I recently received a question from one of my friends regarding the use of keywords and descriptions within meta tags on a website to improve ranking of their site. They asked if they could increase the frequency of how often those tags were shown so they could improve the ranking of their site. My response was as follows:

I always forget how to get into maintenance mode on Sharepoint pages to close / remove webparts that are (potentially) causing issues. Sometimes you will even get an error message that provides a link to the maintenance mode pages. There is also some convoluted way of getting into maintenance mode, but I can never remember it.

An easy way to get into maintenance mode is to simply add ?contents=1 to the URL. For example, if your URL was http://sharepointsite.com/pages/default.aspx you would go to http://sharepointsite.com/pages/default.aspx?contents=1

We just got back from a trip to Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. Laura's sister, Ellen, got married up there and we had a great time. Check out the photos on Laura and my facebook pages. I took a bunch on my blackberry and Laura uploaded the ones from the digital camera.

I think you should be able to see my gallery without being my friend on Facebook, but you'll have to be friends with Laura to see her gallery!

If you've never been to Quebec, I'd highly recommend going. As you'll see in the pictures the place is a lot like a miniature version of a European city. There are 300+ year old buildings, cobble stone streets, and a bunch of cool history. Even though the Quebecians speak French, the people are really great and can speak English just as well!

PS. Congrats to Ellen and Dave Langlois on their marriage!

I just installed Windows 7 on an 8+ year old machine I had laying around my house and I was surprised to see that it runs as well as it does. In fact, it runs better than the XP installation I had installed on the old PC before upgrading it to Windows 7. To be fair, the Windows XP installation was a few years old and probably suffered from disk fragmentation and memory being consumed by the random applications and services that had been installed.

Hardware that I had difficulty with in Windows XP was automatically recognized and had the proper drivers installed. Even the cheap-o USB wireless stick I bought a few months back was recognized during the installation so I could setup my wireless network before even booting into the full operating system. On my windows XP installation, I had a bunch of problems getting the USB stick to work and had to get drivers directly from the manufacturer. With 7, everything was automatically recognized and installed.