About Me | About this Blog | Blog Plugins

About Me

Contact

Email: String.Format(“{0}@{1}.com”, “danrigsby”, “hotmail”);

General

Dan Rigsby is a System Architect for Aprimo in Indianapolis, Indiana. Dan has been an avid .Net developer since late 2001 starting with ASP.Net, but today concentrates on SOA, Wcf, smart client applications, and a host of other areas. Dan is very active in the community as a developer, speaker, blogger, officer at IndyNDA, and 5 star moderator on the MSDN forums for Wcf. He is always eager to help out others when he can and has been awarded the Microsoft MVP award for his work with Connected Systems in Wcf.  As a certified ScrumMaster, Dan has been involved in agile techniques and project management. Read more about Dan and development adventures at http://www.danrigsby.com/ or connect with him on Twitter or Facebook.

Family

I have a family and enjoy spending time with them more than anything. Development may be my passion and excitement, but God and my family are my life and my love.

Resume

I am happily employed at Interactive Intelligence, but I try to keep my resume as up to date as I can. You never know what might happen in your life or career: http://www.danrigsby.com/files/danrigsby-resume.doc.

About this Blog

Domain Registration – GoDaddy (www.GoDaddy.com)

GoDaddy is one of the cheapest register out there. And since all registrars provide the same service, you should pick the cheapest one that has the best features. GoDaddy has an easy to use interface, is totally automated, and has given me no hassles.

Cost: ~$9/year per domain (with discount code)

Hosting Company – ReliableSite.net (http://www.ReliableSite.net)

ReliableSite.Net provides IIS support (asp.net & php), .Net 3.5, Windows Server 2008, a SQL Server 2005 database, a MySQL database, 3 gig of 15K SCSI storage space, 30 gig of Tier 1 monthly bandwidth, the Helm administration interface, a 99.9% uptime Guarantee unlimited hosted domains, etc for an incredibly low monthly cost.

Cost: ~$4.25/month (with discount code)

Blogging Software – Wordpress (http://www.Wordpress.org)

There are a number of free blogging packages out there. Wordpress is one of the most popular ones out there, but its the community support of the product which makes it the choice for this site. There is a large number of templates and plugins out there to make your site easy to use and unique.

Cost: Free

Aggregator – FeedBurner (http://www.Feedburner.com)

Feedburner is a service that will poll the RSS from your blog, cache it, and make it available to subscribers. It provides some basic statistics such as your subscriber count. Using feedburner will cut down the bandwidth usage on your site, since it is serving up the RSS feed instead of your subscribers constantly hitting your site. You can also use their subscription badge to show your subscriber number to other.

Cost: Free or $3/month for Pro Account

Statistics – Google Analytics (http://www.Google.com/Analytics)

Google Analytics offers a myriad of features such as tracking visits, what browsers people are using, what countries/regions/cities visitors are coming from, what languages are people using, what is the bounce rate, etc. All of these statistics can be viewed in different types of graphics and can be compared against similar blogs to see how you are doing. Google Analytics is free. You have to put a bit of javascript into your pages to get it to work. However, in true Google fashion, there is no telling what all Google does with this data. Google is collecting a massive amount of information from blogs all over the world. This could end up helping your blog rating, but just remember that Google has all of this data as well.

Cost: Free

Blog Composition – Windows Live Writer (http://WindowsLiveWriter.Spaces.Live.com/)

Web based blog editors are never the best option. Windows Live Writer works with most major blog engines and has a very robust plugin model for adding and building plugins to customize your markup. It is easy to use and offers a variety of views to help you preview your posts.

Cost: Free

License – Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org/)

You should always have some kind of license attached to your blog so that user’s know how they can redistribute any code samples you have. If there is no license, people may not use your samples because of possible licensing issues. It’s best to make it clear so that there are no questions. Creative Commons is a general purpose license that can allow for any distribution of code. The license text for this site can be found here: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Cost: Free

Total Cost of Blog per Year: $60

Blog Plugins

  Akismet 2.2.7
» Matt Mullenweg (url)
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.

  BackUpWordPress 0.4.5
» Roland Rust (url)
Manage WordPress Backups. Beta Release. Please help testing and give me feedback under the comments section of the Plugin page. Backup DB, Files & Folders, use .tar.gz, .zip, Exclude List, etc.

  Broken Link Checker 0.7.4
» Janis Elsts (url)
Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.

  Category Cloud Widget 1.7
» Lee Kelleher (url)
Adds a sidebar widget to display the categories as a tag cloud.

  Collapsible Archive Widget 2.3.1
» Ady Romantika (url)
Display Collapsible Archive in yous sidebar to save space.

  FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3.1
» FeedBurner (url)
Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

  Google Analyticator 6.0.2
» Ronald Heft (url)
Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics. After enabling this plugin visit the settings page and enter your Google Analytics’ UID and enable logging.

  Google XML Sitemaps 3.2.2
» Arne Brachhold (url)
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

  OpenID 3.3.2
» DiSo Development Team (url)
Allows the use of OpenID for account registration, authentication, and commenting. Also includes an OpenID provider which can turn WordPress author URLs into OpenIDs.

  Search Unleashed 1.0.6
» John Godley (url)
Advanced search engine that provides full text searching across posts, pages, comments, titles, and URLs. Searches take into account any data added by other plugins, and all search results are contextually highlighted. You can also highlight incoming searches from popular search engines.

  Twitter Tools 2.0
» Alex King (url)
A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. Show your tweets in your sidebar, and post tweets from your WordPress admin.

  Wordpress Automatic Upgrade 1.2.5
» Keith Dsouza (url)
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions. Go to Wordpress Automatic Upgrade to upgrade your installation Thanks to Ronald Huereca for making the plugin run in automatic mode.

  WordPress Mobile Edition 3.1
» Crowd Favorite (url)
Show your mobile visitors a site presentation designed just for them. Rich experience for iPhone, Android, etc. and clean simple formatting for less capable mobile browsers. Cache-friendly with a Carrington-based theme, and progressive enhancement for advanced mobile browsers.

  WP-DBManager 2.50
» Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan (url)
Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

  WP-PageNavi 2.50
» Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan (url)
Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.

  WP-PluginsUsed 1.50
» Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan (url)
Display WordPress plugins that you currently have (both active and inactive) onto a post/page.

  WP-Print 2.50
» Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan (url)
Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.

  WPtouch iPhone Theme 1.9.7.4
» Dale Mugford & Duane Storey (BraveNewCode) (url)
A plugin which formats your site with a mobile theme for the Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android and other touch-based smartphones.