Microsoft recently had the excellent idea of helping out start up companies with their software needs by creating the BizSpark program.  That program had become quite popular.  So popular, in fact, that my company, RezHub is a member.  Like BizSpark, WebsiteSpark is a similar program whose goal is to make it easier for website...

Another year has gone by, and as of last night, the 5th annual Orlando Code Camp has wrapped up.  Normally, my perspective of the code camp is much different than this year.  It began as a simple attendee, then upgraded to a Speaker, and then a Speaker/Volunteer.  This year, I was a Speaker and I helped our Orlando .Net User Group President, Esteban Garcia,...

The great thing about an open source project that becomes popular is that many people use it, and if you’re lucky, they let you know about it.  The bad thing about an open source project becoming popular is that people use it, and as a result, you need to fix it when things go wrong.  With the default model of open source being that the product and support are typically both free, this can sometimes be troublesome.  Luckily, this is not the case for this release!

For those of you that haven’t heard of this module, the Ligthbox Gallery module is an open source (free) module for DotNetNuke® that allows you to quickly and easily provide that popular lightbox effect for images on your website.

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I already teased this a bit in my rundown on what to expect from this years Orlando Code Camp.  Now, I am able to tell you specifically which sessions will be broadcast out to the world for your enjoyment.  This is very exciting for us for a couple of reasons.  First, this is a new thing for us to do and it’s a very welcome challenge to overcome for this years code camp.  Second, Microsoft has honored our code camp...

I have gone to the Orlando Code Camp every year since it was first held on the UCF campus 5 years ago.  It was run 3 consectutive years by Shawn Weisfeld, and boy does he run a tight ship.  He was also the Orlando .Net User Group President, and his example is one the main ones I have used in leading the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group...

Well, it has been an exciting week.  I had pledged to use Bing exclusively in place of my preferred search engine, Google.  I knew going into this that I would get a little bit of flak and cause some ill will, as the topic of search engines can be a religious-type conversation among techies.  That, and depending on how we search and when we search, we can each get completely different results – literally.  This test was not at all surprising in those aspects.  Here is my run-down on the final day, and a summary of my findings.

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In my ongoing quest to put Bing through the wringer, and to see how it compares to my usual preferred search engine, I had some interesting results today.  Before I get into that though, I should mention that I have truly been taking this challenge seriously.  I have switched my default search engines, and I even search for more things than usual, just to put that much more effort towards my end goal.  What’s that goal?  Easy.  I want to give Bing its fair chance to make me a believer – if it can.

Searching for Technical Assistance Probably the most common thing I use any search engine for is to look for assistance to technical...

I am not sure if it’s fortunate or not, but the last couple of days with Bing have been uneventful.  The few times that I wasn’t able to find what I was looking for, Google hadn’t a clue either.  In fact, one specific query returned nothing from Bing, and only returned about 8 non-relevant results from Google.  I’ll keep you posted as this weeks Bing Challenge comes to a close.

Technorati Tags: Bing,Google,Review,Search Engines

Today is the second day of my personal challenge to myself to give the Bing “decision engine” another full test run.  Today, I didn’t really have to search a whole lot.  When I did, they were very simple searches.  I am finding that searches that are not targeted to specific websites or technologies work pretty well.  When I go outside that scope, I begin to see the searches go from slightly different, to completely different, in comparison to Google.

Like I said, the searches today were uneventful.  I mostly got what...

I decided today to give the Bing search engine another try.  I had tried it first launched and I wasn’t happy.  While the result generally were pretty good, they were not targeted enough, and even when they were, the targeting was inconsistent.  I intended to give Bing a full week then, but I only made it 6 of the 7 days.  It was enough for me.  I resorted back to the infamous...

I ran into an interesting situation last night.  I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed this in the past.  My blog site was originally one of many in a single DotNetNuke® installation or instance.  Since it has grown in popularity and traffic, I had to move it to it’s own standalone DNN instance.  The quickest way to make that happen was to move a copy of the original instance, and delete all of the other portals that came with it.  In doing so, this left all of the users from the other portals still in the Users table in the database.

WARNING!!! Don’t just run the queries here. Read the post in detail first. Also, BACKUP your database before manually changing any data.  You may severely mess up your site. You’ve been warned!

At first, I kind of panicked, because I was looking at the users in my Superusers Account module.  It was 100+ pages of users!  We all know that there is probably not a single site out there that has 10 super users, much less 100+ pages worth of super users.  In the first page, there were several test accounts, so my first thought was that I had been hacked at some point.  However, I didn’t take the history of the portal into account. 

As it turns out, I had learned in a very scary way how DNN handles user accounts when portals are deleted.  I am not sure of the thought process behind it, but the users are soft deleted from the portals that get deleted.  In this situation, this has a couple of distinctive attributes to take note of.

The IsDeleted column in the Users table is 1 The PortalId column in the UserPortals table is NULL You can see these attributes by running the following query:

1: SELECT up.[PortalId], u.[UserID], u.[Username], u.[FirstName], u.[LastName], u.[IsSuperUser], u.[Email], u.[DisplayName], u.[IsDeleted] ...

My 9 year-old son has to do his first science project at school this year on his own.  Until now, his science projects have been a class project.  Having gone through this before, my only requirement to the kids is that they come up with their own idea for the project.  I don’t want them doing what their friends are doing.  This forces them to use their brain to figure out an experiment using scientific method – which is the whole point of the project in the first place.  I am not a fan of any child using their friends or siblings ideas.  Be as unique as you can! :)

Well, the first part of the project is to turn in your idea of the project to the teacher.  This involves handing over your scientific question, project title, hypothesis, and so on.  The project he chose to do is about saving electricity.  He wants to prove (or disprove) that you save electricity when all of your appliances that are not in use are unplugged.  I love this idea!  It shows that he cares about the environment, thinks about saving...

It was less than a year ago that I created the Lightbox Gallery Module, as a proof of concept for using jQuery in a DotNetNuke® module.  It has been quite popular considering I only ever expected those who attended my code camp sessions to enjoy it.  Since its first release, it has had over 1600 downloads!  I am sure that less than 50 people have physically attended those sessions, so that number is staggering for me.  That being said, I am pleased to announce that I have another release ready for you to use and abuse.

If you don’t already know, Lightbox is the highly interactive method of displaying pictures on a website.  The thing that separates Lightbox out from the uncountable others is that its fast, user-friendly, interactive,...

I have blogged about some community things here and there, and I will begin blogging about them more starting right now.  My first meaningful post in this area talked about how to run a user group, and it was more generic in its discussion.  It could apply to any user group.  This time, I am talking about how to start a user group, and I am focusing this discussion on DotNetNuke® user groups specifically.

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I will be presenting a webinar later this month titled, “DotNetNuke® Essentials: Simple Solutions for Building Your Website.”  I have been very excited for quite some time to be able to announce this.  The webinar will focus on DotNetNuke®...

I didn’t notice it when it happened, but jQuery has had a couple of stabilization releases since the popular 1.4 release.  The updates are pretty significant and I have seen performance increases that were noticeable to the eye with several implementations after upgrading.  I would highly recommend upgrading your current jQuery core scripts if you’re not running version 1.4.2.  Here are some tips for those of you running jQuery...

One of the new features in the updates in my website is the “Most Popular Entries” area at the bottom of each page on my site.  It gets attention for a few different reasons.  First, everyone wants to know how I did it.  Next, people want to know what determines the most popular blog entries.  Finally, people want to know if I would blog about it.  I had always planned to, but since you asked…

First of all, I need to give a quick disclaimer.  I...

Another year has gone by since I last visited the Miami area.  It was of course for the South Florida Code Camp.  There were many things that continue to remain the same with this event: the venue, the coordinators, and of course the fact that this was an incredible event! ...

I just got home from the 2010 South Florida Code Camp, where I presented a session titled “How to AJAX-ify Your DotNetNuke Modules.”  Here are the presentation files for that session.

Slide Deck – This can be downloaded from my Sessions page.

Code Files – The code files has been released as an open source module on CodePlex.  This module is called the QueryToGrid module.

Technorati Tags: DotNetNuke,DNN,Modules,Session,Presentation

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