Sembee Blog

Its all change here on blog.sembee.co.uk and I have an apology to make to visitors.

First the change. If you aren't reading this on the RSS feed, then you will have noticed things look a little bit different. This is because I have changed the blog engine that I am using.

Since I started blogging in 2007 I have used Community Server, nursed back to life after two server failures, plus version upgrades. However with the change of my underlying OS to Windows 2008 R2, I decided it was time to switch to something a little more basic. I only used the blogging functionality of Community Server, nothing else. Plus I wanted to drop the SQL database dependency.

Therefore I have switched to BlogEngine.net. The change was relatively painless, I was running with it on a private URL in less than 30 minutes. What took the time was putting redirect files in to place so that URLs were redirected to the new format. That is now complete (I hope).

You might find that the theme changes, I am still looking for one that I am 100% happy with, and may end up creating my own, or getting one created for me to match the other sites that I have through Sembee Ltd. I haven't quite decided. The content will stay the same.
The HTML code is a bit odd in places, which I will correct as I find the postings, but that is a display issue, nothing more.

Comments are still turned off, because I have seen then turn in to support forums before, and blogs are a really bad way for that kind of thing - use a forum instead. 

Now for the apology.

If you sent a message through the Contact option in the previous Community Server based blog format, then I didn't receive it. I had thought I had disabled all of the options for contact via the blog itself, preferring to receive direct email messages. However when I started to pull the original installation of Community Server apart, I found 70 pages of contact attempts in a location I had never looked at before - called "Feedback". Most of it was spam, and was deleted, but there were still seven pages of legitimate messages, dating back to 2008. I hadn't seen of them.

Big oops.

I am not going to reply to the lost messages now, as they will be very old and no longer relevant. However if you sent me a message via the blog and did not get a reply, it wasn't intentional. They simply went in to a location I didn't know was there.

Blog Blog

This is a posting for anyone reading this blog using a feed reader.  

I am going to be making some changes to the blog in the next couple of weeks, and this could affect the RSS feed.

If your feed address is "feeds.sembee.co.uk/sembee" then you can stop reading now and go somewhere else, as that feed will not be affected.  

If you are using a feed that starts with the address of www.sembee.co.uk then you will need to change it to the Feedburner feed to ensure that you continue to receive the feed from this blog: http://feeds.sembee.co.uk/sembee 

Blog Blog

You may well have noticed that this blog disappeared yesterday (8th March).
The web server it was hosted on suffered a hard disk failure - the second in eight months (see here for last time: http://blog.sembee.co.uk/archive/2006/08/26/13.aspx).

The disk was replaced, but everything had to be reinstalled. Setting Community Server to how I prefer takes a little while, but here it is.

I am slowly repopulating the articles. If you read this site by RSS, then I apologise for a lot of "new" articles appearing as I put them back.

However due to the nature of Community Server, I cannot get the URLs to be identical to what they were before. Therefore I have adjusted one of the error pages which will send you to be root of the blog, where you can find the article that you are looking for. They will all return - eventually.

Blog Blog

If you have visited this site in the last couple of days, you may have received odd HTTP error messages. This blog "disappeared".
On Wednesday (23rd) afternoon, the server that hosted this blog, along with the amset web sites suffered a hardware failure. It was the worst kind of failure for a web server - the hard disk.
The hosting company replaced the machine quickly and I was able to get the amset web sites running around six hours later.
Unfortunately the blog had to wait as it required more work, including configuring Community Server to operate in the way that I liked.
I have now completed the configuration and am in the process of populating the blog with my old articles.
I kept a copy of the articles offline on my home system, along with original publishing dates so I can easily restore the content.
I also took the opportunity to update the server to the latest release of Community Server.
For those of you reading this through RSS, I apologise for the number of "new" articles that you have seen popup. That was me repopulating the blog and couldn't be helped.

Blog Blog

Well I thought it might be time to join the ranks of the bloggers.
Not going to bore you with personal stuff though... this will be a technical blog.

Who am I?
Simon Butler, aka Sembee. At the time of writing (early February 2006) I was the lead expert on Experts Exchange with in excess of 7 million points. I have over 5 million in the Exchange Server topic area alone.
Expert of the year and most answered questions on that site in 2005. In 2004 I was Rookie of the year. I reached the top of the tree in less than two years, only actively posting for just a little over 18 months.
You will also see me contributing to other forums and email lists, mainly on Exchange server topics.
I was awarded the MVP status in Microsoft Exchange server in April 2005.

The Blog?
You will probably find opinion pieces and technical snippets that aren't really suitable for the main web site at amset.info.

For the technical howtos you should still look at http://www.amset.info/ and if you want to hire me to work on your Exchange project (UK only though) then you need to go to http://www.amset.co.uk/

Comments and ratings are currently turned off while I get to grips with these things. If you want to ask me a question about Microsoft Exchange server and you aren't a client, then put it on one of the forums or email lists where it will be picked up. Business proposals need to go through Amset (see above).

Blog Blog