I just set up a message board for a client. There are at least 20 usable products out there: the awesome Forum Matrix solves that in a hurry. View a list of options pared down by your requirements, then view a list of the most important criteria to you (from a list of something like 50).

In this case, vBulletin was the winner. vBulletin is a very nice product, but the competition wasn’t nearly as strong as I’d anticipated after first viewing the size of the field. One similarly-priced solution has their demo offline until some time next year, with their site claiming it’s coming in October. phpBB has a lot of theoretical power from user-created mods, but they’re hit and miss (the file attachment mod is gold, but calendar options are lacking).

vBulletin was easy to install, has a great calendar, supports archiving, and is just extremely full-featured. It costs $160, which it quickly justifies when I compare its setup time with the work I spent on other solutions. People with different requirements might like phpBB or some other free option fine, though, so hit up that aforementioned matrix.

There are a lot of questions about making Wordpress play nice with other functionality on your site, so here’s the solution that works for me.
One of the first things to do after installing Wordpress is to configure it for “pretty permalinks”, in the options tab. That gives you links like this rather than some “index.php?a=144″ gibberish. Unfortunately, it modifies your .htaccess file to do this, and in a way that isn’t terribly friendly with other functionality you might want.

Fortunately, there’s an easy fix: enable Wordpress’s “verbose” rewrite rules by setting “use_verbose_rules” to true in your wp-includes/classes.php file.

Now that you’re good and friendly with your .htaccess file, let’s do a bit of search engine optimization (SEO) to your site. If your site displays the same at “mydomainname.com”, “www.mydomainname.com”, and “www.mydomainname.com/index.html”, you can easily confuse search engines. Unless you explicitly tell Google otherwise, for example, it will treat “mydomainname.com” and “www.mydomainname.com” as two different sites. If people start linking to both, it can hurt your PageRank.

There’s an easy solution to this, too: a 301 redirect. Several sites explain the ins and outs of 301 redirects and .htaccess syntax, so I’m just going to give you the code that works for me. Put this near the end of your .htaccess file, but before the “#BEGIN WordPress” section:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.independentcreator\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.independentcreator.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(([^/]+/)*)index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule index\.html$ http://www.independentcreator.com/%1 [R=301,L]

Finally, I had a problem with this rule breaking WordPress comments: I had accidentally configured WordPress to use my site’s URL as “independentcreator.com” instead of “www.independentcreator.com” in the Options tab.

Recently, a client decided to consolidate all of his e-mail into one GMail account. I’ve done the same thing: I enjoy labels and searchability far more than even corporate Outlook.

As long as you’re switching over to GMail for all the benefits, why not convert your old e-mails as well? This particular client needed his old e-mail moved for other reasons, but it was so easy, I decided to go and do it for my old mail as well.

In most cases, all you need is Mark Lyon’s GMail Loader. It’s super simple. You plug in a working GMail SMTP server from this list (or your ISP’s, if it blocks outgoing SMTP traffic), point it at your existing e-mail file or files, give it a target GMail address, and tell it to go to work. It then merrily chugs away, sending one at a time to your GMail account, leaving the old from/to intact (only the date gets clobbered). Beautiful!

In this case, the e-mail was already in a giant Outlook Express file, which isn’t supported by GMail Loader. No problem: just pop it into DbxConv and you’re good to go.