This is a how to guide on how to install Sqlite3 on your Windows PC. This article assumes that you already have Ruby and Ruby on Rails installed on your PC.

First you will need to download two files from the Sqlite web site http://www.sqlite.org/download.html:
sqlite-3_5_9.zip
sqlitedll-3_5_9.zip

The first file is the Sqlite command line program used for modifing the Sqlite database. You may or may not use this.

The second file is the Windows DLL library file and Ruby uses this when Rails makes Sqlite database calls.

When both these ZIP files have been extracted you should have the following files:

* sqlite3.exe
* sqlite3.def
* sqlite3.dll

Copy these file to the bin directory of your Ruby installation, if you followed the default Ruby installation it will be located here:

C:\ruby\bin

Now that you have the Sqlite3 files installed you need to tell Ruby how to use them. To do this you need to download the Ruby bindings for Sqlite3.
Fortunately this is easy to do, using Ruby gems. Simply at the command prompt type the following command:

gem install sqlite3-ruby

You will now need to tell Gems which version you need as you will be presented with the following output:

Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Select which gem to install for your platform (i386-mswin32)
1. sqlite3-ruby 1.2.2 (mswin32)
2. sqlite3-ruby 1.2.2 (ruby)
3. sqlite3-ruby 1.2.1 (mswin32)
4. sqlite3-ruby 1.2.1 (ruby)
5. Skip this gem
6. Cancel installation
>_

Please select option 1, sqlite3-ruby 1.2.2 (mswin32). All being successful you will get some output like this:

Successfully installed sqlite3-ruby-1.2.2-mswin32
Installing ri documentation for sqlite3-ruby-1.2.2-mswin32…
Installing RDoc documentation for sqlite3-ruby-1.2.2-mswin32…

If you are using Rails 2+ you should be able to run the following rake tasks from your Rails application directory. For example say you created a Rails application located here: C:\MyApp you should be able to execute:

C:\MyApp>rake db:create
or
C:\MyApp>rake db:migrate

ref

public static void ResizeFromStream(string ImageSavePath, int MaxSideSize, Stream Buffer)
{
int intNewWidth;
int intNewHeight;
Image imgInput = Image.FromStream(Buffer);

//Determine image format
ImageFormat fmtImageFormat = imgInput.RawFormat;

//get image original width and height
int intOldWidth = imgInput.Width;
int intOldHeight = imgInput.Height;

//determine if landscape or portrait
int intMaxSide;

if (intOldWidth >= intOldHeight)
{
intMaxSide = intOldWidth;
}
else
{
intMaxSide = intOldHeight;
}

if (intMaxSide > MaxSideSize)
{
//set new width and height
double dblCoef = MaxSideSize / (double)intMaxSide;
intNewWidth = Convert.ToInt32(dblCoef * intOldWidth);
intNewHeight = Convert.ToInt32(dblCoef * intOldHeight);
}
else
{
intNewWidth = intOldWidth;
intNewHeight = intOldHeight;
}
//create new bitmap
Bitmap bmpResized = new Bitmap(imgInput, intNewWidth, intNewHeight);

//save bitmap to disk
bmpResized.Save(ImageSavePath, fmtImageFormat);

//release used resources
imgInput.Dispose();
bmpResized.Dispose();
Buffer.Close();
}

My aim is to build a Twitter SEO community to trade twitter posts. Using different techniques – URLs in the posts, keywords in the URLs, URLs in the URLs…we can test which methods work best.

No black or gray SEO, but trading actual Twitters amongst friends to promote a project or client. Twitter should be as natural as possible without keyword stuffing. We can share results and build a process that will work on many social media sites and micro blogs.

SEO and Twitter: This is some cool stuff that really works. You can beat you head to register on a bunch of crappy directories (I’ll help you do that on the cheap, email me.) or you can get creative and establish a some easy to come by natural links. My experience with Twitter shows it is possible.

If you are SEO savvy, you need to try out different techniques with RSS, anchor text and URL placement to see what works best.

1. The Meta Keywords, Description and Robots tag — Google used description copy to market your site in its results, treat this as optimized sales copy. Make sure your sitemap.xml page is CONSTANTLY called up to the search engines
2. The Title Tag – The MOST important aspect of on-page SEO, just take our word for it.
3. The Body Text (focus on the body text in bold, for this denotes strong emphasis to the search engines)
4. The first sentence in the body text and the first words used per sentence are the most important ones for advanced on-page SEO necessities (Make it humanly readable and SE readable — The words used in the first sentence are most important due to the implementation of Google’s LSI algorithm)
5. The URL — The subdirectory folder and page of content should be SEO’d (i.e. http://domain.com/real-estate/real-estate-marketing-ideas.com would fetch a high ranking for a page dedicated to real estate marketing ideas – especially with many highly authoritative, relevant, deep in-bound links)
6. The H1 and H2 Texts are highly important – Why? They show the search engine the main subjects and Table of Contents for the content to be indexed. Make these keyword friendly and reflective of your page’s title tag.

7. Same Site Link Texts — The links connecting the pages of your site together must have your targeted keyword terms in them as well as all links throughout the site — even though it seems excessive, having variations to your targetted keywords would also help when linking out to other pages within your site.
8. Same-Site Link URLs — Not only should you be using your keywords to describe pages within your site, those URLs you link to must have SEO URLs ( eg: http://domain.com/your-keyword.html)
9. Outbound Link Text — Resources you link to must be SEO’d – If you are an internet marketing site and are linking to an email marketing company (email marketing software in this instance), you would use “Put your internet marketing on auto-pilot and use the best tool for internet marketers today – internet marketing email software. Then just use other variants to internet marketing.
10. IMG Alt Tags — Your images should be described via ALT Tags with the keywords you are optimizing for – If your image is hosted on your web-host, the file name of the images should also be SEO’d — If you have an image about polar bears have it be polar-bear.jpg in your images folder.
11. Keyword Density — 8% is excellent and doesn’t seem spammy, if you have a 500 word article, then 40 of those words should have variances of the search term you are targeting, if this seems excessive, lower the keyword density down to 5% and you will only need to add 25 variances/instances of your keyword. And that’s just a start… (Keyword prominence is big, but not worth a discussion).
12. Lastly and surprisingly, Your HTML comments should have your SEO terms in them (!!) — As a question to the relevancy this has to your ranking, I am unsure, but most of the large sites have html comments connected to their search terms. If you end up doing an analysis of your on-page content, you can find out if the high ranked sites for your keyword use HTML comments tagged to the keyword(s) being targeted.

Are you using SQL Server 2008 Express? Don’t miss the server name syntax Servername\SQLEXPRESS where you substitute Servername with the name of the computer where the SQL Server Express installation resides.

Standard Security alternative syntax
This connection string produce the same result as the previous one. The reason to include it is to point out that some connection string keywords have many equivalents.
Server=myServerAddress;Database=myDataBase;User ID=myUsername;Password=myPassword;Trusted_Connection=False;

Trusted Connection
Data Source=myServerAddress;Initial Catalog=myDataBase;Integrated Security=SSPI;

Trusted Connection alternative syntax
This connection string produce the same result as the previous one. The reason to include it is to point out that some connection string keywords have many equivalents.
Server=myServerAddress;Database=myDataBase;Trusted_Connection=True;

Connecting to an SQL Server instance
The syntax of specifying the server instance in the value of the server key is the same for all connection strings for SQL Server.
Server=myServerName\theInstanceName;Database=myDataBase;Trusted_Connection=True;

Trusted Connection from a CE device
Often a Windows CE device is not authenticated and logged in to a domain. To use SSPI or trusted connection / authentication from a CE device, use this connection string.
Data Source=myServerAddress;Initial Catalog=myDataBase;Integrated Security=SSPI;User ID=myDomain\myUsername;Password=myPassword;

::[Visual Basic]
Public Function ReadFromDB(ByVal connectionString As String) as SqlDataReader
Dim commandText As String = “SELECT * FROM dbo.Table”
Dim connection As New SqlConnection(connectionString)
Dim command As New SqlCommand(commandText, connection)
connection.Open()
Dim reader As SqlDataReader = command.ExecuteReader()
connection.Close()
return reader
End Function

::[C#]
private static SqlDataReader ReadFromDB(string connectionString)
{
string commandText = “SELECT * FROM dbo.Table”;
SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString);
SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand(commandText, connection);
connection.Open();
SqlDataReader reader = command.ExecuteReader();
connection.Close();
return reader;
}

The SqlConnection (.NET Framework) object provides connectivity to Microsoft SQL Server version 7.0 or later and supports a connection string format that is similar, but is not identical, to the OLE DB (ADO) connection string format.

The following code example demonstrates how to create and open a connection to a SQL Server (version 7.0 or later) database.

::[Visual Basic]

Dim Conn As SqlConnection = New SqlConnection(“Data Source=localhost;Integrated Security=SSPI;Initial Catalog=northwind”)
Conn.Open()

::[C#]
SqlConnection Conn = new SqlConnection(“Data Source=localhost; Integrated Security=SSPI;Initial Catalog=northwind”);
Conn.Open();

It is nice that you always close the Connection after using it. This can be done with the Close or Dispose methods of the Connection object.

Starting my blog …

I’ll include some .Net tips, basically the victories of the bizarre problems that we developers spend …