I have been playing with wordpress for very a long time and doing lots of customization on my site such as this web hositng review one. But I rarely pay attention to one important feature — Gravatar. After a bit research, I would like to share the knowledge I learnt.

What's Gravatar?

Here's the definition from gravatar official site:

"A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?"

For short, it's your head image when commenting on some popular blog systems like wordpress, blogspot etc. Even you're not blogging or commenting, when you visit some blogs you will find many beautiful pictures of commentors. That's because the Gravatar is enabled from wordpress admin panel. If you do not have a personal gravatar, it will pick from the system default settings.

How to get & use Gravatar?

In order to show up our personal gravatar, we have to register from the gravatar official site http://gravatar.com first. Once it's accepted our picture will be saved in gravatar system. But please note, during the registration we need to pick up a correct rating for the picture we uploaded (G, pg, R, X). Once submitted, it will be approved manually by their workers so please make sure to choose the right rating.

When we comment on a blog post and use the same email address from gravatar registration, our head image will be displayed. So the key point is the registration email address, it'll grab the picture from gravatar system directly.

As website admin, we can pick up a head image from system default ones directly. In case we don't like the system defaults and don't want to register with gravatar, we can add the following to functions.php of our wordpress theme.

//Make a new default gravatar available on the dashboard
add_filter( 'avatar_defaults', 'newgravatar' );
function newgravatar ($avatar_defaults) {
$myavatar = get_bloginfo('template_directory') . '/images/newImg.jpg';
$avatar_defaults[$myavatar] = "newImg";
return $avatar_defaults;
}

The '/images/newImg.jpg' is the gravatar you would like to use, we place in the images folder of wordpress theme. Once it's saved, we can login to wordpress > Setting > Discussion, the newly defined gravatar will be available there.

The wordpress gravatar codex documentaion: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Gravatars
Excellent wordpress gravatar plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-gravatar/
Recommended WordPress hosting provider: www.inmotionhosting.com

From the last posting I wrote about how to use connect mysql via asp.net technology. Because the web development makes everything possible, can we host asp.net applications on linux machine directly? The answer is yes, I would like to make a brief introduction about the general setup and check if it's good idea for production server deployment.

How to host asp.net website on linux server?

The answer is Mono. We can either add mod_mono for Apache web server or use the XSP webserver directly to serve asp.net pages. While Apache is the standard web server for linux, XSP is a "light-weight web server" capable of hosting and serving ASP.NET applications. The setup of XSP is little complex. To shorten the setup process and go with the standard, we highly recommend using apache. The detailed setup available on this apache mono setup page. If you would like to learn more details about the configuration, it's available on this codeproject article

Once you configured the module properly, you can put your asp.net codes to website working directory and it will out put the cool page as expected!

Why Hosting asp.net on linux server?

Just think about the price of windows server products and service fee for hosting. The possibility of hosting asp.net on linux is absolutely a big progress of web hosting industry. From professionals review, the ability to run Asp.net on linux is important to windows developers since low-cost hosting providers will see Mono as an inexpensive way to provide Asp.net hosting to clients. Because Mono also runs on windows we no longer need Linux to test our application for crossplatform compatability.

Is it suggested to host Asp.net site with Linux Hosting?

The mono project has been open for several years but not yet that perfect to serve any kind asp.net project, it's being developed to be fully compatible with windows technologies. However, unless you're doing local development, we never recommend to host your live .net site under linux hosting service. Simply because we can't make full use of the asp.net features as many objects/components are available from windows server only. The mono only be able to serve simple asp.net scripts that does not rely on windows components.

In case we need to introduce into some sophisticated configurations, we have to switch to windows for 100% compatibility. Generally speaking, we can only host some basic asp.net pages on linux server to approve the capability of linux hosting server.

How do we think about?

Because of the above weakness and limitations I think no much people would be interested to host their money-making website under such environment. But it's still a good sign for future low cost web hosting. Because of the development of such technologies we can spend less to put up our applications online. There's not an actual web hosting service with asp.net support on linux yet, but the tech development makes it possible in near future.

asp.net is popularly used in web development, at the meanwhile Sql server database is always the golden partner since from the start. But for various reasons, we can't always use this database system. In this article we're going to introduce how to build asp.net project with mysql database.

Best Asp.net Hosting with mysql Support

Logically, every quality asp.net hosting provider should have installed mysql odbc connector on their servers. but it's advised to confirm with your hosting support because the policy is different for each company. Also, we need to make sure mysql support is available with the hosting too. So as you see, it's not so easy to put up a mysql driven asp.net site on hosting server. Based our years' experience in web hosting, Arvixe http://www.arivxe.com is the best recommendation based server performance, overall hosting features and tech support.

Arvixe asp.net hosting plans are full compatible with mysql technologies, their tech team has pre-installed all up to date odbc drivers and necessary components to power your asp.net scripts. List of the core features

• Unlimited Mysql databases
• Fully compatible with asp.net scripting
• Latest windows server platform
• Friendly and easy to navigate hosting control panel
• Only $5/mo to start
• Up to 60 days full money back guarantee

Visit arvixe for asp.net hosting plans http://www.arivxe.com

Why use mysql for asp.net site?

When we use Asp.net + Mysql, it doesn't mean it's better than sql server system. The case mostly happened on web hosting deployment, we always have to upgrade to full version sql server database and pay extra fee. Because when we use VS to build the project on local computer the built in database is sql express, however it's not the best solution on hosting server and not supported by most asp.net hosting. The database and web servers are always separated on hosting. In case we don't want to pay the upgrade fee but still want to use asp.net, we can consider switch to mysql.

What should we pay attention to? Because VS has no built in support for mysql, we have to configure the connections manually. We need to install mysql odbc connector and make sure the hosting server has the same version installed. here're two docs about how to

• Mysql ODBC Connector Tutorials
• Asp.net Application using mysql database sample codes

Is there any disadvantage?

Since sql server is the default database system for asp.net development, using mysql is technically limited in many ways such as sql report, security etc.. Unless there's a special reason, we highly recommend to deal with sql server. Mysql would be good for small and simple website solutions.

Using mysql will reduce your cost for website investment, however unless you're pretty familiar with the operation and maintainance, you should use sql server database instead.