVN sucks, now what?  TortoiseSVN of course, the best open source SVN client available.  But Mike, “I don’t want to have to go to a separate program to check in and out my files!”…. That’s where Subweaver comes into play.  It brings the Tortoise SVN menu commands directly into Dreamweaver through an extension.  Here’s the installation instructions along with links originally found here:

Installation

1. Download and install TortoiseSVN fromhttp://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
2. Download Subweaver from http://code.google.com/p/subweaver/downloads/list
3. Run the .mxp extension package file that you downloaded. The Adobe extension manager will guide you through its installation.
4. When you run Dreamweaver now, you will see a new menu in the menu bar, called SubWeaver.

That’s pretty much it.  Also, if you’re in a windows environment and you’re looking for a super simple installation of Subversion, take a look here at the VisualSVN Server.  The standard version is free, but even the added features of the enterprise one only costs $500.  It’s a very simple installation and gets you up and running with Subversion within 10 minutes.

Looking for an HTML 5 countdown, check this out: http://ishtml5readyyet.com/

Sometimes you run into issues and within 10 minutes the internet comes thorough by giving you a solution with no reasoning as to why your having the issue, but you’re just happy to have it and will chalk that one up to the good guys!  Just ran into this one while working on our IIS server and certificate authority: 0×80094801 – the request contains no certificate template information

The solution was found here

“The solution is to import the Certificate Request in command line with CertReq tool.  Use the following command to import your Certificate Request file.

certreq -submit -attrib “CertificateTemplate:WebServer” <Cert Request.req>

If the template is different, find the correct template name in “Certificate Authority” console. If you don’t find it, you may have to add the template before you try importing the request file.”

No name, no person to give credit to, but thanks!!!

Found a need for a reverse proxy. What is that you ask??? A regular proxy server or “forward proxy” can be used to forward HTTP traffic from a network’s clients to external web servers on the Internet. The proxy can also cache popular sites to save on bandwidth also, so all CNN.com’s images would be loaded once and everyone who visits the page afterwards can use images off the local proxy server instead of downloading off the internet.

A reverse proxy would allow you to have 1 IP address and multiple webservers behind it. According to Wikipedia :”A reverse proxy is a proxy server that is installed in a server network. Typically, reverse proxies are used in front of Web servers. All connections coming from the Internet addressed to one of the Web servers are routed through the proxy server, which may either deal with the request itself or pass the request wholly or partially to the main web servers.”

At LW, with our virtual environment, we’re able to setup multiple test boxes for all our different client environments, but right now we still have 1 IP address, thus the need for a reverse proxy.  Searching the internet for something that works properly and is inexpensive, I found that IIS has a module called Application Request Routing (ARR) and URL rewriting which when combined give you the reverse proxy functionality. To download the modules, you can find them here: ARR, URL rewriter

here’s the basic steps in IIS 7 to setup which were found here:

“For a very simple reverse proxy, all you have to do is:

1. Select the server node on inetmgr.

2. Double click on Application Request Routing icon.

3. Select/check “Enable proxy”.

4. Select/check “Use URL Rewrite to inspect incoming requests.

5. Enter the server of where you want to route the request to in “Reverse proxy” – ie. (myserver.contoso.com).

In above example, all requests that are received by ARR will be routed to myserver.contoso.com.”

There’s also a great video walkthrough by Ruslan Yakushev(his accent is pretty thick) that really shows you how to use the modules properly, it’s located here

Enjoy!

2010 is being coined the Year of Growth for Local Wisdom.  We are excited to continue pushing forward and as we do, we can’t help but be reminded of the stellar cast of characters who have helped bring us to where we are today:  our beloved employees.

So as part of our continued growth, we are maintaining our commitment to acknowledging the valued efforts of all our employees.

Beginning this year, we will be acknowledging milestone anniversaries, namely the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th and 10th year of employee tenures, with a little something special   A small token of appreciation, a special LW Blog shout out and a whole lotta love!  LET’S GET STARTED, SHALL WE??!

We just wanted to take a moment and give the following LW employees an anniversary shout out:

Happy 1st Year Anniversary!

Eric Williamson,  1/19

RJay Haluko,  1/5

Happy 3rd Year Anniversary!

Joe Fonte,  2/1

Laurie Kathiari,  2/5

We value your hard work and dedication and are so happy you are a part of the LW Family.  We wouldn’t be where we are today without awesome employees like you!

xoxo