Step 1: Install the UrlRewrite module for IIS: http://www.iis.net/expand/URLRewrite

Step 2: Add the following rule to your applications web.config file:

<configuration>
 <system.webServer>
    <rewrite>
      <rules>
        <clear />
        <rule name="Redirect from www" stopProcessing="true">
           <match url=".*" />
           <conditions>
              <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www.yoursite.com$" />
           </conditions>
           <action type="Redirect" url="http://yoursite.com/{R:0}" redirectType="Permanent" />
        </rule>
     </rules>
   </rewrite>
 </system.webServer>
</configuration>

IMPORTANT: When using the above code, take care to merge it with your existing web.config without duplicating any existing elements.

I like my URL’s to be in the format http://mysite.com. If you prefer http://www.mysite.com, simply remove “www.” from the <add> element and add it to the <action> element’s “url” attribute.

In the mid-1980s, NSF decided the time was right to try to link its regional university networks and its supercomputer centers together. This initial effort was called NSFNET. By 1987, participation in the new NSFNET project grew so rapidly that NSF knew it had to expand the capacity of this new network. In November of that year, it awarded a grant to a consortium of IBM, MCI, and a center at the University of Michigan called Merit to create a network or networks–or internet–capable of carrying data at speeds up to 56 kilobits a second. By July 1987, this new system was up and running. The modern Internet was born.

I came to the U.S. on Sept. 3, 1987 from India to begin my Bachelor’s degree at Western Michigan University. I remember logging on to the Merit network that same month from the campus computer lab. Since, at the time, everything about computers was totally new to me (other than the Sinclair ZX Spectrum+, my home computer), I had no idea until today that this was a brand new network and more importantly, the first “network of networks.”

Also, the brutally honest truth is that Posterous is on borrowed time.
If the service does not start innovating rapidly, get huge user
adoption and then create a significant reason for users to stay, it
will soon become irrelevant. Its primary feature — email to blog — is
not enough of a differentiator because technically it is not very
difficult to implement and other blog engines will be quick to offer it
to their users (some already do).

I think Posterous should be thinking about ways in which they can
continue to stay relevant and even attractive to bloggers by doing the
exact opposite of what they are doing right now. Instead of trying to
be a blogging platform, they ought to focus on being an email
publishing utility very much like FaceBook is positioned as a social
utility. The AutoPosting
capabilities available on the service are a great way to start, but
they could be so much more. Instead of just supporting vanilla posts
with title and body and hosting the photos/media here, they should go
all out and implement email to MetaWebLog and other API’s. Being able
to use email to make a complete, detailed post to WordPress, DasBlog
and other blogging engines would be great. Add template, tagging and
categorization and it starts to get really interesting.

And while they are at it, they should do it for not just 10, but 100′s of other services. Basically, email enable every ProgrammableWeb.com API
for which email posting makes sense and that has any kind of traction.
That would be killer and greatly increase the barriers for competition
as users don’t like changing habits unless there is a very good reason.
Imagine “posterous” becoming a verb for “posting something to any web
service using email.” I think this would be a bigger opportunity for
the company and allow it to become truly indispensable compared to
where it is now — a “me too” blogging platform which re-posts to other
services.

Bottom line, forget the blogging and focus on the email.

Fast-forward to present day and there is a new iWidgets.com site created by someone else. Here’s how eHub describes it:

Create custom widgets for your website or your brand with iWidget.
Using their online wizard, you can easily create widgets that your
website visitors or customers can add to their iGoogle start page,
Facebook profile, or their own blog. Your widget is customizable by
your users so that it fits right in with their design.

It
felt very strange seeing the site…sort of like seeing someone else
wearing your favorite shirt. I spent some time on the site playing with
their tools and was very, very impressed. Great job iWidgets.com team,
wish you much success.

1. I love Chai and drink a lot of it (not the Starbucks kind…the regular Indian kind which is way better).

2. I am a digitalmediaholic. I have over 6 terabytes of ripped movies and 100 GB of music.
3. I am a dot com bubble survivor. I founded a venture-funded startup called iWidgets.com that created widgets for web pages. Unfortunately, the technology was six years ahead of its time.
4. My un-Americanized name is Nikunj, pronounced nick-ooonj.
5. I have never had any alcoholic beverage…none.
6. I became a vegetarian in 2001…did it cold turkey (pun intended).
7. I grew up in Bombay and came to the U.S. in 1987 for my undergrad education. Never went back, and became a U.S. citizen a few years ago.
8. I enjoy the creative aspects of brand development, especially logo development, tag line creation and messaging.

I greet widgets with a mixture of emotions. In 1999, when I created my venture-funded startup, my world-changing idea was to bring the web to people in the form of mini-applications that provided identical functionality with a web browser, a mobile device or a telephone. Not only that, the mini-apps had collaboration built-in so you could decide who could view/edit your data etc.

Yes, the mini-applications were called “widgets” and my startup was iWidgets, Inc. Unfortunately, the world wasn’t ready for widgets at the time and I didn’t know as much about running a startup then as I do today, and so iWidgets joined thousands of other dot bombs when I turned the lights out in early 2001.

But seeing all the buzz about widgets today gives me a good feeling — I had the right world-changing idea, just at the wrong time and perhaps a little flawed in the execution. I felt nostalgic enough to go digging through the archive DVD’s to pull up some promos we had created. Here are four of them, each focused a specific target market.

Janet |  Hannah |  Johnsons |  Rob