Archive | October, 2008
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Working around webpage display issues in Internet Explorer 8

October 3, 2008 1 Comment

In Internet Explorer 8 the way HTML data is interpreted and displayed is changed significantly compared to earlier versions. These changes, made to be more standards compliant may result in your current pages not being displayed correctly if they were not designed with these same standards in mind. This could result in overlapping text or an incorrect layout. Fortunately, there’s a way around this at the web server so that you don’t have to rush out and update every single page immediately!

Working around IE8 in IIS7

In order to get around this problem, we’re going to add a custom header to the webserver that will tell IE8 to process the page in IE7 compatibility mode, thus displaying the page in IE8 just as it would display in IE7. This edit will be site wide and affect all pages on your website.

In IIS7 we can enable what’s called Delegated administration allowing you to have full access to the same IIS Manager functions we use on the server to manage your site.  What you’ll do is open your site in the IIS Manager, Navigate to “HTTP Response Headers” as shown below:

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And then add a new header named “X-UA-Compatible” with a value “IE=EmulateIE7” as shown below:

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Working around IE8 in IIS6

In IIS6 the process is similar except you’ll navigate to the site in question in the IIS MMC and click on properties and then select the HTTP Headers tab:

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And add a new ‘Custom HTTP Header named “X-UA-Compatible” with a value “IE=EmulateIE7” as shown below:

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Working around IE8 on a per-page or per-application basis

If you don’t wish to enable this to your entire website you can also do the same thing via headers inside the <HEAD> section of your webpages. If you add the line:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

In your HTML page just below the <HEAD> line it will enable IE7 Emulation in IE8. If you use a web application with a templating engine, like wordpress you can add this to the headers template so that all pages generate have this setting. Then later after you fix the HTML of your pages you can go in and remove it.

You can learn more about this in the Microsoft Support Article: Your Web site may not display correctly in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1.

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AppliedI.net helps sponsor Extreme Makeover Home Edition project.

October 2, 2008 0 Comments

On September 26th, “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” (the popular ABC television program hosted by Ty Pennington) traveled to Holt, Michigan to tell the Nickless family that their 1860’s farmhouse would be remodeled in only seven days.  The Nickless family, like the other families featured on the show, have a very compelling story and are truly deserving of this gift:

After husband Tim Nickless passed away in January, Arlene and her three sons were left to fend for themselves in the dilapidated home. Therefore, Ty and his designers will rebuild the Nickless’ home to help them eventually rebuild their own lives after their tragic loss.

Tim Nickless was a true Renaissance man. This loving husband and father to three young boys was not only a respected nurse devoted to his patients but also a gifted craftsman, mentor and environmentalist. As president of the Lansing Area Flying Aces model airplane club, and a member of the Arbor Day Society, Tim had a lust for life and a love for all things living. However after a painful 7-year battle with Hepatitis C, Tim died on January 19, 2008. Arlene and her three boys are now on their own in a 148-year-old farmhouse that is in dire need of repairs. Its walls, floors, and foundation are deteriorating, and the old wiring is a fire hazard. Had he survived, Tim would have and could have turned this dilapidated house into their dream home. It is now up to Ty and his designers to do just that, for with Tim’s untimely passing, Arlene and the boys are desperate for help.

Finding a webhost that can help.

The builders and web developers for this project, Mayberry Homes and Preston Services realized early on that they could harness the Internet to help the project attract volunteers, donations and of course document the project online. So they launched mayberryhomesextreme.com and quickly realized that with the amount of traffic and buzz generated around the website that they would need more than just your standard website hosting service and approached their longtime hosting partner, Applied Innovations.

About the mayberry extreme web hosting account

Today the website www.mayberryhomesextreme.com runs on the Advanced Hosting plan, the VS-3. What makes the VS-3 stand out from other hosting plans is that it’s the same class of server hardware that powers our shared hosting infrastructure (A Dell PowerEdge server with dual quad core Xeon processors, Serial attached SCSI drives at 15K RPM in a high availability, high performance RAID configuration) but is limited to just 25 sites per physical machine. This configuration is ideal for those high traffic, high demand and growing websites that require more resources than a shared hosting plan would provide.

But what’s truly unique about the Applied Innovations shared hosting service and what helped Preston Services and Mayberry Homes select Applied Innovations was that we offer a ‘truly scalable, enterprise class’ hosting solution.

The mayberryhomesextreme.com site is not just hosted on a beefy shared hosting server with just a handful of other sites. It’s integrated into our hosting infrastructure and is able to take advantage of the entire hosting platform from a single management point.

Thanks to the design of our shared hosting infrastructure and customizations to our hosting control panel system should the site prove to require more resources than even the advanced hosting plan offers we can have the website migrated to a dedicated server in a matter of just minutes with near-zero downtime! To the hosting customer and web visitor, everything would still appear the same, the FTP accounts, the email accounts, email servers, the management interface, even the web analytics details would be the same and not be affected. Yet the site would be migrated to a dedicated hosting plan and if necessary a high availability load balanced solution could also be put in place with minimal impact. This is why Applied Innovations is proud of it’s ‘scalable, enterprise class’ hosting infrastructure and why companies like Mayberry Homes and Preston Services look to Applied Innovations to power their web projects.

What you can do to help and where you can learn more

If you’re interested in helping, remember you don’t have to be local to help out. Through the mayberryhomesextreme.com website you can make a donation that will go to help the project and family. In addition, Although the project is now nearing completion (building an entire home in just seven days!!) you can still volunteer to help or learn where you can go to help cheer on the workers as they finish the project at, where else, http://www.mayberryhomesextreme.com. 

In addition to the media available on the mayberryhomesextreme.com website, the local area newspaper: the Lansing State Journal, also has a twitter feed on the project and full coverage (including videos and photos) of the project on their own site.

The TV show featuring the build will air in a couple months but keep an eye on the mayberryhomesextreme.com website, I understand it will continue to get updated even after the build is completed.

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