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If your website has good rankings on Yahoo, MSN and other search engines but not on Google, it’s likely that your website has been put into Google’s sandbox. What can you do to get out of it?

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) seems to be important in Google’s new ranking algorithm. This article tells you how to deal with this.

Rumor has it that reciprocal links are not as effective as one way links. Some people in online discussion forums claim that one way links from a website to another site work far better than reciprocal links. Is this true and what do you have to do about this?

I have a new Tablet PC (Acer TravelMate C110…love the form factor) and so of course I”m installing all of my required applications and updating the patches.  I was suprised to be redirected to the new Microsoft Update site (http://beta.update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate/default.aspx?ln=en-us). It installed all of the latest Windows AND Office applications.  Man did that make things MUCH easier.  Once place for all of my Microsoft updates.  The vision now reality (in beta form at least)…I Love It!!!

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I”m not known for my deep technical skills and posts on Redhat/Linux, but I was working on something and thought I should provide a post.

On a project that we”re doing some Proof of Concepting on, we are going to migrate content from a Non-Windows environment (in this case RedHat/Linux) to a Windows 2003 environment.  This is only part of the project, but an important one.  So I thought I”d use Virtual Server to host my Redhat installation.  I know it”s not supported, but I had to try anyways.  Well the entire installation went pretty well.  I followed the GUI based installation provided by RedHat 9.0 and everything worked well.  Now for the bad part.

After the Virtual Machine rebooted after the installation, I could see the boot up process that is typical in Linux, but at the end of it I got a weird display.  At this point, I got a “Black Screen” with some weird “haze” that appeared to be a hard to see version of the UI.  I could see my mouse cursor moving around and could even make out a few icons.  But it was so hard to see and I couldn”t read anything!  So reinstalled it and thought perhaps I chose the wrong device driver.  Nope, that wasn”t it either.

The solution was VERY simple.  I found out that in order for this to work, you needed to set the Display to 16-bit in order for the display to “work.”  Once that was done, all was good.  It”s weird that I didn”t find more information on this on the web.  Perhaps I just didn”t read the documentation correctly, I”m doing the wrong searches via Google/MSN, not many people are installing Redhat on Virtual Server/PC, or something else.

Here are some sites that helped me out:

• http://vpc.visualwin.com/
• http://www.robertmoir.co.uk/win/vpcfaq/VPCFAQ6-InstallingGuestOS.html
• http://dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com/archives/004025.shtml

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So it”s been just over a year now that I”ve actively been blogging and doing lots around communities and forums.  For the most part, I focus on topics related to providing Hosted Services with the Microsoft Platform.  This includes things like Hosted Exchange, Windows base Hosting (aka Windows Web Hosting), and the Microsoft Provisioning System.

In the future, I”m looking to expand the the focus of my blog entries.  But for now, I”m interested in seeing who out there is reading my blog and what topics they”d like me to cover.  Not so much on a “How do you do this” type of issue as there are forums for that kind of thing (if can”t find a forum for your question, then go ahead and ask and I”ll see what we can do).  I”m looking more for, “How does xyz work?” or “What do think about abc?”

If there is not interest, fine.  But I have to at least put the question out there and see if there IS something someone is interested in me writing about.

Either way, I”ll keep on posting!

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Thumbshots are thumbnail screenshots of web pages that allow you to visualize websites before web surfers click on the link. If you use thumbshots on your link pages, web surfers know what they get before they click on a link.

I have a number of labs that I use for various projects and demos.  Many of them are based on a standard set of images that already have many of the basics installed (Windows, Active Directory, SQL, Exchange, WSS, etc.).  I of course use Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 to do all of this and it works great.

In building out a new lab for the Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 3.0 (HMC), I needed to add a new Windows 2003 Virtual Machine to the mix because of the update to MPS.  My old lab had a Windows 2000 Server for MPS, but now that MPS has been upgraded to work on Windows 2003, well I needed a new box for that purpose.

When I deployed my lab the first time, I used ADS to deploy all of my new Virtual Server images.  This worked great the first time.  This time wasn”t so smooth.  I first noticed that I could”t get the new image (which was connecting to ADS via a Virtual Boot Floppy which was a RIS boot floppy) to connect to ADS.  I then noticed that all three services (using the ADS Admin MMC) were set to the status of “Disconnected.”  When opening up the properties for the services, I (finally) noticed that the MAC address was not the same to the MAC address on the box.  How could the be?

Well of course this “intance” of the lab was actually a new copy of the base images.  Thus, once added into Virtual Server they were given a new set of MAC Addresses for all of the NIC cards.  Besides, that MAC address was being used by another image.

So I tried to update the MAC address in the ADS Admin MMC with the correct MAC address on the box.  That didn”t work.  I tried to do searches all of the net (Google and MSN), but still couldn”t find a solution that work.

Finally, I decided to change the MAC address of the appropriate NIC via the Virtual Server Admin website to reflect the MAC address that ADS thougth it should be using.  Once that was done, everything worked like a charm.

I know there has got to be a better way to do this, but at least this solved my issue for now.

BTW, when I was searching around for information on this issue, I found this interesting article:

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