Moving to WordPress.com

For years I’ve hosted WordPress somewhere, most recently in Azure using Project Nami so that I could store all the posts in SQL Azure. It’s been a good learning experience. It takes some effort to set up, but once done it’s fairly painless, you can even have security updates applied automatically. The variety and power […]

Moving to Open Live Writer

I’ve used Windows Live Writer for almost as long as I’ve been blogging (mid 2007 or so). It’s worked well enough and I’ve liked having an offline editor. It moved to open source after years of stagnating (though it still worked well enough!) and I’ve finally moved to that version (at the same time I’m […]

Moving SQLAndy to Project Nami

I’ve been hosting this blog on Azure for a while, running WordPress on top of MySQL. Works fine, gives me a reason to use Azure here and there to gain experience. No good reason to change. Still, why not? Last night I loaded Project Nami, a port of WordPress that runs on SQL Azure. The […]

Requiring SSL for WordPress

Last week I wrote about adding an SSL cert to this blog. That left me the remaining task of figuring out how to force SSL for all connections. Azure doesn’t have a checkbox for this; the options are to make a change to the WordPress config, try a plug-in (a variation of changing the config), […]

Adding SSL to SQLAndy.com

I’ve had this task on the list for a while. I wanted to do a refresh on the basics of SSL and certs, plus I’m in favor of using SSL everywhere, even personal blogs. I ended up using The complete guide to loading a free SSL certificate into an Azure website by Troy Hunt as […]

WordPress, Project NAMI, and Azure

I’ve been running WordPress for years now and find it to be a solid solution for what I want to do. The only negative in my view is the requirement to use mySQL. There’s nothing wrong with mySQL itself, it more than does the job. I can quibble that it is one more thing to […]

Sorkin On Writing

I saw this write up about Aaron Sorkin and the writing on Newsroom just after posting Blogging-Write More and found the part about meeting a weekly deadline for a series interesting – hugely paraphrased he says that you have to write it and let it go, there just isn’t time for perfection. If you think […]

Blogging-Write More

Blogging isn’t easy. You have to come up with a topic, write about it, and then release it for the world to see. That’s three kinds of pressure. Now most of us don’t have hundreds or thousands of readers, but the pressure is still there, and it can lead to the trap of not writing. […]

Embedding Flash Video in a Blog Post

I recently needed to figure out how to embed Flash streaming video in a blog post. LiveWriter does Youtube ok and I thought about moving the content, but was looking for something I could get done faster. I had used the JWPlayer for streaming on a web page and they had a WordPress plug-in so […]

Updating to Live Writer 2012

My 2011 version of Live Writer didn’t seem to want to embed a Vimeo video, so I checked for an update and was surprised to see that a new version of Live Writer was released in August. I’ve always been happy with the product, so I decided to upgrade to see what was new. It’s […]