This service includes the transfer and installation of:

• All themes transferred and same theme reactivated on new host
• All plugins transferred and active plugins reactivated on new host
• All images and post content transferred and reactivated on new host
• All database data backedup and transferred and reactivated on new host
• All hosted files transferred and reactivated on new host
• Ensure all security settings are correct on the new host

If you are interested in this service special, I look forward to working with you soon.

To disable WordPress thumbnails and image linking to the image source (link url):
Go to Settings->Media and uncheck all the boxes and clear all the values. Don’t forget to click Save change button.

You can turn off authentication on the SMTP Instance, thus disabling the AUTH verbs for any external smtp access (for those not using 3rd party filtering), therefore disabling anyone attempting to send authenticated email. Everyone I know uses OWA/RWW, no need to leave authentication turned on for things that noone uses.

One of the ways to show IP access is view the WWW(\windows\system32\logs\w3svc) logs, but if you use windows mobile push email, then your www logs get filled with the phone access.

Well, after searching high and low and everywhere in between, I found out how to successfully stream ripped DVD VOB files from my MCE 2005 PC to my extender. Read on to find out how!

I came accross this article below from http://windowsmediacenter.blogspot.com and it is very detailed in how to accomplish this task. It is more geared for Vista but you can impliment for MCE 2005 without having to worry about the user issue described below.  I will add….  In MyMovies Collection Management, check, Configure/Media Center Interface/Extender Transcode/Let “Watch” button and MyMovies will use Transcode 360 as “engine” to play your files.

 I just saw a great guide on setting up Transcode 360 with My Movies for MCE. Enables movie play back on the Media Center Extenders of DVD VOB’s, DivX and XVid etc.

It includes some of the pitfalls that took me a long time to work out, such as the Transcode 360 registry change that is required.

See the guide here on Adding Guest account to network movie folders and sharing themIf you will be accessing movies from an extender(Xbox 360), we need to alter permissions setting on the shared movie folders computer. The bottom line is ‘Guest’ account needs to be enabled on the other machine, and ‘Guest’ needs to have Read (Read and List) to the movie folders. On Vista Ulimate and Vista Enterprise Enabling go to Start>right click on Computer>choose Manage>expand Local Users and Groups>Highlight Users>in the right pane right click on Guest>choose Properties>on the General tab make sure that ‘Account is disabled’ is unchecked. Click Ok.
In Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium editions go to Control Panel > User Accounts > Manage Accounts, and Turn on Guest Account.

To give Guests access to the movie folders go to Computer and browse to the root folder containing all of the movie folders. Right click the folder and choose Properties. Click the Security tab. Click the Continue button (if UAC is enabled). Click the Edit button. Click the Add button. In the ‘Enter the object names to select’ box type Guest. Click Ok. Click Ok again. Click Ok.

Share the movies folders, if not already, and everyone should have read.

Add the guest account the the movie folders. Give Guest account Read access.

I intend to come back and give instruction on the above two sentences.

If the above is not configured, when you go to Watch Stream on your extender, you will get a ‘Path not found ‘ error message.

To sum, enable Guest account, give guest account read to movie folders (do this by giving read to the parent folder (or drive) and the permissions will propagate down. Finally, share the folders so the UNC path matches the path you specified for the movies in My Movies.

Testing

Bring up your Xbox 360, connect to the Media Center, go to My Movies, pick a movie and choose ‘Watch Stream’. If you click Watch you will get an error. So use Watch Stream. You should see ‘Loading’ for a short period, and then you should get the spinning circle in the middle of the screen. The spinning circle may stop spinning for a short period before the movie starts. If the spinning circle stops and you wait, and wait…and no movie, then something is wrong. The xbox may be frozen at this point. I’ll get into some troubleshooting below.

Troubleshooting

The two versions of My Movies I have used TT with are 2.42 and 2.44.

It may be beneficial to disconnect from the Media Center on the Xbox 360 if the permissions changes were made while connect from the Xbox. I always do this when I make a change so I can’t really so if it is not necessary. From the extender, close media center. Then reopen media center on the extender.

Valuable information will come from the TT log file. These are located at C:\Users\Public\Transcode360\LogsIf you tried to watch a movie on your extender using Watch Stream in My Movies and it did not work, look at the log file with the most recent ‘Date modified’ value. This should be the log created when you tried to stream the movie.

The error message you get when you try to stream the movie is important. Depending on what happens, you may not get a message.

The event viewer on the Vista MCE machine will also give valuable information. Go to Start>right click on Computer>choose Manage>expand Event Viewer>expand Applications and Services Logs>Click on Transcode 360 Service>in the right pane events will be listed. Looks for events that are ‘Error’ and ‘Warning’.

Examples

The path [some path] was not found when trying to watch a network movie-> give ‘guest’ account access to the network folder

After doing the above try to watch the network movie and get ‘Transcode failed transcode was unable to transcode the file [some path].
-> this could be that the service is running with an account that does not have permission to the remote computer-> this could be the mencoder.exe file is not updated

If in the log file you see:

*ERR* Transcoding error:*ERR* This codecs.conf is too old and incompatible with this MPlayer release! at line 6
-> you can delete the codecs.conf file located in the C:\Program Files\Transcode360\Wrappers\MEncoderTranscoder\mplayer folder

If in the Event Viewer you have a message that includes ‘Cannot open file/device.
‘->it might be a permissions, network access, firewall type issue.

Make sure your movies are stored in a separate folder for each movie. Inside the movie folder there should be a Video_TS folder and within it the movie files (.ifo, .vob). Transcode 360 looks for the Video_TS folder and the movie files within. If the folder and file structure described above is not used, the movies will not work.

The first thing that happens is that a security flaw is found in Wordpress. WordPress updates its files regularly each year as security holes are found so it is important to keep your WordPress version up-to-date with the latest release. 

Once a flaw is found, a script is written to take advantage of the flaw.

Next a search is done to compile a list of sites running the software. For instance if you use ‘Acme photo content management’ and a flaw is found in the file acme.php; then a search is done for acme.php. The site list is compiled by a bot and all the sites are attacked over a very short time. Or a Perl script is run on across several websites looking for flawed programs. ( See RFI vulnerability scanner )

One way to help keep your site off the list is to keep those files off of Google and other search engines. Use your robots.txt file and disallow all directories the public does not see. For WordPress disallow /wp-admin and /wp-content/plugins. Go through your website and disallow in robots.txt all the directories not meant for public viewing.

For WordPress I disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: wp-app.php
Disallow: wp-atom.php
Disallow: wp-blog-header.php
Disallow: wp-comments-post.php
Disallow: wp-config-sample.php
Disallow: wp-config.php
Disallow: wp-cron.php
Disallow: wp-feed.php
Disallow: wp-login.php
Disallow: wp-links-opml.php
Disallow: wp-mail.php
Disallow: wp-pass.php
Disallow: wp-rdf.php
Disallow: wp-register.php
Disallow: wp-rss.php
Disallow: wp-rss2.php
Disallow: wp-settings.php
Disallow: wp-trackback.php
Disallow: xmlrpc.php

Go through your logs and if you see robots crawling your site that you don’t know. Find out who they are. If you still don’t know – banish them using your .htaccess file.

Next you want to check each directory on your website. If a directory does not have an index.html file, then when someone types that directory into a browser a list of all the files in that directory is shown on the webpage.

You can prevent this by creating a index.html file and placing it in every directory that does not already have one. You can have it says ‘You should not be here’. Yours could include a link back to the home page of the site or anything else you’d like. This keeps prying eyes out of places they should not be.

All you need to add a Favicon to your site is a Windows Icon (.ico) file usually called favicon.ico that you upload to the main directory of your website. Nowadays, most browsers besides Internet Explorer can use a GIF (including animated ones) or PNG (including full transparency) instead. But since all browsers including IE understand the .ico format, and because it’s got a lot of intriguing features that GIFs and PNGs don’t, read on to find out how to make one.

Download The Plugin
You’ll need the Windows Icon (ICO) file format Photoshop Plugin to export to the .ico file format. You can download the plugin from Telegraphics. The plugin reads and writes ICO files in 1, 4 and 8-bit Indexed and 24-bit RGB modes, and also reads and writes 32-bit “XP” icons (with 8-bit alpha channel). Make sure to install the plugin before you begin this tutorial.

Let’s Begin
Because 16 x 16 is such a small canvas area, it can be very difficult to be creative. So instead start your project with a canvas set at 64 x 64 (always use even multiples when you plan on resizing files). Do this by selecting File>New, and opening a new canvas that is 64 x 64 pixels in size.

The Design
If you already have a logo you should reduce it to the 16 x 16 size to see if it holds up. If it doesn’t look good at this size, work with the 64 x 64 canvas and try creating a simple design that incorporates colors from your website’s palette.

When you’re ready to test the design select Image>Image Size menu and enter 16 x 16. Click on Resample Image and choose “Bicubic Sharper” from the drop-down menu (CS only for this step). This is the best setting for making sure that an image doesn’t blur as it’s being resized. If it’s still not sharp enough, go back and oversharpen, oversaturate and/or heighten the contrast of the original image and then resize it again.

If you feel the icon is not quite what you wanted, just keep tweaking it until it is perfect. At this tiny size it can take a few tries before you get it right.
Saving The Custom Icon
Go to File>Save As and make sure you name the file favicon.ico. Under Format you must choose Windows Icon (ICO) from the pulldown menu. This format will only be available in Photoshop after you download and install the plugin. In the next step you’ll need to upload this new file to the root folder of your website, so it’s a good idea to navigate and save it to that location on your hard drive now.

Uploading The Favicon.ico File
Connect to your server and upload your Favicon.ico file to your website. You must place it into the same directory as your home (index) page, and leave it loose, making sure not to put it in an images directory or other folder. The standard location is the “root” folder of your site, which is same directory as your home (index) page, not inside an images directory or other folder. If you put it there (and name it favicon.ico), most browsers will find it automatically.

Some browsers will look for a direct link in the HTML source code to your site’s favicon.ico file. You can help these browsers by adding this link in the head section of each page on which you want the Favicon.ico to appear.
Here is the link code to include: <link rel=”Shortcut Icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>
Once you’ve added this code, upload all of your modified pages.

(Some people suggest that the following is actually more correct: <link rel=”icon” href=”/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon”> You can use both if you want!)
 
If you want to use a GIF or PNG instead, use this format instead (just remember that it won’t work in IE):
<link rel=”icon” href=”/favicon.png” type=”image/png”> or
<link rel=”icon” href=”/favicon.gif” type=”image/gif”>

Testing
If your new Favicon does not show up right away, try refreshing the page or clearing your cache — or put a ‘?’ at the end of the url, which will trick a browser into thinking the page is new and not cached.

Troubleshooting
Browser Issues: Microsoft IE 6 for Windows will not display the favicon until the URL has been added to the favorites. Or try this trick: go up to the address bar, click on the existing (usually the IE default) favicon, then “jiggle” it a bit and let go. That will reload the page and should get the new favicon to show up.

Safari for the MAC will not display an updated favicon until the browser cache has been cleared. But choosing ‘empty cache’ from the menu won’t help because Safari stores favicons in a separate cache. Go to Edit > Reset Safari, and check “Remove all website icons”. If you can’t find that, you must empty the icon cache yourself. Look for it in User>Library>Safari>Icons. On the Windows version of Safari, find C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari\WebpageIcons.db. Quit Safari, delete the file, restart Safari. (Sometimes you need to restart the computer too.)

On FireFox, clear the cache and restart the browser. On Opera, just refresh.

Windows can actually be the most beligerent about not updating favicons for Internet shortcuts (on your desktop, for instance). This tip from www.vistax64.com/tutorials:

1. Right-click on the Desktop.
2. Select Personalize and select Display Settings (or simply Settings on XP).
3. Change the Color from 32 bit to 16 bit and click Apply.
4. Change the Color back to 32 bit and click Apply.

File Format Not Available: The Windows Icon (ICO) file format will not be available until you have downloaded and installed the plugin, and then Quit and Restarted Photoshop.

Troubleshooting Update
One person who had trouble with Internet Explorer 7 has sent us a little tip:
I had some trouble with IE 7 — but the addition of these 2 lines of code solved the problem:
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico”>
<link rel=”icon” type=”image/ico” href=”favicon.ico”>
 I found the info here:
www.webmasterworld.com/html/3251565.htm

And Shareef sends this in: In my experience, Internet Explorer seems to be a bit flaky in the length of time it takes before deciding to display the favicon. I have tried many variations in the code, but the majority of the time the favicon won’t display immediately.However, I recently discovered what may be a helpful tip: Once you place the code in your web pages and upload the favicon.ico file to your server, navigate to the favicon.ico file (www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico) and the browser (IE 7) will immediately display the favicon and keep it there.

Multi-Resolution Favicons
So if you’ve gotten this far, you can already see your favicon in your browser’s address bar, and it probably looks great. Feeling ambitious and want to go one step further?
 
In Windows especially, favicons show up all over the place. For instance, if you put a shortcut to a website on your desktop, Windows often uses the favicon of the site as the shortcut icon. But on the desktop, Windows uses a much larger size icon, usually 48×48 pixels. When this happens, Windows has to scale up your favicon and it will probably look blurry and not so great anymore.

You can fix this. One of the neat things about .ico files is that they can contain multiple versions of the icon, at different sizes and color depths (kinda like an animated GIF contains multiple frames). When they do, Windows uses whichever size and color depth is most appropriate. For the sizes, 16×16, 24×24, 32×32 & 48×48 pixels are most common, and all can put bundled together in a single .ico file.

Creating a multi-resolution icon isn’t much harder than what you did to create your 16×16 favicon, Telegraphics, the same place you got your favicon plugin, also has another plugin http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/info/icobundle.html that allows you to bundle multiple icons together in a single .ico file. It’s not actually a plugin, but a standalone program for Windows (used at command prompt) or MacOS (drag and drop). There are also many standalone tools that will create a multi-resolution icon for you from a single starting image. Here’s a couple that are free to try: www.sibcode.com/icon-studio and www.aha-soft.com/anytoicon.
 
As for color depth… again, if you’re on Windows, you may have noticed before that some icons on your desktop have jaggedy (aliased) edges, while others blend smoothly on the edges. The smooth blending is because those icons contain a version with 32-bit color depth, which allows true transparency, just like your layers in Photoshop. You can create a 32-bit version of your icon, along with 24-bit (16 million colors, gif-like transparency), 16-bit (256 colors) or even 8-, 4- or 2-bit… all of which could again be stored in one .ico file!
 
So if you want to make sure your favicon looks great wherever people might see it, try creating a few versions in your favicon.ico file. For example:
 
16×16, 16-bit (256) colors
16×16, 32-bit colors
32×32, 16-bit (256) colors
32×32, 32-bit colors
48×48, 16-bit (256) colors
48×48, 32-bit colors
 
But don’t go too crazy, because every variation makes your favicon a little bit bigger, which means it will take longer to download.

Inspiration
If you need some inspiration have a look through this nice collection of favicons. Also look at the nice categorized list of 50 remarkable favicons at Smashing Magazine. You might find something that triggers an idea for your own.

That’s it. Enjoy your Favicons!

There are times when you are testing template tags, plugin tags, or different bits of code and you need to prevent them from showing or intiating (being active). To do this, you “hide” them with comment codes. To restore their activation, just remove the comment code.

To hide or deactivate HTML:

<!-- <div><p>This is some HTML in the redblock class.</p></div> -->

To hide or deactivate CSS styles:

/* .redblock {font-size: 80%; font-style: italic; color: red; } */

To hide or deactivate PHP code in a template file:

<?php // the_content(Continue Reading...); ?>

or

<?php /* the_content(Continue Reading...); */ ?>

This plugin adds 15 plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced HR, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras.

Some of the features added by this plugin

• Imports all CSS classes from the main theme stylesheet and add them to a drop-down list.
• Support for making and editing tables.
• In-line css styles.
• Advanced link and image dialogs that offer a lot of options.
• Search and Replace while editing.
• Support for XHTML specific tags and for (div based) layers.

HTML email can have the same appearance as a web page. You can include your favorite photos, create colorful newsletters or charts for your friends or business associates.

It’s now often used as a valuable tool in email marketing campaigns.

HTML email has now surpassed text-based email in popularity.

Read this survey on email format preferences and and programs: http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt8/email_format_preferences.htm

Let’s first point out the pros and cons of sending html email before we get into how to create it.

Pros of using html email

• Visually appealing
• Able to include graphics, icons, clickable links, different fonts, interactive forms.
• Increased interactivity with your customers.
• Mostly used by advertisers, however more consumers are using html email as they switch to faster connections.
• Ads can be more effective in HTML
• Most of the popular email clients now support html email (ie Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora, Netscape Communicator, Hotmail, Rocketmail, AOL, Yahoo, Web TV).

Cons of using html email

• Slow loading due to downloading of graphics
• Takes up more space in your email client
• Not all computers support html email
• Users may not have the required bandwidth or may have download quotas set by their ISPs
• Hackers can send viruses, trojan horses embedded in html email
• Users may turn off the option to receive html email, or use filters to quarantine it

How to create a simple html email

1. Open your favorite html editor. ie Microsoft Expression Web, Dreamweaver (you can also use MS Word 97 or 2000 but it tends to bloat the code a little) to create your email.
2. Always use absolute URLs for your graphics (ie http://www.systaweb.com/images/graphic.gif).
3. Graphics (ie images, icons, fancy fonts) must be stored on a web server to correctly appear in email software – you could save it as an attachment, however most folks will not open the attachment especially (and delete it) if it’s from someone they don’t know. If you don’t want to use graphics, you can use colored tables for different sections (ie header, masthead, contact information and footers).
4. Name and save the page you have created (ie html-email.htm).
5. Open your Email Software – in outlook express (since it’s the most popular) go to create mail – insert – text from file – scroll to your saved html page. You are now ready to send your html email.
6. Email a test to yourself before your send it to your subscriber list. You may want to send it to your friends who have different email programs so you can be sure most of your subscribers can read it on their computers.
7. Once you have created an attractive html page or newsletter, save it as a template. Now you can just open the template whenever you want to send html mail and most of the work will be done for you.

HTML email is a great marketing tool if used properly. The key is to test, test , test to see if your subscribers prefer it over text based email. If you are unsure your subscribers can read html email, then offer both text-based email and html email, to cater to both audiences.

Until Internet Explorer 7, shortcut icons would appear only when users added a page to their Favorites. Starting with Internet Explorer 7, shortcut icons will always appear when one is available in a supported format.

This article describes how Internet Explorer handles shortcut icons, explains how to add shortcut icons to your Web page, and provides troubleshooting steps.

About Shortcut Icons

Shortcut icons are supported in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and later. Internet Explorer downloads a shortcut icon when a user first visits a Web page that has a valid icon. (For more information on what constitutes a valid shortcut icon, see Creating Icons in the Correct Size and Format.) If more than one Web page shares the same shortcut icon (for example, a Web site that uses the same shortcut icon site-wide), the shortcut icon is downloaded only once.

In Internet Explorer 7, when a user adds a site to the Favorites menu, the site’s shortcut icon is saved to the Microsoft Windows NT File System (NTFS) alternate data stream of the shortcut (.url) file that is created. (On hard disks formatted with the file allocation table (FAT) file system, the icon is saved to the Temporary Internet Files folder.)

In Internet Explorer 6, the icon is stored in the Temporary Internet Files folder on the user’s computer, and additional metadata about the icon is stored in the user’s history information.

Creating Icons in the Correct Size and Format

A shortcut icon for Internet Explorer must be square in size, and at least 16 x 16 pixels. Consider creating both a 16 x 16-pixel icon as well as a 32 x 32-pixel icon (and larger, bandwidth permitting), since on high-DPI displays, Internet Explorer may stretch the icon to fit the available space.

To create the icon, use an icon editor, such as Microsoft Paint or the one included in Microsoft Visual Studio, and save the icon in the .ico file format (or save as a bitmap, and then rename the file with a “.ico” extension). Internet Explorer will ignore icons that are not in .ico format, and will instead display the default Internet Explorer shortcut icon.

Associating the Shortcut Icon with Your Web Page

After creating the icon, you must associate it with your Web page. There are two methods for doing this.

The first method is to save the icon with the default file name of favicon.ico to the root directory of your domain—for example, www.microsoft.com/favicon.ico. The first time a user visits your Web page, Internet Explorer automatically searches for this file and places the icon in the address bar, next to all favorites linking to your site, and on page tabs. In Internet Explorer 5 and Internet Explorer 6, the icon will appears only after a user adds the site to the Favorites menu.

The second method for associating a shortcut icon with your Web page is to add a line of HTML code to the page’s head element. The line of code includes a link tag that specifies the location and name of the icon file. You can include this link tag on a per-page basis. First, save the icon with a file name other than favicon.ico, and then add the following code to the head element of your page.

<head>
  <link rel=”SHORTCUT ICON” href=”http://www.mydomain.com/myicon.ico”/>
  <title>My Title</title>
</head>

You can use either method, or both. However, if you use the second method, whichever icon you point to in the link tag on each page will be displayed instead of the default favicon.ico file at the root of your domain.

Associating Multiple Shortcut Icons with Different Web Pages

If you want different pages on your Web site to have different shortcut icons, you must use a link tag as described in Associating the Shortcut Icon with Your Web Page. Within the link tag, point to whichever shortcut icon you want to display for that page.

Changing Your Page’s Shortcut Icon

If you have used only the default favicon.ico file at the root of your domain as your shortcut icon, and you change the icon, your users may not see the updated icon until they have cleared their history and cache as described in Troubleshooting Shortcut Icons. Internet Explorer cannot detect whether favicon.ico has changed, so it will load a new copy only if it does not have one already.

To prevent this, use a link tag as described in Associating the Shortcut Icon with Your Web Page and use a different file name for the new shortcut icon. Internet Explorer compares the file name in the link tag to the known file name stored in the history information. If the file name has changed, Internet Explorer downloads the new icon.

Adding the Web Page to the User’s Favorites Menu

In Internet Explorer 5 and Internet Explorer 6, a shortcut icon does not appear on the address bar unless the user chooses to add the page as a favorite. You can add a button or link to your page that prompts the user to add your page as a favorite. The following code is an example of one way to do this.

<script>
<!–
if ((navigator.appVersion.indexOf(“MSIE”) > 0)
  && (parseInt(navigator.appVersion) >= 4)) {
    var sText = “<u><span style=’color:blue;cursor:hand;’”;
    sText += “onclick=’window.external.AddFavorite(location.href,”;
    sText += “document.title);’>Add this page to your favorites</span></u>”;
    document.write(sText);
}
//–>
</script>

Troubleshooting Shortcut Icons

If you are seeing the incorrect or default shortcut icon for your Web page, try the following:

• Verify that the shortcut icon is the correct size and format. For more information, see Creating Icons in the Correct Size and Format. Note that shortcut icons in image formats other than .ico—for instance, .bmp, .gif, or .png—cannot be displayed in Internet Explorer.
• Clear the Internet Explorer cache and history information. If either has become corrupted, incorrect shortcut icons may appear.
  • To clear the cache and history information in Internet Explorer 7, on the Tools menu, click Delete Browsing History. Click Delete files to clear the cache, and click Delete history to clear the history information. Also, since shortcut icons for favorites are stored in the shortcut (.url) file in Internet Explorer 7, try removing the favorite and adding it again.
  • To clear the cache and history information in Internet Explorer 6, on the Tools menu, click Internet Options. Under Temporary Internet files, click Delete files, and under History, click Clear history.
• Verify that Internet Explorer can store the shortcut icon in the Temporary Internet Files folder. If you have set Internet Explorer to not keep a cache, then it will not be able to store the icon and will display the default Internet Explorer shortcut icon instead.