iFinity

Somehow I got a rumor mill going.   As most things with unexpected consequences, this caught me a bit by surprise.

Let’s get the back story : last year, while at the DotNetNuke Conference in Orlando, Scott Wilhite and I had a little chat about the DotNetNuke Forge.  As the chief of the DotNetNuke community, it’s his job to make sure the community has the best tools at it’s disposal.   One of those is the DotNetNuke Forge.  And it’s where any open source extension for DotNetNuke should live.

I’ve written a lot of bits and pieces for DotNetNuke in the last half-decade or so since I started doing this – some are trash-can fodder, some are ‘for my eyes only’, some are good enough to give to the community, and some are commercial products that keep my family fed and housed.

Most of the stuff in the third category was sitting on my website as downloadable zip files.   It really wasn’t the right place for it.  Scott asked me when I was going to start putting stuff on the DotNetNuke Forge.  It was...

My blogging has been a bit patchy in this first quarter of 2012, as has my open-source output.  The reason for this is that I have been involved and working on a new startup project that should hopefully launch soon and prove to be a big success.

The investors behind the project hadn’t done a web startup before, so they obtained the advice of the first person they found. I don’t really know the history behind this choice, and it scarcely matters now anyway. By the time I arrived, technology choices were in granite and the runway end was fast approaching.

Upon arrival I was disappointed to find out that this was what I call a ‘scratch build’.  The first person on the project literally went into Visual Studio and said ‘New Project…’.

The first question I asked was ‘did the original person who chose this technology consider using a CMS of any type?’.  The answer was ‘Yes, but it was ruled out’. 

Again, there is little value in turning over old rocks when there is a project to finish...

Just last week I did a presentation to the South East Queensland DotNetNuke User Group, on the topic of ‘What’s new in DotNetNuke 6.2’.

The slides from this presentation are shown below:

What’s new in DotNetNuke 6.2 View more presentations from brchapman.



About the User Group Meeting This was a very fun event – generously sponsored by Power DNN Australia and held in South Brisbane.  Unfortunately we were in the grip of one of the worst rain events in recent history – while I was presenting, over 370mm of rain fell on my house – that’s 14 inches of rain - in the space of a few hours, which caused widespread flooding.  It wasn’t as bad in Brisbane where I was giving the presentation, but the weather was foul enough to keep a few people away.

The next SEQDUG meeting is already in planning – make sure you join the Linked In Group...

One of the greatest strengths of the DotNetNuke framework is the ability to create many different websites with the one installation.   This means you only set up one IIS website, and then serve up as many individual sites from that as you like.  Personally I’ve seen DNN installs with thousands of sites, which is a bit of an eye opener if you’re used to running 2 or 3.

However, this power has a few small drawbacks, and one of the ones I’ve been mulling over for years has been the ability to serve up separate robots.txt files for separate sites in a DotNetNuke installation.

The robots.txt file is a pretty old protocol, and dates back as far as I can remember.  The basic idea behind the robots.txt file is that it tells ‘robots’ – such as search engine crawling bots – which parts of the site they can index, and which they should ignore.   While it’s a bit of a relic in that it’s a voluntary standard (those writing malicious bots for stealing content don’t exactly pay attention), all of the major search...

The new DotNetNuke store arrived last week – and what a momentous day for vendors like myself who use the platform extensively.    The old Snowcovered store had remained quite stagnant for a long time, and while it had many strengths, there were a lot of weaknesses that needed to be fixed.  This  has been done, and everything is good!

Well, almost everything.  One feature that vendors use extensively is the ability to track visitors to both their product page and their vendor page.  While a vendor like myself has no idea overall what sort of traffic the site gets, we have the ability to create a Google Analytics account and see traffic to ‘our’ specific pages in the site.

One of the big changes with Snowcovered to DotNetNuke store was, of course, the domain name.  And anyone who knows anything about Google Analytics should know that it works on a combination of your tracking ID and the domain name. 

So it should be no surprised that many people will see analytics graphs that look something...

The 13th February, 2012, marks 10 years since the .NET Framework 1.0 was released, well, according to Wikipedia, anyway.  I don’t recall the specific date, but I remember the general period vividly.

This little point of achievement will probably pass most people by as they spend another day creating new software based on this platform, or use one of millions of websites that the platform provides, or any number ways of interacting what has become an incredibly successful framework by any standard to measure.  But I thought it might be fun to just pause for a minute and reflect back on the last decade.

Is ten years such a long time?  Realistically, in computer industry years, it’s an absolute eternity.  The internet has really only been around for most people since the late ‘90s. The Windows 95 platform only lasted for 5 or so years before being dropped.  Visual Basic (the original version) went from 1.0 to 6.0 in 7 years, before...

This blog post brings together two threads of thought that I have been thinking about.   The first is related to my recent blog post Implementing jQuery and Javascript Libraries across DotNetNuke versions, and the second was a conversation with Scott Willhite at DotNetNuke World, who asked me why I hadn’t actually ever published anything in the DotNetNuke Forge despite writing lots of stuff.  I didn’t really have a satisfactory answer that didn’t involve using an excuse of inertia or procrastination.

My prior post on jQuery and Javascript implementation has been pretty widely read, and one of the comments on twitter was thus:



...

The big change for Url Master 2.5 was the inclusion of the ability to build custom module providers for generating module-specific Friendly Urls.  Part of this strategy was to develop a set of module providers for popular third-party modules.  This kicked off with the DotNetNuke Blog module provider.  

The next module provider to be developed is the News Articles Friendly Url Provider, which transforms the Urls generated and used by the Ventrian News Articles module.

The new provider is a plug-in...

DotNetNuke 6.0 brought jQuery UI directly into the framework as a ‘1st class’ DotNetNuke member.   It also allowed developers to request the DotNetNuke jQuery registration code instead of each developer independently including the library, which prevents multiple versions and the subsequent page errors this will create.  I have previously blogged about this in my post Using jQuery UI with DotNetNuke 5 and 6 in the same module.

With the release of DotNetNuke 6.1, the new Client Resource Management (aka imbibe) framework has been included.   This framework not only includes jQuery and jQuery UI in DotNetNuke, but it uses a client registration framework so that other libraries and Javascript files can be included in the correct order.  The best resource for this is Ian Robinson’s blog post : jQuery & jQuery UI in DotNetNuke 6.1 and 6.1.1.  ...

Something that quietly slipped past a lot of people at the start of November was the announcement from Google that was rolling out SSL Search for all logged-in Google users.

This can be broken down like this:

- SSL Search means that the search session is conducted over https

- logged-in Google users covers the universe of people who are logged into a google service, such as iGoogle, Google+, Gmail – plus a whole pile of others.

- SSL Searches do not provide the Keyword data in the referer value for a click-through from Google

This fact that SSL searches do not pass the search query data (ie, the keywords used) onto the site that is clicked on has a very large impact on Analytics packages, which collect that data and summarize it for analysis.

This means that data using any Analytics package (not just Google Analytics) will no longer provide keyword data for some Google searches.

...