Ok, I cheated a bit but…
It’s working awesomely now… The gallery I’m using is My PHP DropBox and it is exactly what I want. A simple gallery that will build a photo album based on my directory structure without having to upload files and create albums. The use of Dropbox makes it as easy as drag and dropping for me to organize photos!
Anyhow, the gallery had some theming ability and I cheated by just copying the wordpress raw theme output into the themes the gallery uses. Not very elegant cause I’ll have to update every time I add a new page or a new month rolls over and the archive links changes, but oh well, I’m not going to complain. Hopefully with this last change, I can move my entire blog platform over.
Also, since my original images were so big, I’ve streamlined the process by using ImageConverterPLUS to just batch up everything. Anyhow, its Halloween time… Will write more about this process later!
Freaking WordPress
Dear god, someone help me figure out how to get my gallery themed! I can’t figure it out. The gallery solution is really slick by creating a photo gallery from your dropbox photos album, but no integration with WordPress. I’m sure that it’s really easy to do but I’m just dumb meh!
Migration to Google Apps
So those who know me know how I don’t really trust the cloud, and all that jazz. Now don’t get me wrong, I find things in the cloud useful; Dropbox for example is a great tool; I love syncing all my documents across multiple devices, but I’m not sure how much trust I put in it. That is, until recently. You see, everything is moving to the cloud… the cloud.. I remember during a Microsoft Company meeting that was the buzz word of the year. I even remember thinking how we should make it into a drinking game… anyhow I digress.
In the last year or two, I have worked for two incredible companies that operate predominately in the cloud. So today, October 27th, I have moved my entire mail infrastructure into the cloud with the help of Google Apps, and it was a BREEZE. I couldn’t be more excited to destroy this SBS HyperV image and not ever have to worry about email downtime due to power outages, moving, or any number of ridiculous reasons.
The move itself was simple:
- Goto http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html
- Configure my domain
- Verify the domains either through simple http get requests, or in my case, I just used DNS entries
- Configure accounts and off you go!
The downside? There are surprisingly few that you can’t work around, but it is a pain nonetheless. The biggest thing for me was outlook integration. That was my biggest draw to Exchange to start with. How that mail is all happy what about contacts and calendar? Well for all the paying users of the service, google has a great little sync app that does everything for you! But for us lowly people, we have to resort to separate tools.
- Calendar – This is actually quite silly cause Google actually provides a tool to do this! Go here to get it!
- Contacts – Google doesn’t provide this for you but there is a simple free tool called GO Contact Sync which works great
Honestly, I hope Google will just allow anyone to use their sync tool since there are already so many alternatives. Either way, everything is now working and happy thanks to Google Apps and a myriad of tools to sync Outlook to contacts and calendar!
Installing Subtext on Windows Server 2008 over UNC Path
I promised I'd start making random tech blog entries so here's the first. As part of my migration to Hyper-V (which totally rocks), I had to rebuild my web server. I know this scenario probably doesn't happen much in the consumer space but I have a raid server on the back end where I store all my web content, as such there are all kinds of whacked .NET permission problems you have to deal with. Anyhow, here are the nuances I ran across.
Problem
"Could not load file or assembly 'System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified."
Solution
This is a weird one. The reason this message comes up is because the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 assemblies aren't installed. Why they aren't installed by default in Windows Server 2008 is beyond me. Either way, fix is simple... just go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ca9d90fa-e8c9-42e3-aa19-08e2c027f5d6&displaylang=en and install the bits and off you go.
Problem
"Request for the permission of type 'System.Web.AspNetHostingPermission' [...] failed."
Solution
This is one of the reasons I'm actually blogging this. I always forget that I need to give the share full trust else .NET fails. This is easily done via the UI, or if you don't have it installed just run:
%SystemDrive%:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\caspol.exe -m -ag 1 -url "file:////\\computername\sharename\*" FullTrust -exclusive on
Ok, that's all I got... hope this helps someone somewhere. Man I wish I knew how to properly format posts like this. It looks stupid right now. Will spend some time later and figure out the proper way to do this.