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Recently I wrote a post about my search for a TIFF iFilter that would enable me to use VBScript to query a Windows Indexing Services server for file management. I found that since OCR is never always 100% accurate, neither were my attempts at sorting all the inbound EMR faxes we get each day. I did however, find Tesseract , a great product that was originally developed by HP and proprietary, and is now developed by Google and licensed under the Apache License v2, open source . It is one of the most accurate open source OCR engines available. It is quite basic, and in the version you obtain from the project page , it only operates from the command line, and without the libtiff library, will only do it's work on un-compressed TIFFs. More information can be found on the project pages , and Wikipedia . Doing some scouring, I aso found a front-end , and ArchivistaBox, a complete document management system . Image via Wikipedia I'm using it in Windows, so I needed to do one of...

First, I realize this is going to generate some issues for some, since Twitter 's use is primarily for micro-blogging , keeping connected with others, but some have been using it for other various reasons. Image via CrunchBase I think the producing backlinks (which really doesn't work as far as Google is concerned...but I digress) and driving website traffic are two good examples, and these are what I've been investigating with a couple of accounts at Twitter. One of those accounts is @zippydpinhead . I picked on him because I used to read Zippy the Pinhead comic strips in HighTimes magazine in my early 20's and thought it was...*dude*...*funny*...*cough**cough*... I primarily use Ubuntu for my workstation these days, but have used Linux for years on the desktop and in small enterprise. My experiments were first to see if automation worked. Fortunately we have curl and a multitude of posts on the subject floating about the internet. My zippy character posts several...

My employer, IHBSOnline.com , uses the Efficon Articles 3.x module in DotNetNuke to aid in driving website traffic. Every morning, I troll the news sites , and add News content items to the module. Then I use Twitter to announce these additions. I can easily browse to the posts and see the number of hits these items generate. Image via CrunchBase I also use the iFinity Google Analytics module to track my web traffic . Unfortunately, you can't add this module to any post, since technically, it's not really a page. I played around a bit, and found that I was able to add my code to the DesktopModules/Articles/ArticleDetailsStandard.aspx, and start tracking my posts!

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife Out of the box, DotNetNuke provides a method of programatically creating a search-engine friendly XML sitemap for easy website submissions to the likes of Google , Yahoo and others that accept that format. This is one of the first things to do in your quest for SEO . What it doesn't do, is accurately give a priority to pages. A priority is used by webmasters to set a level of imporance to a webpage. These numbers range from 0.0 to 1.0. All DotNetNuke sites prior to 5 assign a default value of 0.9 to all pages. Google, and others don't like the fact that all your pages have the same priority, which will likely cause them not to index your site. After doing a bit of research, I found a quick hack in the DotNetNuke forums , that assigns priorities based on page placement in your menu. 1 to your home page , 0.9 to all other first level pages, 0.8 to second level pages, and so on. Just recently I've found another approach outlined ...

I've been reading quite a bit lately on improving SEO for our DotNetNuke website , IHBSOnline.com and quickly realized it just isn't enough to throw up a website, add a listing in a couple of search engines and wait for the masses. First off, the DnnFriendlyUrlProvider, while writing friendlier URL's than older versions of DNN, could be better. This is why you need the iFinity FriendlyURL provider. It is free, but keep in mind it is really designed for a single domain site, and presents other issues with some other 3rd party modules. If you fall into that category, I'd suggest you purchase the full version, as it adds additional functionality you'll need and want. Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife I've learned that Google and possibly other search engines actually penalize you if you create duplicate content. The duplicate content issue could easily arise if you have a host that responds to both http://mydomain.com and http://www.mydomain.com. Yo...

This post was prompted by a couple of off-line inquiries into my experience with a recent VIPRE Enterprise deployment. I should point out that this is NOT my first deployment of anti-virus software . I've rolled out McAfee , Trend, and Symantec server/client solutions. I was probably found because of my activity on Twitter , since I was whining about it one day... In any case, here's my story. My client, a 3 shift manufacturing bakery with 90 clients and 5 servers, was looking to me and another consultant for suggestions for a replacement to Trend CSM, since it was expiring. It was suggested that we try VIPRE. I hadn't used it, did a bit of research, and eventually agreed to that it would be a good fit. It was easy to roll out, and even easier to manage. One issue I immediately called SunBelt about was the Admin UI, and it's inability to list the known vulnerability list without bogging down, and eventually bringing the server to it's knees. NOT a good th...