Brandon LeBlanc - A Self-Proclaimed Windows Geek

I’ve spent some time this weekend working on getting things lined up and ready to go in moving this blog to Telligent’s Graffiti CMS platform. You can check out my progress at http://beta.brandonleblanc.com. Essentially the site is pretty much ready to go live - in my opinion. I’ve got a few things to iron out prior to the end of this weekend (hopefully) and by Monday I hope to have the site completely migrated over. It looks like I need to sift through each and every post I imported from WordPress to tweak some formatting issues and tag issues unfortunately - and this could take some time. I don’t want to do the move until I have gone through my posts.

I’ve heard reports of folks getting “invalid host” errors while trying to access the Graffiti site. If you’ve seen this, please leave a comment and let me know. I’m not sure why exactly this is occurring but need to investigate further.

Also: I know some things are a bit wonky with the theme and intend to continue tweaking it into this next week. Usually with my themes it takes me a few weeks of tweaks to get it right where I like it to be.

With my theme I have going on Graffiti - its essentially the same theme here except I am trying to use more eye-pleasing fonts and font sizes to make the site “cleaner” and much easier to read. I am also tweaking the spacing between sentences as well. Let me know what you think.

I went on a roadtrip this past weekend with a good friend of mine and took a ton of photos which I used Windows Live Photo Gallery to stitch together to create panoramic shots.

I did a write up with lots more panoramic shots over on the Windows Experience Blog.

One of the things Windows Vista has enabled for me since its release is for me to get more serious about digital photography. And now with Windows Live Photo Gallery to manage my photos - I’m getting even more serious

My new web server is back online tonight and now running 64-bit. Check it out running Graffiti CMS over at http://beta.brandonleblanc.com.

I have a post going on over at the Beta Site asking for Feedback. Please leave it

My new server (hosting http://beta.brandonleblanc.com running Graffiti) went down early today with what appears to be an “hardware failure”. It will be at least Thursday before I can drive down to where my server is hosted and take a look at what has happened - as I am about to head out the door to head up to Redmond. I’m not sure at this point if I’ll have to rebuild or simply fix the hardware issue and have the server come up.

This is disappointing of course but part of the risk in building your own server with misc parts.

This evening I successfully completed bringing my new Windows Server 2008 server online along with Graffiti CMS - which I’ll be developing and migrating this blow to.

You can access the new server and site here: http://beta.brandonleblanc.com. I’ve also made a post here about the beta site.

I’ve imported my content from here to Graffiti but have had a couple issues: lots of formatting issues within the posts, tags didn’t import correctly, and the URL in Graffiti isn’t the same as the format WordPress uses for each individual post (permalink) - meaning it won’t match the URL’s I’ve used and cached on the web. My biggest concern is the breaking of my permalinks for individual posts because this is what search engines have indexed and when folks do a search and find a topic on my site from one of the old URL’s, they’ll get an error.

In the next couple weeks I am hoping to find ways around these issues I’ve come across as well and reconstruct my theme (perhaps even better than what I have here today).

I welcome any suggestions and thoughts!

New Server for Windows Server 2008 continues to be a work-in-progress as of this evening due to some unexpected hardware issues.

I am working on my Windows Server 2008 box as I write this. It should be up by the end of the weekend. If everything goes according to plan - I’ll have Windows Server 2008 up and running with Graffiti at beta.brandonleblanc.com. This is where I will continue to develop the site under Windows Server 2008 and Graffiti. Once I get it to a point I feel is good enough to go completely live with - I’ll switch beta.brandonleblanc.com with my main site and completely move away from WordPress all together.

I’ll post more when I get the server up and running.

Special thanks to Jason Alexander from Telligent for promptly responding to a few questions this weekend. Heck, everyone from Telligent has been incredibly helpful and responsive to questions and comments. I really appreciate it!

Dare Obasanjo has announced that his blogging at www.25hoursaday.com/weblog as been put on indefinite hiatus and he won’t be blogging anywhere else outside of a RSS Bandit blog with a location TBD.

This disappoints me quite a bit. Dare was one of the first Microsoftie blogs I remember having in my very first RSS feed reader - which ironically was RSS Bandit (his feed was in there by default too). I’ve enjoyed reading Dare over the last few years.

Dare has recently worked on one of my most favorite features on any of the Windows Live services - the What’s New page on Windows Live Spaces.

Dare also says he’s cleaning up his Twitter account and Facebook account - only keeping around “friends” he’s actually met personally. I use this practice today with Windows Live and Facebook. If I don’t know who you are, I don’t accept the friend invites. Shouldn’t your friends truly be your friends? Hopefully this doesn’t make me sound too bad of a person. You could always let me know who you are though. Of course this also completely explains why Dare hasn’t accepted my friend’s request of Windows Live Spaces.

Its a shame to see Dare go dark but looking forward to any “comeback” he may make in the future!

It seems that Windows Live Home (home.live.com) has received a small update integrating Office Live Workspace into the “More Services” section.

I thought this was really neat. You can see my Workspace I set up for the Windows Vista Team Blog just recently.

I also noticed that when I sign in to Office Live Workspace the URL changes to workspace.office.live.com. I find it interesting that Office Live now sits under the live.com domain.

I look forward to seeing Office Live and Windows Live integrate further!

Today Microsoft announced that Office Live Workspace Beta is now open for everyone (yes, including me finally!).

I just logged in and am checking it out for the first time. I’ll blog about my thoughts after I spend more time with it.

Head on over to workspace.officelive.com and sign-up yourself!