Free tools and services such as XAMPP and DynDNS are an absolute blessing for me particularly when I need to develop my web apps and test them under development mode. Last year, I successfully set my home web server running on XAMPPLite to be accessible via DynDNS so that I could demo a website I developed. Recently, I assisted a friend of mine in setting up another server, but it wasn’t quite as smooth sailing.

I remembered that I only succeeded in setting up my server previously after much scouring in the Web. God knows how many times I tried and re-tried the instructions at DynDNS, even resetting my modem router and network settings of my computer just to be sure.

After combining what I’ve read in the Interwebs and testing the setting out, did I finally manage to get everything up and working. Port forwarding is one of the important things to do, but the way I do it is so much unlike most instructions I read on the web sites.

Using my new HTC Desire HD smartphone (yeah, I FINALLY have an Android phone, yippee!), I made a few screenshots of my web server port forward settings.  If your Internet connection uses dynamic IP, and you use DHCP to assign IP addresses in your local area network, then I hope you find this useful.

Here’s how they look like on my D-Link modem router:-

DynDNS web server port forward + XAMPP VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

(okay, am I the only one who thinks this Windows Live Writer is fricking funny AND cool?! … oh, alright… here’s the screenshots one by one…)

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Having been impressed with the demo at the recent Microsoft TechNet MSDN Roadshow here in Kota Kinabalu early September, I decided to install the freely-distributed Windows 7 RC installer on my just-repaired Acer Aspire One netbook almost immediately afterwards, and have been installing and testing many software almost non-stop since then.

I’m so psyched that Windows 7 performs as well as, if not better than, Windows XP! Not only were there no hardware and device conflict, but many of the software I used in XP is still compatible with 7! I’ll be honest and admit that there were very very small occasions where I encountered the dreaded BSOD, but those were entirely my fault since I installed certain software *cough virtualization cough* that were not compatible with my CPU, against Microsoft’s and Intel’s warnings, and again those errors were very few and far between.

As a blogger, my main concern was whether I’d still be able to use XAMPP and TortoiseSVN for my WordPress sandbox and plugin development, specifically for the Top Commentators Widget(TCW). Boy, am I glad they work on 7!

The screenshot above shows my Windows 7 desktop with the XAMPPLite program running Apache and MySQL. I’m also re-setting the TCW repository with TortoiseSVN to continue with my WordPress development, specifically the GEDCOM plugin and another plugin which will be simple but surprisingly useful – the latter will also be my first attempt at developing an AJAX-powered app.

So, yeah… I hope this lame excuse is enough of a good reason for the lack of posting in this blog

BTW, I’m typing this post via Windows Live Writer (which is bundled with the free Windows Live Essentials if you’re wondering how to get it). If this program screws up with the formatting, then this will be the last time I’ll be using WLW, otherwise I’ll be sticking to this as long as there are no better decent and free offline blog editor that comes along. I’m currently not using ScribeFire, since Mozilla Minefield doesn’t support it yet (yeah, don’t install FireFox on Windows 7, it’s very unstable).

Hope to do more posts concerning my WordPress plugins and Windows 7 experience soon.