Fremus.co.za

Wow, what a difference the Dashboard is. Its a total revamp, and I totally like it. Amazing work these guys put into this Blog CMS.

Today I also experimented briefly with the Extended Desktop feature that comes with some graphics accelerators. I am specifically referring to one that I have running on a HP laptop. What this particular accelerator does is allow you to create an extended desktop,  and with that feature you can run the Presenter view in Powerpoint, which basically allows you to run the presentation without the audience seeing the details of the PowerPoint interface. In other words all they get to see is the Slide Show, nothing else of what you are doing. So, I decided to create a little WPF application that has a width greater than the monitor size, and low and behold it overflows onto the other screen. This is interesting for several reasons. Firstly PowerPoint is not great for everything, and one thing it is not good at is displaying data. This often means that if you have an Access Database you will have to write some VBA code to extract that data and display it. So I thought that maybe the other option could be to write a WPF app that displays content on an extended desktop.  If that works its quite feasible to write better logic for everthing and actually use relational data.

What does it take to host Silverlight content on a site? Why would I want to publish Silverlight content on my website?

Well, to host Silverlight content on a website that runs Apache is not the same as running .NET content on IIS. Its kinda obvious that .NET content cannot and will not run under Apache. Remember though that Silverlight is a plugin, the same as Flash, and you are simply pointing to a file (XAP) that executes on the client side. Silverlight is a client side technology if you really think about it. I have in the week for instance, experienced that content will not immediately update on the client side even if you updated it on the server side.

It is thus possible to run Silverlight content on Apache, as this simple HTML document shows. It however seems that running Silverlight in WordPress requires an iframe:

Why would I want to run Silverlight on Apache? There are many reasons I can think of and the list may grow or shrink depending on what I think is relevant for me, but here are some reasons:

• I can keep my C# skills and keep using Visual Studio. Why would I want to give up using one of the best and most powerful IDE’s in the world.
• Silverlight is a genuine Flash alternative and because it integrates so beautifully with Visual Studio and C# I can truly start developing great rich internet applications

I regularly check out www.jimmyr.com for the top digg posts and images and I also clicked through to another very popular web design portal called Smashing Magazine and found their one of their latest articles with 30 “free” wordpress themes from which I found my current website’s theme. Its really quite clean and crisp

So I noticed that my site had an incoming link (the WordPress dashboard shows this) and I clicked on that link and came across this site where they have an exact copy of one of my articles. On the same site I clicked through to the WordPress blog and saw that they have updated their theme directory. The theme directory seems to contain a few nice looking themes and one in particular seems cool, and I have decided to use it. Its called Amazing Grace and worked well the first time. Its interesting to see that WordPress 2.6 now creates a little theme preview window. Nice touch.

While chilling to Armin van Buuren’s A State of Trance Episode 356 I decided to instal Wordbook, a plugin that:

Use your WordPress blog to publish updates to your Profile Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds.

It takes a few seconds to download the WordBook plugin and a few more seconds to extract the contents and upload it to a webserver. Once uploaded go to “Settings”, where you will be prompted to provide a one-time code, which is generated through Facebook. The code just allows you to post on WordPress and this allows the posts to be displayed on your Facebook profile, without having to login to Facebook. This is my first post with this plug in! So I will see if it works!

Its sad to say but the WordPress theme directory is not up to scratch. The themes seem old and out of date. I have added a new theme called TechJunkie and it seems like a pretty awesome theme.