Kent J. Chen's WebLog

This blog had been running on subText, a .Net powered blog engine, since it’s first launched in 2004. I picked it because being a .Net developer I suppose to run my own blog on the same platform. But it turned out, WordPress won the war in the end, as I finally migrated it to WordPress a few months back.

And here are the steps I took to make this happen.

Step 1, set up a new WordPress blog

This is probably the easiest part in the whole process. Simply follow up the instruction and everything…

If you have a blog and use FeedBurner burn your RSS feed, you may like this new approach FeedBurner recently added.

Log into your FeedBurner account and go to Publicize tab, you will notice a new category listed at the left sidebar named Socialize, just under the FeedCount. What this new thing does right now is that once it’s enabled FeedBurner will automatically post updates from your feed to your social media account, though Twitter is the only one supported at the moment.

Clicking Add a Twitter account will go through Twitter’s oauth authentication process to verify your…

It’s not a rumor. It’s from Matt Cutts on his interview with WebPreNews at PubCon.

there is strong lobbying in Google to introduce a new ranking factor into the algorithm. The new ranking factor has to do with how fast a site or page loads. Matt described this as one of his ‘what to expect in 2010′ bullet points in his presentation yesterday evening in Las Vegas.

Would that be a big thing? I believe so. Not only does it make those webmasters try hard to crack their code to make their site faster,…

• Neowin’s top 5 Windows 7 Features [via Neowin]
  no surprise here, they are Libraries, Aero Peek, Jumplists, Superbar, and Aero Snap, listed in descend order.
• What if you never backed up your exchange server again? [via TheEmailADMIN]
  introduced an new killer High Availability feature in Exchange Server 2010, called the Database Availability Group (DAG).
• 7 perfect legal ways to get Windows 7 cheap [via ZDNet by Ed Bott]
• 7 VPN services to anonymize your P2P/Torrent Traffic [via How To Hide Your IP]
  a good list of services for those who often use VPN for their P2P downloading.

According to Twitter Blog:

We’ve just activated a feature called retweet on a very small percentage of accounts in order to see how it works in the wild. Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy.

Yes, finally Twitter decided to roll out this long-waited feature, a feature that should have been around since day 1. I am just fortunate that one of my twitter account @windows7hacker was selected as one of these beta tester, so I was able to see what this feature looks like and…

Twitter ditched TinyURL for bit.ly as its default URL shortening provider a few months back, which basically put TinyURL to a very difficult position to survive and throw tr.im out of the business. I had been wondering why Twitter made the change because all in all, it’s just a service that shortens the URL and redirect them to the right place. Why does it all matter? I just didn’t quite understand up until now after I have been using it quite extensively for a while.

It’s not like bit.ly has a shorter domain than TinyURL.com. Otherwise,…

Finally, Twitter has started rolling out a very long missed feature, Lists, that is pretty similar to Groups or Favorite Users that are on 3rd party Twitter client tools. It first appeared on one of my two twitter account above the all status updates but disappeared now. So I guess they are still testing and working on this new feature.

I created a new list called Windows-7-Giveaway at the time when I saw this new feature showing up, in a hope using it to manage the Windows 7 Giveaway contest we are running at the moment. So…

You probably have noticed that I just added a widget in every post that automatically shows some related posts, the picture above is one example from one of my posts.

I didn’t actually write any code for this. All I used is to subscribe the service from an online web app, named LinkWithin. I came across it from other blog the other day and couldn’t help but try it out almost instantly.

So why I need it in the first place? Well, the home page of LinkWithin summarized pretty well:

First, don’t let your past stories

…

It’s not the sitemap that is meant to help users find the information they need. If you want to generate that type of sitemap, you may come to the wrong place. However, this WriteMaps web application may help generate the sitemap you are looking for.

The sitemap I am talking about here in this post is mainly used for Google that helps your site got index quickly, properly in Google’s index. It’s in XML format, usually called Sitemaps, with a capital S in it. Google adheres to Sitemap Protocol as defined by

We heard the good reviews of this new version of IE, and we also saw bad words of it as well, just like all other new things.  Unless you try it out yourself you can never tell who is right and who is wrong, or they could be all wrong. So I went ahead and downloaded the package and installed on my laptop.

After using it for a while, I already found myself like it quite a bit. The layout is pretty much the same as the previous version, including the logo, but they added a few nice neat features on…