Website Designers and Webmasters

I use Adobe Dreamweaver 8, and every time I go to work on a large website (where I have a large number of files on my local server), I get a little pop up dialog saying:

Opening Site WebsitesinaFlash.com

Searching for new and changed files.
You can safly stop this if you have not
changed any files outside of Dreamweaver…

Here’s a quick screenshot of the dialog that pops up:

Searching for new and changed files.

This has been getting increasingly annoying, as if I don’t his stop, it takes up to 10 seconds to finish the scan. Most of the time when I do hit stop, it lags for 6 seconds and then stops.
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I just searched the WordPress Plugins section for “twitter” and I got 17 pages of plugins and most of them are crap… ugh.

All I want is a Twitter Plugin that will:

1. Send a tweet to my twitter when I post on my blog.
2. Adds a re-tweet link to each blog post.

How difficult can this be? After installing a few highly-rated plugins, and not being satisfied, I decided to write up what I found. This is only 6 of the most popular twitter plugins I could find. If you know of a better one, please let me know so I can check it out. This is in order of Best to Good. I don’t have any crappy plugins on this list. They should all work, at least partially.

Twitter Tools – v1.6

WordPress Plugin Page

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

Well that’s a promising introduction. It’s a very simple installation, and just about everything is editable in an easily-accessible Twitter Tools Page. Put in your information, select your preferences, and you are good to go.
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Although I primarily use MySQL on linux servers, I’ve had a couple clients using MSSQL databases for all sorts of things from email marketing to order tracking. For these clients, I use Microsoft SQL Sever Management Studio Express and have saved many of the MSSQL queries I’ve had to create. Some of these will work fine in MySQL as is or with minimal tweaking.

Here’s a collection of the useful MSSQL Queries I’ve used and saved. This is by no means a comprehensive list of all the MSQL Queries and MSSQL statements, but I hope they can be useful for you.

MSSQL Variables

Being able to declare MSSQL Variables has saved so much time for sets queries that I need to run multiple times with slight variations.

This is a very basic example, but has everything you need. MSSQL Variables must begin with a “at symbol” (@). You first declare the MSSQL variables and assign it a character type (in this case, I’m just using varchar(55). 55 is the maximum number of characters to be stored in the variable. Then you set a value for the variables.

Declare @email1 varchar(55), @name1 varchar(55)
set @email1 = ‘%websitesinaflash.com%’
set @name1 = ‘%Ashton Sanders%’

SELECT *
FROMÂ Â email_database
WHERE email_address LIKE @email1
AND first_name LIKE @name1

MSSQL UNION

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AWeber is a very popular web-based email marketing service.

What is an email marketing service?

An email marketing service is a company that does all of the technical aspects of maintaining an email/newsletter list. If you want to start sending out an email newsletter, since it is one of the best ways of marketing on the internet, there are many email marketing services that will handle the removes, bounces, ESP whitelisting, and all of the other tasks a large email newsletter sender would have to do.

The down side of using any email marketing service is that you have to follow their rules and do thing their way. So it’s very useful to know how the different email service providers work so you can make an intelligent decision on which one to use, as there are many of them.

AWeber

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It has been a crazy year so far, and we barely finished the first quarter. Websites in a Flash has been keeping me very busy, so I have been neglecting all of my blogs.

But at least I do have something to show those who ask “What has Ashton Sanders been up to?” This blog is the first unavailing of the new Websites in a Flash logo and website design branding. It’s been a long process, and it turns out: Ashton Sanders is the pickiest client I’ve ever had to deal with.

They say the cobbler’s children go without shoes, and that has really happened with Websites in a Flash. It has been years since I was able to update it. (Some of the spacing is even mixed up on the Website Clients in Internet Explorer 7.0… that’ll give you an idea of how long it’s been.)

Other things to note: I have joined a group called Montana Programmers which has quickly grown to 12+ “extreme programmers” (of all skill levels). We have monthly meetings where we can connect with and share ideas with other website programmers in the area. I’ve been working on websites for 4 years in Polson Montana, but only knew of 2 other website developers in the area.

Tomorrow will be the second meeting I will attend and will be doing a 45 minute “brain dump” (seminar) on CSS. I’ll be covering the very basics and some more advanced items.

That seems to be a good update for now. I plan to finish the new website design for Websites in a Flash, and then will be back to routine updates on this blog!

Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders

(P.S. I’ve got a great new project in the works for those looking to learn everything there is to know about CSS!)