I just finished reading the interview with Shaun Walker by the folks at HowSoftwareIsBuilt.com.  This is a website sponsored by Microsoft, whose purpose is to open a dialogue for proprietary...

As you likely know, I am a user of twitter.  You’ll find me at:  http://twitter.com/WillStrohl.  Lately, I don’t contribute as much as I used to, but I still try and pay attention to what’s going on.  For example, I have an ongoing search that filters all tweets based on some DotNetNuke® keywords.  Today, this search came across a blog post titled, Does DNN Allow Me To Do SEO Stuff.  I liked this post, despite it being on a non-DNN blog platform.  It only scrapes the surface though.

Basically, it mentions that DNN makes it easy to manage the Page Title, Keywords, and Description.  Unfortunately, the only thing here that is very important these days with SEO is the Page Title.  The Kewords and Description can help, but by all accounts, little to no...

If you’re using the URL Master module from IFinity, chances are that you are also using the extension-less URL pattern like you see on my site.  This is a great way to shorten your URLs for a more SEO-friendly impact when search engine spiders crawl your site.  It also removes the TabID from the URL, which also has a meaningful impact on SEO – not to mention making the URLs more human-friendly.  This is sometimes more important than the SEO benefits.

By default, the DotNetNuke® Blog Module generates a URL that looks like the following URL:

http://www.domain.com/PageName/tabid/123/EntryID/123/Blog-Title.aspx

This isn’t a horrible URL structure, but it leaves plenty of room for improvement.  That pesky TabID needs to go.  This is done automatically by URL Master. ...

I had been planning for a long, long time to update the design of my blog site.  Even though I consider myself a proficient skinner, I simply haven’t been able to find the time to return to it for my own projects.  Nearly all of my professional and personal time has been taken up recently with module development.  Through this, I have found that not only did I not have the time to build myself a new skin, I also have been getting a bit rusty at it. ...

There can be many times when you might want to clear out the skin and/or container value assignments for your DotNetNuke® website.  The most common example would be when you’re switching skins.  By clearing out the skin and containers, it can make it easier to re-assign the new skins and containers across your site.  (This of course depends on your specific site.)  This is quite easy to accomplish.

Default Skins and Containers First, let’s review where the container and skin assignments are made.  This begins at the portal level.  For your portal, you can set the default skin and container to be used for all pages and containers in the Site Settings.

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I thought I’d share a little gem that I had drummed up some time back to help you with a little bit of built in audit information from your DotNetNuke® website.  Many sites that want to present their visitors with a notification of when and where they last logged into the web application.  This can be useful, even if I believe few to no people actually pay attention to it past the first couple of times they logged in.  That being said, it’s very easy to implement in DotNetNuke®, and you don’t even need to build a module to take advantage of it!

First, you’d want to add a stored procedure to your DNN site that queries the database for the user login information that’s currently logged in.  Here is an example snippet:

1: CREATE PROCEDURE {databaseOwner}[{objectQualifier}GetLastIpNumberForUser] 2: @UserId INT, 3: @PortalId INT 4: AS...

Not too long ago, I mentioned on twitter how much I had accomplished in one day by multi-tasking.  You never know what statements will return comments to you on the various social networks, and when they do, it is typically surprising.  This was one of those surprises to me.  As I remember it, at least 3 other people began sending me links and comments showing how multi-tasking actually makes you less productive.

Here are a couple of examples:

Multitasking May Not Mean Higher Productivity Multi-Tasking Leads to Lower Productivity There are very valid points in every argument posed in this area.  However, I do have to point out that studies like these are very subject to situational and contextual scrutiny.  For example, multi-tasking is an entirely different proposition if you...

If you follow anything that I do, then you might have picked up on the fact that I am a big fan of Active Social.  Active Social is a complete social networking solution for DotNetNuke®.  Out all of the available solutions for DNN that I could demo, this was the only one that just worked, with minimal set-up and had the best usability.  Needless to say, I am using this solution on a handful...

Do you live in or near, or frequent the South West Florida area?  If you do, then you might want to attend the first ever Tech Fest Event.  It is the Thursday before South Florida Code Camp, so it would be a great primer for the code camp, or to talk your boss into paying for you to attend both!  This is a half day event, running from 2:00 PM to 6:30 PM on Thursday, February 25, 2010.  I am told that there will be lots of premium content with some great speakers from around Florida. 

Among some top-notch speakers rises their keynote speaker, Jack Braman, the Eastern U.S. Vice President of Microsoft.  Other featured speakers include Ricardo Olivares, a Business & Technology Strategy Executive and MIT Sloan Alumni, and Brian Zaas, a Business Development Executive with over 22 years of experience implementing...

I happened across a REST standard for importing remote content today called oEmbed.  It uses REST to display embedded content from other websites.  This specific method avoids (but doesn’t get rid of) XSS issues that are experienced with importing content from other websites.  Using either JSON or XML, you make a GET request using the oEmbed standard, which will return the remote content that you can embed into your own website. 

There are many ways to do this, but using this method, you can gain a higher level of usability over user-entered content in your own web applications.  For example, imagine your end-user having to add a YouTube video into an online editor.  They’d have to:

Find the video on YouTube Copy the embed HTML Figure out where and how to paste content into the source of the editor Paste the HTML source code into the editor Save the content For anyone...

Do you live in the Toronto Area and need your DotNetNuke® fix?  Well, Paul Scarlett has that fix ready for you!  He has just founded the Toronto Area DotNetNuke User Group.  Paul recently announced this on the DotNetNuke® Forums, and is currently looking for your input.  So, if you’re passionate about...