Month: February 2008

Flat File Blogging with FlatPress

If you’re into blogging and host your own blog, you are aware of the need for MySQL databases when you install most blogging platforms, and this is because most blogging programs, and indeed most content management systems store their data in a database. This is generally not a problem because most web hosts offer MySQL databases. But there are situations where you may not have or want to use a database.

Flatpress is a standard-compliant multi-lingual extensible blogging engine which does not require a database to work. Better yet, it’s open source. FlatPress stores all of its content on text files and therefore you don’t need a MySQL database. Installing it is a breeze, and you can get several themes to work with. Theming is done with Smarty and PHP, and the Wiki on the official Flatpress site has some useful information on this and other topics. There are a good number of plugins available, including Akismet, Categories, Calender, etc. Flatpress also has the ability to use widgets using the blockparser plugin.

All in all, FlatPress looks like it’s worth exploring, and is something I will be looking at and playing with more.

Have you used or do you use FlatPress? Please share your thoughts and experiences with us.

Microsoft going Open Source?

I just read this from the BBC News website:

Microsoft has announced that it will open up the technology of some of its leading software to make it easier to operate with rivals’ products.
The technology giant is to publish key software blueprints on its website.
It also promised not to sue open source developers for making that software available for non-commercial use.

Are we talking Microsoft going open source on some of it’s products?
Here is the link to the full news article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7257411.stm

It will be interesting to see where this goes. The fact that they’re now handing free developer tools to students tells me that Microsoft has stepped up their efforts at getting more developers to work with and get used to the Microsoft Suite of tools. And their goal now is to get them when they’re still young. I suppose with all the free and open source solutions that are available, Microsoft is feeling the pressure and the cost, and they want

Free Microsoft Developer Software and Tools for Students – Full and Professional Editions

Microsoft is offering free developer and design software for students all around the world. Students can download professional-level Microsoft developer and design tools.

The downloads currently (as of this posting) listed are:

  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
  • Microsoft Expression Studio
  • xna Game Studio 2.0
  • xna Creators Club Online
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition

Other free products include:

  • Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition
  • Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition
  • Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
  • Microsoft Visual Web 2005 Express Edition
  • Microsoft Visual J# 2005 Express Edition
  • Microsoft Virtual PC

In order to get this software from Microsoft at no charge, you first have to log into the website using your Windows live account, and if you don’t have one it’s easy and free to create one. You are then asked to establish or verify your student status and you have to do this verification once every 12 months. This process is built into this DreamSpark site itself. You need to be at least 18 years old or have otherwise reached the age of majority in the place (province, state or country) where you live, or if not, your parent or legal guardian must accept the Microsoft DreamSpark software license terms on your behalf, in order for you to download and use the software.

As of this posting, the countries listed were:

  • Belgium
  • Canada
  • China
  • Finland
  • France
  • Germany
  • Spain
  • Sweden
  • United Kingdom
  • United States.

If your school is on the list then the verification process is easy. If not, you have to go a step further and provide more information to attempt online verification. If that doesn’t work then you need to mail in your information such as current school ID to them for verification.The other thing to keep in mind is that the software being offered is only accessible via a download, and as you know these are not small programs, so you’re in luck if you have a fast internet connection. Considering that these are full editions, and not limited student editions, I think that if you’re a student or a parent of a student who is into computers and coding, it’s definitely worth the process to get the free downloads.

To access the download area, select your product and start the verification process: https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/

A delimiter with non-delimiter uses during data import in Excel

I ran into an interesting situation the other day when trying to import some data into Excel. I had a text file with words and definitions that I needed to have in two columns in Excel, one for the word and one for the definition.

The words and their definitions were separated by a hyphen (-), so I could have gone ahead and done a direct import and specified the hyphen as the delimiter. The tricky part was that the hyphen appeared in some of the definitions too, and so using it as a delimiter would have split some of the definitions into separate columns, and I would have had to go through the sheet and reunite the definitions. Given that I had over 10,000 entries, this was a less than optimal solution, and not very time efficient.

I work a lot with Excel and Excel formulas, but I am by no means an Excel guru, and I am sure there’s a pretty simple solution, maybe a macro or something, for this kind of situation. But I used a formula to solve my problem as explained below:

What I did was paste the contents of my text file into one column with no separation between word and definition, with each entry in it’s own row. I then wanted to split the column into two, one with the word and one with the definition. I then used the right, left, len, and find functions. So with my data in column A, I put the following formulas columns B and C respectively and filled down.

=LEFT(A1,FIND(“-“,A1)-1)
=RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-FIND(“-“,A1))

This worked perfectly, and solved my problem in seconds. Do you have any suggestions for a different way to do this?

Share your Programming/Coding Tips and Tricks

I am pleased to announce that I will be starting a guest post series. I am inviting programmers and coders from all languages and platforms to share their coding tips and tricks, snippets, and stories. It doesn’t matter what your level of experience is, anything you have to share is a welcome addition, so if you would like to share some knowledge or even talk about your programming services, please feel free to drop me a line by leaving a comment here or sending me an email at info (at) maryspad (dot) com and we’ll take it from there. The only condition is that your post must share some useful coding tips or snippets.

I look forward to hearing from you.