Business.*Technology

Visual Studio Templates

don@oldtownit.com — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 22:32:47 GMT

I love techniques that help shave time off of software development and the ability to create templates in Visual Studio is one of those features that doesn’t get the use it deserves. In this post, I’ll describe how to create a template, some things to look out for when managing your template and a few tips on how to optimize working with templates.

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A Hedgehog Principle for DotNetNuke

don@oldtownit.com — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:09:34 GMT

As many of you know, I’ve been recommending DotNetNuke as a CMS to organizations for years. It is the largest open source project built on Microsoft’s .NET framework and just recently DotNetNuke Corporation, the company which manages the project, received their first round of funding from August Capital and Sierra Ventures. Yes, this is tremendously exciting for everyone associated with DotNetNuke. It heralds amazing opportunities as the news filters through enterprises of various sizes who have heard of DotNetNuke but were not ready to commit for various reasons. It tells IT Directors and CIOs…

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Creating metaPost Videos - Our Camtasia Settings

don@oldtownit.com — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:50:04 GMT

People have asked about the metaPost videos we created, specifically how we got the overall file size as low as we did. Well, here's how we did it...

An upgrade of your Flash video player may be needed.

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Missing Captcha Images with DotNetNuke on Windows Server 2008 Running IIS 7

don@itcrossing.com — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:15:04 GMT

If you're running a DotNetNuke site on Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7, there are some great new features you can use. In fact, you'll see them in use on this site with the extensionless URLs. In order to achieve this effect, I had to switch my server from classic mode to integrated mode, and this switch caused the Captcha images throughout the site to stop working. Here's how to solve this problem...

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On Openness and the Social Web - A Seminar from France via Le Web

don@oldtownit.com — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:13:55 GMT

I took a quick trip to France this afternoon to sit in (yes, unfortunately, it was all virtual) on a great panel discussion between representatives from Google, Six Apart, MySpace, Facebook and Microsoft...

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Unicode Characters in the DotNetNuke Blog Module

don@itcrossing.com — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:47:27 GMT

The latest release of the DotNetNuke blog module contains a bug that affects sites using Unicode characters in Page names. This post contains a couple of workarounds that can be implemented temporarily until the fix is made available in the upcoming 4.0 release of the module.

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Facebook - Personal or Professional Use

don@oldtownit.com — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:45:38 GMT

OK, I'm probably a little more paranoid than 95% of the population, so it's no wonder that I haven't posted pictures of my family through Facebook for my friends to see. I've had this fear that if I post galleries to Facebook, they're visible to more than just my trusted group of friends. Part of the problem is that I'm still learning the ropes at Facebook after more than a year of using it and I'm not quite sure how visible galleries are. I know I can see images from the galleries of my friend's friends, at least when they've posted a comment on an image; but how far down the chain does this go? To my knowledge there's no way to track this.

Well, it turns out that my fears weren't unfounded...

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A Proposed Usability Metric - V/SS (Value to Screen Space) Ratio

don@oldtownit.com — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:31:01 GMT

One of the things I love about being involved in a large open source project, like DotNetNuke, is the opportunity to work with people who love what they do and who work like lunatics to get things right. I learn a lot working with the rest of the members of the team. While chatting via email this morning with Rip Rowan regarding changes to the new comment interface for the blog module, I realized that some of the interface elements we've added to support a new feature have what I think is best labeled as a low value to screen space ratio, or V/SS ratio for short...

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Updates to the DotNetNuke Blog Module

don@itcrossing.com — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:46:16 GMT

As many of you know, IT Crossing staff have been actively involved in a couple of open source projects. One project of particular interest to us is DotNetNuke. For those interested in keeping track of DotNetNuke related posts on our blog, we have created a separate category for DotNetNuke related posts with its own distinct RSS feed.

In this first post to the DotNetNuke category, we highlight some updates to the DotNetNuke blog module...

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The GTLD Rush Of 2009

don@oldtownit.com — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 06:48:57 GMT

Get ready for the gold rush of 2009. ICANN announced on June 26th that starting in the second quarter of 2009, you'll be able to purchase a generic Top Level Domain (TLD). Up until now, web addresses have ended with one of 21 TLDs accepted by ICANN, the organization which oversees the names allowed in the Internet addresses we use every day. This is great news for organizations which may have showed up late to the first domain name party only to find that another guest had taken the domain of choice for their association. This new ruling by ICANN will pave the way for...

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