Appliedi.net Windows Web Hosting Blog

Applied Innovations is always trying to bring more value to our e-commerce web hosting customers. We often will find a popular product that our customers find useful, and we will see if we can get our customers a discount. Revolver Commerce makes many useful add-ons to the ASPDotNetStorefront e-commerce app, and they also provide design and development services.

Revolver Commerce brings some much needed add-on applications to the already wonderful ASPDNSF product. These apps can save you a lot of time, and potentially increase sales. I was able to ask Chris McKellar, one of the lead developers at Revolver Commerce about their products. Here’s a couple of the questions I asked:

From customer feedback you’ve received, what might be the most important add-on if someone had to choose just one?

“Product Attributes. Search is a great add-on, but there are a couple others out there as well. Attributes is something that was desperately needed in the ASPDNSF community and we’re thrilled to have had the opportunity to be able to provide a solution there.”

I see that my purchase of an add-on includes a year of upgrades. Can you tell me about how often they are updated? For example, if ASPDNSF releases a new version, if there’s any compatibility issues, will there be an update to the add-on?

“Add-ons will be updated shortly after ASPDNSF releases new versions. As we add features to the add-ons, we’ll also update our clients with those features. We have no specific roadmap for feature development since it’s highly demand driven from our client base.”

AppliedI customers can log into the control panel  and check out the market place to redeem a 10% off coupon from Revolver Commerce for add-ons to your ASPdotnetstorefront website.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Remember those SSL certificates called Extended Validation certificates? Well, one of their major drawbacks was that they only worked when your customer was using IE7 to browse your website. Now, with Firefox version 3, you have more than 8 million more browsers on the internet able to see an EV certificate. Upon entering a site using a EV SSL certificate, Firefox will display a green button, much like IE7′s green bar. A blue button means an SSL certificate is installed, but it’s not an EV cert, and a grey button means the  page you’re on is not using SSL. The worst buttons to see are red (a known malicious website) or yellow (an invalid SSL certificate). You can read more about this new feature here.

Firefox 3 has many other new features. Among them is a better handling on your computers resources (memory) which equals a quicker more efficient browsing experience.  Other features include a new URL discovery designed to allow you to quickly navigate to the website you want to get to. The address bar will try to find an address you’re typing based on your browsing history.

As always, our customers can purchase a Comodo EV SSL certificate from Applied Innovations at a greatly discounted rate ($349.95 as of the date of this writing).

Popularity: 1% [?]

Today Joomla released an update to their CMS called “Naiki” and our PHP webhosting customers using this CMS may want to install the update. If you are running a previous version 1.5.x, you should download the update patch and run it. You can read the release notes and installation instructions here.

Although Applied Innovations is an ASP.net specialized web-host, many do not realize that PHP is available to our customers. With the flip of a switch in the HELM control panel, you can enable PHP. Then, with a mySQL database which is included with VS-1 and higher plans, you can install Joomla! for free and have a huge community of PHP/Open Source developers working together to bring you free add-ons such as the famous free shopping cart “Virtuemart“. PHP runs on Windows, and it runs great especially with “Fast CGI” which is installed on AppliedI’s shared webservers. It should be noted that an advantage of Windows and IIS is that you can run ASP.net 3.5 and PHP side-by-side. Something you can not do on Linux (Well, not 100% functionally anyway; see “ASP.net – mod_mono“).

Popularity: 1% [?]

Consider it a little gift for the holidays, AppliedI.net has commissioned the design of 3 FREE wordpress themes and are providing these completely free to our wordpress hosting customers and the wordpress community at large. Best of all, if you install wordpress now through our one click installer these 3 themes will be immediately available for your use. We’re also including the PSD files so you can update images as needed.

To install any of these blogs just download them, unzip them and then upload the entire folder in a subfolder in your wp-content/themes/ folder. Then select them from the theme manager in WordPress.

Free WordPress Theme #1 – Gone Fishing

Gone Fishing is a fully W3C validated theme that is also widget ready! The included PSD file is layered and labeled and easily modified if you so please.

DOWNLOAD    or    DEMO

Free WordPress Theme #2 – The Awesome Blog

Awesome Blog is like no other blog design you’ve probably seen.  It should be easy to modify and tweak to your own settings. We’ve included the PSD file with this blog so you can adjust the header banner with your own text or logos.

DOWNLOAD    or    DEMO

Free WordPress Theme #3 – The Sleek Blog

The Sleek Blog is a 3 column blog that is just simply sleek.  It’s a very clean design that’s easy to read and not overly colorful or overwhelming.

The sleek blog also includes the PSD file so the banner images can be modified to your needs.

DOWNLOAD    or    DEMO

We hope you find the three blog themes easy to use and enjoy them. If you make any changes to the themes and wish to share those changes with the community feel free to drop us a line and we’ll make sure it’s posted. 

Happy Blogging!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Applied Innovations is pleased to announced we have partnered with DotNetInvoice, makers of the ASP.NET billing and invoicing system, DotNetInvoice to offer dotnetinvoice hosting.

DotNetInvoice is a comprehensive ASP.NET based invoice and billing system that allows all types of organizations to offer online invoicing and real-time payment processing. Today DotNetInvoice is commonly used by webhosting companies, web design firms,  web developers and consultants of all types.

Professional ASP.NET Invoicing software features

DotNetInvoice includes a large number of features that can be found on their features page and some of the features that really stand out for us include:

• ASP.NET 2.0 Application Integration – DotNetInvoice uses the standard ASP.NET 2.0 membership and roles providers so it can easily be integrated with your existing ASP.NET 2.0 based web application for seemless integration.
  
• Automated Hands-Free Recurring Invoicing – DotNetInvoice supports the ability to setup recurring invoicing on any period of time you wish, days, months or years and then will automatically email your clients their invoice when it comes due.
  
• Support for PayPal Website Payments Pro, Paypal and Authorize.net – Real-time online payments for your invoices, no phone calls, no checks to deposit just setup the site, email your clients and let the payments get submitted and best of all since it’s online your clients can submit payments at anytime, night or day, that’s convenient for them.
  
• Globalization - Out of the box, DotNetInvoice supports the following countries and currencies: Australia (AUD), Canada (CAD), China (CNY), Great Britain (GBP), India (INR), Ireland (EUR), Japan (JPY), New Zealand (NZD), USA (USD).
  
• Graphical reporting - A pictures is worth a thousand words:
  

These are just a few of the features we found most useful in DotNetInvoice and we believe our hosting partners will enjoy. We recommend you visit the DotNetInvoice site and the DotNetInvoice Demo to experience all of the power of this great application.

Special Offering: $40 Off Coupon for DotNetInvoice

DotNetInvoice is compatible with all of our hosting plans but we recommend the VS-1 Small Business hosting plan since it includes 250MB of SQL database spac, full support for ASP.NET 2.0, the ability to run your own SSL certificate (which you’ll need if you’re taking credit card information over the Internet) and starts at just $22.50/month. 

In addition, DotNetInvoice is making a special offering to all Applied Innovations hosted customers and offering $40 off their normal price. Deploying DotNetInvoice will save you time and money and with $40 off you’re already ahead. To access this special offer and any of our other great offers, remember to log into your control panel and select the Marketplace icon.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Hello, this is Andre, I’m one of the newest members of the team and thought I’d share a little with you about this new tool from Microsoft called "Windows Live Writer".

Today I’ve been introduced to Windows Live Writer by a colleague and thought about sharing this magnificent tool with you.
Basically, Windows Live Writer is a very small application that will allow you to manage your posts directly from your desktop.

This is extremely practical because you don’t need to log into your blog’s admin page anymore. Windows Live Writer stores your admin details so all you have to do is to run the application and start posting!

Here’s a screenshot of the dashboard:

(this is actually how it starts up)

As you probably noticed on the top-right corner, there’s a WordPress logo and our Blog Title there.
This helps you to identify the blog you’re currently posting to (very helpful if you work on multiple blogs).

Windows Live Writer is compatible with the following platforms:

»» Windows Live Spaces
»» SharePoint (Supported by AppliedI)
»» WordPress (Supported by AppliedI)
»» Blogger
»» LiveJournal
»» TypePad
»» Moveable Type
»» Community Server
»» dasBlog (dasblog hosting is offered by appliedi.net)
»» BlogEngine.NET (blogengine.net hosting is offered by appliedi.net)

One of the things I like the most on this small application is its built-in WYSIWYG Editor.
So no more HTML coding for highlights, links or anything else. You can just do it there, using its simple and effective interface.

Did I also mention that it also has its own Spell-Checking engine? It does!
So this is great news to all of you that were worried about that. Not to mention that you won’t need any extra plugin in your blog platform to check for grammar errors.

Another feature that has impressed me is the fact that you can blog without being online.
So now I can comfortably write my articles while watching TV or even on the kitchen while I wait for my pizza to be ready. Impressive, isn’t it?
It will basically save your posts on the local hard drive, and it will publish them as soon as you connect to the internet.

So I guess we won’t have reasons not to update our blogs anymore.

Windows Live Writer Beta Download page:
http://get.live.com/en-us/betas/writer_betas

NOTE: During the installation, the InstallShield Wizard might appear to have crashed during the "Checking for Installed Products" step.
While I don’t believe this is normal (most likely a bug), it didn’t really crash. I personally had to wait almost 5 minutes for that step to complete; so don’t panic.

Popularity: 2% [?]