A couple of weeks ago I posted some advice on the DotNetNuke forum regarding the use of the 'NavigateURL' call.  Through my work on Friendly Url Providers I've become a bit of a walking reference for this particular corner of the DNN framework.  So I posted a short description on all the different overloads for the NavigateUrl call.

In it, I posted the cheerful snippet:

"[Same as the other NavigateUrl overloads] but allows you to pass in your own portalSettings instance.  This allows you to define different portal options, so you can either change the current language, change the portal alias, or even generate urls for a different portal altogether.  All overloads without 'portalSettings' produce Urls for the current portal, with all the current settings like the current language, current portal alias and more.  You would also supply the 'portalSettings' value...

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The ease at which you can post to a blog with Windows Live Writer (WLW) would have seemed like science fiction a couple of years ago, yet here I am doing it right now.   Except that, in years gone by, you could easily edit Html in a WYSIWYG editor and quickly FTP Up the results.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I thought I'd post a quick entry in case people are running Blog 3.5, Url Master and would like to use WLW.  I found that in configuring the Post Url for WLW, I had a few problems to sort out.

If you haven't yet set up your WLW to post to your blog, it's really easy.  Here's the steps:

1) Start WLW, and progress through the first couple of steps, indicating you already have a blog, and that it's with 'Another Blog Service'.

2) Enter your blog Url and DNN username and password that you blog under

3) Select 'MetaWeblog API' as the type of weblog

4) Enter your Blog Posting Url : this is pretty easy to get.  Its http://www.yourdomain.com/DesktopModules/Blog/blogpost.ashx?tabid=nn...

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I've been waiting eagerly for the new Blog module to be released.  Quite a while back, I posted on here how the Blog module developers could make people happy by putting the module title into the Url using the 'page name' functionality of the Friendly Url API.   One of my readers thought it was a good idea and posted it on Gemini, now the results are in.  Here's my experience with the upgrade.

I answered a post on the DNN Forum the other day relating to a question about how to go about structuring a custom build DotNetNuke® module. It's an area probably covered well in various DNN books, but I think it's a question that most experienced developers but first-time DNN module builders ask. Here's how I recommend you structure and build your custom DNN modules.

A little while ago, I posted a blog entry as a guest blogger on seablick.com.  I'm putting a link in this blog to that entry, so that anyone searching for it here can find what they are looking for.

Url Rewriting has been known to make sites act strange, with broken image links, missing CSS files and javascrtipt not found errors.  Here's why it happens, how to fix it and how to avoid it in the first place.

Have you got two home pages indexed for your site?  I bet you have.  There are two home pages for most ASP.NET websites - www.domain.com and www.domain.com/default.aspx.  Read on for the final word on this.

If you're getting serious with your Google Adwords advertising, you should probably be trying out different types of page copy to see which works the best.  Here's a quick guide on how to setup Google Adwords testing in a DNN site.

If you've installed the Url Master module, and it's not working exactly as you want, here's some things to try to work out where you're going wrong.

This entry is the first in a series about building SEO modules for DotNetNuke.  It follows on from my earlier posts about building a module that is optimised for search engines, but in this series I am going to build a module and show the relevant steps and pieces of code that go into making it.