Another "what type are you quiz."  This time, it was for a file extension.  As a computer geek, I couldn't pass it up.  However, The results don't seem to jive all that well if you ask me...

Which File Extension are You?

Has anyone else tried out IE 7 Beta 1?  I recently installed it, and while I like the advent of tabbed browsing, there are other features that have annoyed me.  For example, many sites that use scripting no longer work as a result of the upgrade, and I can no longer enter my time for work or even log into Engy's Experiment!  I've looked in the options to see if I have to check/uncheck something, but haven't yet discovered the problem.  The interface itself is nothing special, although Microsoft appears to be taking the Google approach of simplicity in their UI.  I'm not digging the tiny new back/forward buttons, and can't find a way to increase their visibility.  In addition, it is reporting www.jasonengstrom.com as a potential Phishing site!!  What??  I'd love to know their criteria for selecting a "potential phisher" and how my site shows up on the list. 

Granted, I haven't spent a ton of time evaluating it and haven't even tried out the new Web Feed functionality (thanks to BlogLines), but I'm ready to uninstall.  Which, leads me to another point...how the heck DO YOU uninstall it?  It doesn't show up as an option in my Add/Remove programs list, and even in the Windows Component section, it shows up as using 0.0 MB and uninstalling it via that method has proved unfruitful. 

IE 7 is going to lose my business unless the final product is markedly improved!

[UPDATE:]
Just found this post over on the Framework Zone and bingo, IE 7 is history!

Google is in danger of losing my business!  Googling my name still points to my deleted MSN space, and there is no reference to www.jasonengstrom.com anywhere that I've found.  It's been over a week since I moved the site, so what gives?  How long does it take for search engines to update their results?  I know their bot is pinging me daily, so I think it's odd that Google seems to have no knowledge of my site. 

Any tips on how to gain better visibility?  Google's my last hope!  MSN and Yahoo lost my business years ago.  ...Stupid graphic intensive sites ;-)

My apologies to anyone experiencing the dreaded 403.9 "Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected" errors.  I didn't realize my little blog was so popular ;-)

Running IIS 5.1 with its 10 concurrent connection limitation seems to be the culprit.  Unfortunately, hardware limitations are preventing me from upgrading the server to 2k3 and subsequently IIS 6.  However, I found this nifty little post describing how to max your IIS 5.1 connections at 40.  Hopefully this well help alleviate the connection issues for the time being.

I've also given permission to a "little hacker friend" (who also happens to be a competent Halo 2 buddy) of mine to take a look at my current security situation.  Will be interesting to see how helpful the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer tool is.

The other day I was talking to Kevin, and he encouraged me to host the blog myself.  Initially when I started this blog, I used MSN spaces because it was free and there were really no hurdles to jump in order to get my thoughts out.  After running into problems using spaces, I decided it was time for dasBlog!

The whole process was really quite simple and I got the site up and running in only an hour or so.  Basically, I headed over to EasyDNS and registered JasonEngstrom.com and set them up as my DNS host.  This was probably the most time consuming part of the whole process, since I was trying to decide what domain name to use, and there are several I was considering that were already taken (www.theengstroms.com, www.engstroms.com, www.engstroms.net).  I finally decided I might as well grab my name since it was available.  So, for a year's use of the name and DNS hosting, it was $35.  Subsequently, I picked up www.theengstroms.net for $2 at Yahoo. 

Since I don't have a static IP, EasyDNS has a nice option for dynamic IP's using a program called DynSite.  We'll see if this gives me any problems, but for the time being it seems to be working fine.

Finally, I installed dasBlog and with some minor tweaking, I had it serving my site locally.  The small snag I did run into was opening up port 80 on my box.  I couldn't view the site from the outside world, and had to do some digging until I remembered SP2's Windows Firewall service.  My router was properly forwarding port 80 to my webserver, but I completely forgot to open up the port via Windows Firewall.  The good news is Windows Firewall seemed to do the job in blocking the port!  Once I opened it up, though, it was all good.

Finally, there is some minor configuration needed for dasBlog, but it can really be done in about 5 minutes.  I'm still figuring out some the finer details, so you might see some cosmetic changes (for example, I like the Sound Waves theme I'm using, but for the life of me I don't see a way to edit/delete entries using this theme.  It may go away!) 

Anyway, just wanted to encourage anyone out there that may be sitting on the fence deciding whether or not to host a blog themselves...its easy!  Give it a shot.