I love how images look in the new wordpress editor found in v2.6+. But when I hit publish, they looked pretty weak. Here, I thought it was just how the theme I used wanted images to look very minimal. Turns out it’s something you’ll need to add to the majority of your theme’s stylesheets. Glad I looked it up before I went messing around with my theme.

Further reading: Floating Images within the post in WordPress 2.6 (wprocks.com) Thanks Sadish!

I love the GridFocus theme by Derek Punsalan found at 5thirtyone.com.

The only thing I would change, is i’d rather it be even more simple as in two columns instead of three. I’m not expert with WordPress, so take this simple 12 step program for what it’s worth. Here’s my quick guide to removing the third column. I hope it’s the correct way to do it:

1. Log into your dashboard, go to Appearance, then Editor.

2. Select the stylesheet, style.css

3. Find #mainColumn about half way down.

4. Change the width from 420px to 640px. Save.

5. Select Single Post, single.php.

6. Comment out the second column found at the bottom, Example:

Original:

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/second.column.post.php’); ?>

New:

<!—<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/second.column.post.php’); ?>—>

7. Save

8. Select Main Index Template, index.php.

9. Repeat Step #6 and #7.

10. Select Page Template, page.php.

11. Repeat Step #6 and #7.

12. When using widgets, put them in the Shared space.

I’ve made the switch. I’m extremely picky about web hosts, and I don’t have many crazy requirements. I barely use any disk space or bandwidth, and although I care about uptime, I probably wouldn’t notice it if I went down for a while.

What I care about is a good price, the ability to pay monthly, quick, and instant access. I am looking for something more of a playground. I program all day at work, so I want to try out new things in my free time. If they don’t work, no big deal.

That being said, I think I found my soulmate in Steadfast Networks. Now, I’ve only been a customer for a little over 24 hours, but so far I’ve had a great experience.

I was a godaddy customer at their $4.95 a month plan. I was only allowed to host this domain. Their control panel while extensive was difficult to navigate and every major action seemed to take several minutes for the server to process. I don’t fault them, but I wasn’t thrilled.

The other day, I discovered that some web hosts are offering an “unlimited domains” under a single account. This was perfect for me, I could play on multiple domains for the same low price. So I began the search for a new provider since godaddy did not offer this service in their basic package.

After reading a ton of reviews, I took a serious look at Site5, Bluehost, and Hostgator. While Bluehost and Hostgator looked great, I didn’t like the fact that you had to sign up for a year. There’s little chance I would leave within a year, but if the service is terrible right at the start, I would want to move. So, sorry Bluehost and Hostgator.

I came within minutes of signing up with Site5, until I found hostjury.com which seems to be one of the few websites host reviews that isn’t an obvious marketing site for a web host. Site5, while it seemed to enjoy great ratings before, was recently bombing out on Site5. Supposedly, some new management was causing problems. While I can’t confirm this one way or the other, I decided not to go with them.

From hostjury, coming in around #5 was Steadfast Networks. From the reviews, the customers seemed to love them. They offered multiple domains and I could pay monthly if I so desired. After doing some snooping, I signed up with their 2nd level account at $4.95 a month.

I was blown away by how quickly I had access to the account and how wonderful their control panel was. It was simple and straight forward. Let’s be honest, most people using these control panels know a thing or two about computers and we don’t need to be glamored by graphics. We just want to be able to do things quickly ::cough godaddy cough::. I transfered a few domains from godaddy paid and free hosting and within minutes the sites were up and running. Multiple domains under a single account.

I tried their one click install of wordpress, and while it worked it was a few versions behind. I decided I’d do it myself. Steadfast’s DB tool was great, the FTP worked immediately, and everything seemed great. Within an hour I had several blog software up and running.

As of right now I’d give Steadfast Networks a 10/10. As long as the uptime is reasonable and they don’t screw up billing I don’t see where this could go wrong. I’ll try to update as I get some more time on their servers.

Well, this error is pretty much the entire reason I decided to start my own blog. During the work day, I often look to the internet for the solution to errors or coding help. I feel I’ve become quite handy with google.com and rarely am I stuck with a problem for more than a few minutes.

Then I met this error. I even actually opened up an incident with Microsoft, something I once thought I’d never do. I’m not a Microsoft hater, nor do I doubt the answer was somewhere at Microsoft, perhaps by a lot of employees. But, I know how large corporations work, and it’s just frustrating working your way up the call ladder to get to someone who can actually help. I’d probably find a solution quicker by just formatting my machine and started from scratch.

Enough with the introduction, here’s the error.

At work I’ve developed an application that was to be deployed by clickonce. I published several versions and everything appeared to be working perfectly. We began to test the application on a wider range of machines as it came closer to application’s release date. It turns out that the ClickOnce applications that I was publishing, would not work on any machine that did not have all the prerequisites. If a machine was lacking any prerequisites, you could click on the “Install” button on the publish.htm but the user was instantly prompted by two empty dialog boxes.

 

As you can see, it’s very descriptive.

Anyhow, after some digging on the client machine, I did find an error in the Windows temp directory.

Error: An error occurred attempting to extract setup configuration file.
The following error occurred initializing the bootstrapper: “An error occurred attempting to extract setupconfiguration file.”

Google doesn’t bring up much on this error.

I had other developers try publishing the application after downloading it from source control. They had no problem publishing a working setup.exe. This problem was limited to my machine. So, I began creating new completely blank projects and immediately tried to publish them via clickonce. I got the same result each time. This problem was plaguing my entire machine, not just ClickOnce.

So, I started looking at the setup.exe my machine was publishing. Turns out my setup.exe was always 320kb. On the other development machines, they were 422kb. My setup.exe were a valid win32 image but, obviously they were missing something. I found out you could drag setup.exe’s into Visual Studio and examine them, so I did this:

Bad Setup.Exe

 

 

And the good one:

 

Pretty major difference, right?

So, I searched my machine and found in previous projects my setup.exe were 422kb, so I had a time frame of where something went wrong. In one previous project I did a lot of work with certificates, so I spent some time trying to see if certificates were working on my machine, no luck.

Finally, I decided to remove a few programs each morning at work. (At the same time I was getting emails from my assigned Microsoft Tech telling me he thought it could be Firefox on the client machines). On the second day, I removed two programs: Microsoft’s WSE (Web Services Enhancements) 3.0 and .NET Memory Profiler Trial Version 3.0 by Scitech Software.

I loved the .NET Memory Profiler but my trial ran up and I even sorta forgot it existed, so I removed that. I still needed WSE but I was so convienced something with certificates had messed this up, I had to remove it.

Lo and behold after the removal of these programs, everything works again.

I reinstalled WSE and tried ClickOnce again, and everything was still fine.

I kept WSE and installed .NET Memory Profiler and my setup.exe was corrupt again. So, I’m somewhat certain that it was just the Memory Profiler but, I can’t say with 100%.

What I can say, is if you are having this problem, please remove WSE and any IDE add-on’s you have. Perhaps do it one at a time.

I let Microsoft know they could close my incident that although firefox on the client machines was a damn good suggestion (dripping sarcasm) but it was actually WSE or .NET Memory Profiler. I received a congratulations and was told that “WSE and ClickOnce is a known issue” Of course that pissed me off, I wish I would have been told that during the first phone call when I asked if anything could interfere with that.

Hope this saved someone out there some time that I lost.
UPDATE (3/14/08): Microsoft did refund my incident here. So, no harm no foul. Perhaps I’ll try their support again one day.

UPDATE (11/13/08): I’ve been using clickonce nearly daily since this incident and not one problem since. I have recieved some feedback from other people with this same issue, and it always seems to be solved by uninstalling some plugin software to visual studio. So, I believe the ultimate answer to this issue is to remove your plugins one by one.