or more importantly:

click here to download SharePoint Designer for free (registration required).

There were some questions in the comments and also maybe the instructions weren’t quite clear, so I’ve made a screencast showing the entire process.
 

Sorry for the bad sound quality. I’ve had trouble with microphone, so thanks to Audacity I didn’t need to record again. Below you can see the video screencast published on YouTube (Strange, MSN Video didn’t want to process it). If you want to see the video in better quality (not sound) and with Table of Contents, click here (17 mb streaming flash, 9 minutes).
 

On the Server in SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration select Operations tab and select Alternate Access Mappings under Global Configuration.
 

 
Now change the web application you want to edit public URLs for by using the dropdown on the right hand of the page
 

Next click Edit Public URLs
 

And now enter full URLs (including http:// or https://. You can add up to 5 URLs to which the web application will respond

At the end also add the host headers to the Website in the Internet Information Services manager.

Note that this works on the web application level. If you have site collections with custom URLs you can’t configure multiple URLs for each of these (or if someone know the way, I’d appreciate if you left me a comment).

All you need to add to the page are the
 
?PageView=Shared&ToolPaneView=2
 
parameters.

This opens the Task pane for adding webparts. So now you can add any webpart to the page. Some practical uses are to add Content Editor Webparts to the page or related lists,…

Next click the button “New Parameter” and enter a name for it. Then in a Parameter Source dropdown, select Query String.

Under the dropdown enter the variable name – which parameter in URL to read. For example if it will be reading parameter “p” in url webborg.blogspot.com?p=1234 just enter letter p. You can also set a default value if there is no p parameter in the URL.Next click OK.

And that’s it. Now you can use this parameter for filtering, or in the Data View Web part as you desire. If you want to use the parameter in the DataView just enter its name with a $ (dollar) sign before it. SharePoint Designer’s Intellisense will recognize it.

An improvment in performance was immediate. And then suddenly a baloon pops up from my system tray explaining that there are solutions to my Vista problems (format? ). Desiring the better performance I follow the link and download the update. For all here’s the link to KB article from which you can download the update for 32-bit or 64-bit Windows Vista.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/941649

After installing the patch and restart – the difference is obvious. Performance is better.

The best performance improvement I notice is that my SharePoint Designer crashes immediately instead of freezing for 2 minutes first :-)

1. Mouseover DOM inspector v. 2 – MODIv2

This thing is pure JavaScript, DHTML and CSS so you really don’t need anything else for inspecting a DOM of a certain page. All you need is to bookmark a link on the help homepage:

And then go to the page you want to inspect the DOM, and next just call the script from your favourites.

And you’re already exploring the DOM.

It doesn’t contain as many tools as the previously described toolbars, but it’s a very good solution for quick start and instant DOM inspection.

1. Web developer toolbar for Mozilla Firefox

It offers quite a wide array of tools for web developers, such as ruler, css validation, DOM explorer, etc.

It has a nice feature when exploring DOM – it displays all the parrent elements – so you can see how any element is nested.

A neat add-on to that feature would be to be able to pause the selection and view the nested DOM, since there are a lot of times too many nested elements and the text goes out of the screen.

2. Firebug

A good combination of both – ie and firefox dev toolbar, it has very good tools for debugging HTML, CSS and JavaScript. What I like about it is that you can select the elements and it automatically also selects the HTML. And to manipulate the HTML, JavaScript and CSS in real time is very easy.

What I like about it is that it is easy to use, it has ability to monitor, debug and execute JavaScript, it helps with visualising some of CSS properties, and its toolset is nicely organized and easy to use. On the image below you can see how easy is to manipulate HTML in real time.

The problem of displaying too many nested elements is solvet neatly with a simple solution: the elements are ordered in opposite sense – it displays nested elements from right to left – instead of html > body > … div it displays div < … < body < html.

These are some neat tools that may make your life easier. I recomend using them all together because you know what headaches the IE/FireFox display compatibility can cause

After a couple of retries (also uninstalling SSEE and a lot of reading on the web to my horror I’ve found one sentence “you’ll need a clean install of Windows Server 2003.”

.

This was a bit tough because of existing users and some other parameters. After digging a bit deeper and combining knowlege of couple of experts’ blogs I’ve managed to successfully reinstall WSS3 without Windows Internal Database (SSEE) and into SQL server 2005.

Before I write how I did it, let me clear that this solution worked for me. I’m presuming that you don’t have anything else installed in SSEE and I’m not responsible for any errors that might happen if you’re following the same procedure. So please before making anything on a production server – backup, backup, backup. This procedure includes messing with Windows registry!

Here goes:

1. Copy all the SharePoint Sites to another temporary folder
Using
 
stsadm -o backup -url http://<site_collection_url> -filename <location and filename>
 
copying backup files to new server and
 
stsadm -o restore -url http://<site_collection_url> -filename <location and filename>
 
on the temporary server worked the best. It kept all the relations and all the custom formatting on all the sites.

2. If these are productions sites modify DNS or forwarding to point to the temporary server

3. Here’s where the “fun” begins: Delete all the SharePoint Web applications

4. Uninstall Windows SharePoint Services through Control Panel

5. Uninstall Windows internal database (##SSEE)
Connex’ Copper Coins has it described in his blog here. Just in case I’m writing a short ressume:

Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionUninstall click different GUIDs untill in the right pane you see under “Display name” Microsoft SQL 2005 Embedded Edition”. Under that registry copy the value under “UninstallString“. Run the command prompt window, paste the command AND add “CALLERID=OCSETUP” at the end of commend line. For example: MsiExec.exe /X{BDD79957-5801-4A2D-B09E-852E7FA64D01} CALLERID=OCSETUP.EXE.

(ressumed from Connex’ Copper Coins)

6- Delete all files and folders under %windir%SYSMSISSEE

7. delete all and folders files under %Programfiles%Common FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions12

8. Using reged backup and delete in registry everything under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftShared ToolsWeb Server Extensions12.0

9. The previous step also deleted the “Server language” entry. so Using notepad create a .reg file with the following text:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftShared ToolsWeb Server Extensions12.0ServerLanguage]
“1033″=”"

and run it to restore the “Server Language” entry needed for Windows SharePoint Services installation.

With that I have removed every trace (or at least enough) of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 from the server. Now I was able to re-run the WSS 3 setup and and it offered me the option for nstalling it into SQL server 2005 and without SSEE.

This is how you can have it done without making a clean install of Windows Server 2003.

If you need help installing WSS, I recommend the following article on technet:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/WSS/en/library/6181fe5b-90ca-40cf-aade-abd59cf3c9071033.mspx?mfr=true

I’m already using it to write all my posts for this blog. It has many improvements and features, so I recommend it. Amongst many others, one of them is also the support for blogger tags. You can download it from Windows Live writer website, but the link is misleading. Don’t click on the big Download button, because it will lead you to the Live Betas web page.

 To download Windows Live writer, click on the links in the left bar. Click here to go to Windows Live Writer

Click here to go to the page and download Windows Live Writer beta 2