Ryan Chapin's Website – Page 41 – Principal Software Engineer/Architect, motorcyclist, drummer, and artist

5 Reasons Why Your Website Needs a Legal Checkup Now!

Posted on June 26, 2008January 21, 2021 by rchapin

This month we welcome a guest contributor, Chip Cooper, a leading information technology, software, and Internet attorney with over 25+ years in practice. Chip operates http://digicontracts.com, a cost-effective, online contract drafting service for drafting website legal compliance contracts featuring “do-it-myself” and “do-it-for-me” options.

It’s extremely important for website businesses to stay on top of new legal risks, as well as new opportunities, as they develop. So, I highly recommend that you sign up for Chip’s FREE newsletter, Website Law → Continue reading “5 Reasons Why Your Website Needs a Legal Checkup Now!”

NSIS Installer Maker and the HM NIS Edit IDE

Posted on June 11, 2008 by rchapin

The NullSoft Scriptable Installer System is a great open source package for building Windows installers. Recently I found an open source editor/IDE package that makes putting these things together a real snap!

First download the NSIS package and install. Then download and install HM NIS Edit and you should be all set.→ Continue reading “NSIS Installer Maker and the HM NIS Edit IDE”

Tethering a Treo 700w Under Kubuntu Linux 8.04

Posted on June 10, 2008 by rchapin

I have finally been able to get the USB modem feature with the Windows Mobile 5, Verizon Treo working under Linux.

Following is a detailed how to on getting it set up and running. In this case, I was doing it with an IBM ThinkPad T42 running Kubuntu 8.04.

This how to should help you figure out how to get other mobile devices to work as well.

The first thing that you need to do is make sure that you

→ Continue reading

Business Lessons From the Presidential Primaries

Posted on June 6, 2008 by rchapin

This is an article written by a colleague, Bhavesh Naik of Ambica Training.

Bhavesh has some very interesting insight into how things played out in the primaries and how they relate to business. → Continue reading “Business Lessons From the Presidential Primaries”

Creating Aliases with a “.” in them under qmail

Posted on May 22, 2008 by rchapin

If you are creating aliases that contain a "." in qmail via the command line you need to make sure to replace any "."s with ":"s.

Otherwise, qmail will simply deliver the mail to the equivalent of /dev/null.

Such that the alias ryan.chapin@nbinteractive.com’s alias would be:
.qmail-ryan:chapin→ Continue reading “Creating Aliases with a “.” in them under qmail”

Boost the Effectiveness of your Contact Form . . . Respond Promptly!

Posted on May 16, 2008January 21, 2021 by rchapin

So you have a Contact Us form on your site, with which, customers and prospects can easily send you an e-mail. That’s all well and good, but if you don’t respond to those e-mails in a timely manner you could lose a potential new client.
This all ties into basic, human psychology. People want instant gratification and they want it on their terms. Which is one of the reasons why providing a contact form is so important. It enables a → Continue reading “Boost the Effectiveness of your Contact Form . . . Respond Promptly!”

Loading and Manipulating FlashPaper 2.0 SWFs into Flash

Posted on April 23, 2008 by rchapin

This tutorial demonstrates how to load and manipulate (resize in this example, but once you have access to the API you can do a whole lot of other things) FlashPaper 2.0 SWF files with ActionScript 2.0.

You will need:

Flash MX 2004 or Flash 8
FlashPaper 2.0

Click here to see the example in action.
Click on the attachment to download sample files.
In this example, we will simply load a FlashPaper 2.0 document and scale it to fit the → Continue reading “Loading and Manipulating FlashPaper 2.0 SWFs into Flash”

Using Michael Jordan’s Open Source Captioned Skins for the FLVPlayback Component in AS 2.0

Posted on April 23, 2008 by rchapin

Following is a quick tutorial on how to set-up and use the set of captioned FLVPlayback skins created by Michael Jordan.

This tutorial covers using the skins with ActionScript 2.0 cuepoints.

First off, download the set of skins. I’ve included them with this blog entry (because Adobe is notorious for moving and deleting pages), but there may be a newer version out there so check out this page, and/or Michael’s page.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the skins → Continue reading “Using Michael Jordan’s Open Source Captioned Skins for the FLVPlayback Component in AS 2.0”

Setting Up an IIS Webserver under Windows XP Pro

Posted on April 18, 2008 by rchapin

I recently had a client who was hosting a site on IIS under Windows XP Pro using .NET and ASP.

As a result, I needed to set up an appropriate development environment to test and debug the site before handing it over.

I opted for setting up VMware install that was running the necessary OS and software.

Following is a quick how-to on setting it all up.

Installing IIS 5.1 and .NET 2.0 on Windows XP Pro:

Go to Add/Remove

→ Continue reading

Your Most Popular Entry Page and Its Impact on Layout and Design

Posted on April 15, 2008January 21, 2021 by rchapin

Knowing your most popular entry point helps you determine the kind of content that is driving traffic to your site. This in turn helps you determine what kind of changes and additional content you should add to your site to help boost your success. There are a number of different tracking and reporting packages that can answer this question. NBI provides a hosted tracking solution called goalTracker which enables you to answer that and many other questions about your website → Continue reading “Your Most Popular Entry Page and Its Impact on Layout and Design”