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...

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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...

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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

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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...

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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...

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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] ...

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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...

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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,...

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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®...

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