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 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/

We’ve talked before about using content management systems, whether database-based or flat-file. As you may know, some of the CMS’s out there are very powerful and can be used to create some amazing websites and communities. In a previous post I talked about the simplicity and ease of using a flat-file CMS.

Another option for creating a website, apart from hand coding it yourself, is to use templates and build on them. To this end, I want to share with you two wonderful resources I discovered the other day. I am going to be exploring and using these resources myself and you may see me mention them again, but in this post I just want to introduce them.

The first is the Open Source Web Design project. Open Source Web Design is a site where you can download free web design templates and share yours with others. The goal is to help make the internet a prettier place, and the templates you find there are really nice to look at, and can inspire you with a slew of ideas. As of this post, there are currently 2080 free designs for you to download and play with. If you download and use one of the templates, make sure you read and adhere to the Usage Agreement and the copyright information of each template.

The second resource that I want to share with you today is the Dynamic Drive DHTML and Javascript Code Library. This is one of my favorite places to find and download free, original DHTML (Dynamic HTML) and Javascript scripts to enhance your web site. Some of the scripts you will find on this website include:

* Calendars
* Date & Time
* Document Effects
* Dynamic Content
Iframe & Ajax,
* Form Effects
* Games
* Image Effects
Galleries, Mouseover, Slideshows
* Links & Tooltips
* Menus & Navigation
CSS Based, Multi-levels
* Mouse and Cursor
* Scrollers
* Text Animations
* User/System Preference
* Window and Frames
* XML and RSS

and others.

Between these two resources, you may be able to come up with some ideas for projects in the new year.

If you have a large csv file that you have tried to open in Excel, you know how troublesome that can be, because Excel is limited in the number of rows and columns of data it can handle - 65,536 rows of data and 256 columns per worksheet. Truncation of rows or columns in excess of the limit is automatic and is not configurable.

I discussed this problem before in the post Splitting large csv files - the CSV Splitter where I introduced you to Scorpion’s nifty little program, the CSV splitter, which takes large csv files and splits them into separate smaller files and you decide how many rows you want each file to be. Previously, as you will see if you read my post on Splitting large csv files, you had to register on the forums to be able to download it. Scorpion just updated me that he has now provided a direct download link so that you no longer have to register but can download the csv splitter directly.

You can now download the csv splitter directly here.

The program is easy to use and is a lifesaver if you are like me and frequently work with large csv files. You can Splitting large csv files - the CSV Splitter read more about the csv splitter, and please do leave a thank you for Scorpion.

My friend Bo recently pointed me in the direction of a cool great app, it’s “The Open Source Development Environment for .NET”, aka #develop, and what it does is allow you to create .NET applications in a free open-source environment. #develop (short for SharpDevelop) is a free IDE for C#, VB.NET and Boo projects on Microsoft’s .NET platform. It is open-source, and you can download both sourcecode and executables from the sharpdevelop website. For those of you who program in the .NET framework, this is definitely worth a look.

I haven’t made the move to .NET yet, so this might just be the impetus I need!!

Happy Coding!

I recently came across a website that has a bunch of free database tools. These are PHP scripts. I haven’t tried any of these tools so I can’t really vouch for them.

The website is http://scripts.ringsworld.com/database-tools/. If you have used any of the tools listed on this page, please leave a comment and let us know.

Happy coding!