I'm configuring a new Windows server on EC2, but it's not just any server. It's a server that, if everything goes well, will be cloned. Maybe many times. So the questions that are coming up here are ones I want to give some serious thought to.

1. Thinking I ought to pre-install the DynDNS demon. Amazon has Elastic IP addresses, but they cost money. I'm still a newbie with DynDNS so I'm not sure if I can point a CNAME at the server using a DynDNS alias. Have to check this out.

2. Should I include Apache? Are there any other open source HTTP servers on Windows that run as reliably as Apache, which is somewhat of a bear to configure (not exactly something I'd want to give to an end-user). The user of this system is not a tech neophyte, but every bit of simplicity is a good idea. Back in the day WebSTAR on the Mac was very easy to set up. Wonder if anyone has put something like that together for Windows.

3. Same question for an FTP server.

4. I have to install a browser on the system. I've been using Firefox, but am thinking of possibly switching to Chrome. I think Firefox is a hog (actually I don't think it, I know it). Chrome says it's faster, I believe them. But geez it's Google. They're the new Evil Empire. Leaning towards ignoring that and going with Chrome anyway.

5. Dropbox? I wish they had sub-groups so I could use Dropbox to distribute stuff easily among all the clones. But you can't be part of more than one Dropbox network.

6. Windows Remote Desktop Connection is okay, but VNC is better integrated with the Mac, which what I use primarily these days, and I suspect many if not most others do too. Are there any good VNC servers that run on Windows?

I'm sure people will say I should use something other than Windows, like Linux -- but that's not an option so please don't waste your time or mine. Thanks in advance. (All the good it'll do.) ">

 6/26/2010; 11:44:09 AM.   .

This is the obligatory post after I made my last post of the day yesterday disappear.

It's not magic, or sleight of hand -- it's a new Scripting2 feature. Posts that are not part of the chronology.

Over the years I've made various tools that create web documents in the OPML Editor. They never turn out to be as powerful as the blogging tools I develop, because that's where I focus my efforts. So I figured to get the best web document editing tool, I should just be able to use the blogging tool to make "standalone" documents. For change notes pages, and howtos, etc.

If you see this but not the post about development, then it worked. ">

Places to look include: the RSS feed, the monthly archive page, the archive page for June 25, the home page.

One thing that's now broken by this -- the next/prev links. They don't know they should skip the pages that aren't in the chronology. At least I think they don't.

 6/26/2010; 5:46:31 AM.   .