Chris L. Bennett

 As I said in my last blog post, I put together a simple site with the new Blog 4.0.0 Beta 3 Module.  Took me a bit longer than I hoped; however, it seems like a very good module now that I've played with it for a bit.  I cannot wait to get the final version installed on this site.  

To get started, head over to the site http://dnn5test.chrislbennett.com/.  Then you need to go ahead and register.  No I'm not going to sell your email address or anything there of.  Once you're registered, you can jump into the Blog page and create yourself a blog.  You should then be able to create posts, comments, tags, categories, etc.  If you find something you would like to do and are not able to because of a permission on the site, then send me an email and I'll see what I can do ...

Please be kind, do not start doing inappropriate things on the site such as links to inappropriate content.  This is also not an opportunity for SEO.  If you want that, head over to blogspot, wordpress, etc.

And I almost forgot the link to the site ... http://dnn5test.chrislbennett.com

  For some time I’ve had problems with the base DNN Blog Module and I had just reached the point where I was ready to find or purchase a commercial module to replace it.  Of course, I checked out the ones available on Snowcovered  SunBlogNuke and NukePress.  I didn’t really want to drop $100, so I kept looking around.  I came across the News Article Module by Ventrain Systems.  I saw a couple different sites that used the module as well as other modules from Ventrain Systems.  And I was close to the point of paying the $30 to get access to the source code for 3 months. 

Since I’m a .Net developer I went back to the thoughts of just modifying the Blog Module to do what I wanted it to do.  Although, I can make the changes, I would really prefer not to touch it as I have other distractions on my time at the moment.  The thought also crossed my mind to switch to WordPress.  I do have several WordPress blogs on other topics; however, I just didn’t feel right to switch to WP.  I really wanted a CMS system not a Blog System.  So I have a choice …..

And then, I came across something a reference to updates on the way for the base DNN module.  Turns out, version 4.00.00 beta 3 was just released on 1/7/2010.  The list of enhancements looks quite impressive:

For the past year or so I've been using GoDaddy hosting, specially the Windows Unlimited.  While there service is pretty good, the overall performance of the sites are not the greatest.  They have a few qwerks in how you run multiple sites within one account which anoying and their admin site is very slow.  But the biggest problem I have with them is the Database size limitation of 200MB per DB.  While you can have as many as you want, this inconveniece means you have to split up sites and applications in such a way you stay below that limit.

For a while, I've been thinking about switching provides and  never really planned when.  Then, I came across a link to a provider I have never heard of before Arvixe.  They have a similar unlimited hosting plan for Windows.  It was a couple $ cheaper per month, so I thought I would go ahead and give it a try for a month on one site.  After seeing just how easy the first one moved over I made the jump to move them all.  My sites now run much faster and they resolve all of the issues I had with GoDaddy.  Took me about 3-4 hours to move over 8 domains, web content, databases and email addresses.  So far, I'm very impressed.  And best of all, they don't nickle and dime like GoDaddy!

Update: 1/15/2009 - Its been almost 4 months since I completed th switch to Arvixe and I'm still very impressed.  I have quite a few domains setup now and the sites are still very fast and reliable.  Over the time since I switched my downtime has dropped drastically.  I can say that I will be recommending Arvixe in the future to others.

Its been a long time since I last published a blog entry and so I thought I should get to it or shut it down.  Over the last several months, I have not had a lot of free time as I've been publishing a lot of articles lately.  I'll get the Article Page updated later to reflect my most recent ones on Developer.com later today. 

Since I've been putting time into writing articles, I have had the need to keep a lot of separation as to not remove value from the articles or accidentally break my agreement with the publisher.  I'll have to think over the next couple days and decide what I want to do to refocus this blog into something more useful.  In addition, I have a book idea in mind that I've been developing.  I'm not sure if it will go anywhere, but that this point, I just want to proove I can do it.

 Update 11/18/2009: Just updated my article list as of today.

Until next time ...

Over the past couple of months, I've made several different packages with Open Web Studio. And after creating a simple content version package, article manager and a link exchange system I think it is a great tool for creating simple packages.

Unfortunately, the script language it inherited from listX is not exactly easy to master. Not only is the script language a bit difficult, but there is very little documentation available. I was able to learn it by starting with the listX documentation and downloading as many examples as I could find. Nonetheless this is time consuming.

I do believe they have started to address the short comings. Lately, the OpenWebStudio site has drastically improved the content available on the wiki. The lack of information is mainly why I published the packages I've created for this site. There is also a page on the wiki describing changes to the script language to make it more usable.

Even though OpenWebStudio is still fairly new, I would have to conclude that is a very good tool for creating fairly simple packages to augment DotNetNuke. However, if you intend to create complex modules, I would recommend creating native .Net code.

Extrenal drives are so cheap these days that anymore you can pick up a 500GB at Frys for <$70. Like many out there, I have several of them. Rather than have all of these drives connected to one PC. I would rather have a small home server. However, I'm not about to pay what HP wants for a Windows Home Server. Essentially the Home Server is a light weight version of Windows Server. So, I've looked for a long time for a small and inexpensive server that provides more functionality than just your basic NAS (Network Attached Storage).
Last week I came across an article on Slashdot regarding a new $100 embedded device designed to run Linux. The device is called a SheevaPlug. The specs for the device are quite impressive as listed below:

• 1.2Ghz ARM5 processor
• 512Mb Ram
• 512Mb Flash
• 10/100/1000 Ethernet
• USB 2.0
• SDIO Slot
• USB Development Port

Amazingly all this fits into the size of a "wall-wart" as shown in the images below:

Here is a block diagram of the internals

Out of the box you will need to go through a fairly technical process to install the boot loader and the file system image over the development board.  Once Linux is installed and running you can run the normal software you would expect in a small server Samba, Apache, PHP, MySQL, NFS, etc. Quite a few Linux distributions support ARM processors including Ubuntu and thus can be used on the device. The development kit is available in small quantities through the Marvell site.  I'm pretty sure I'm going to purchase one for myself to use has a light home server and as a remote backup for my virtual server.

Over the last couple of days I started using the iGoogle page. Well, it didn't take me too long to create my first Google Gadget. You can add my FightClub Quotes gadget to your iGoogle page below.

Creating the gadget was much easier than expected. Google has a very nice gadget editor that plugs into the iGoogle page. Basically a gadget is an XML doc with a configuration section and an HTML content section. The gadget also has a fairly simple set of javascript commands that provides access to remote content. One confusing thing I found when I started building the gadget is that there are 2 different APIs. The new and the legacy. My first reaction was to use the new format and go from there; however, currently the new format is not supported. For some reason this is not explained very well. I have a couple ideas for gadgets that I'm going to build. I'll publish them here as I complete them. To start creating your own gadgets click here.

Since my last post, I've been quite busy with family and work. I'm now traveling 4 nights/week until the end of April. On top of that, I've been publishing at least one article per month on developer.com. I also spent quite a bit of time working on another ecommerce site. None the less, I've have a laundry list of things to talk about, so I'll try to go through them.

I'm always looking for something that can improve the performance of Windows. I've always been irritated by the fact that over time windows just slows down through installing apps, registry errors disk defragmentation. Recently, I came by a couple of apps that seems to help the performance quite a bit.

First download/install the following 3 utilities:

• CCleaner - Directory cleaner and registry repeair
• JKDefrag - Lightweight disk defragmentation
• PageDefrag - Page File and Registry File Defragmentation

Next perform the following steps:

1. Execute the command "chkdsk /f". When prompted press Y to run chkdsk at reboot. This will run a check on the file system and ensure it does not have any errors.
2. Upon reboot start CCleaner and click the Clean Button.
3. Click on the Registry button, and click Scan for Issues and Fix Selected Issues.
4. Launch JkDefrag.exe.
5. Upon completion, start Page Defrag. Select the Defrag at next boot and click Ok. Reboot the computer to defragment the Page File, Event Logs and Registry.
6. After rebooting, launch JkDefrag.exe again to clean up any fragments caused by Page Defrag.

After running these steps, you should notice an improvement in the performance. If you have other tips and tricks for improving performance, please send them over.

Recently, my job has had me traveling quite a bit. So I haven't had much time to actually sit down and write down my thoughts in blog entries. Regardless, for some time I've been searching for good DotNetNuke data modules. Specifically I generally focus on modules which provide the ability to work with data. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon the open source module Open Web Studio. Open Web Studio (OWS) is an upgraded version of the ListX module from R2Integrated.

While OWS is open source they do have several different subscription levels. The subscriptions are a bit pricey from my persective; however, I'll let you choose. Mainly the purpose for the subscriptions levels is to provide commercial support. I've been using OWS without a subscription and so far, the user interface is quite good; however, it is quite a powerful and unfortunately has a steep learning curve. Recently a couple of basic videos have been posted to a Wiki on the OWS site. The Wiki so far is an ok reference for the package but not great. I also did some googling which gave me a couple of samples to start looking at. Another good source of information I found was to download a copy of the latest documentation for the ListX package off the dnn.bi4ce.com site.

Unlike other data module for DNN, OWS is extremely flexible in how the data is stored and how the user is able to interact with it. Essentially, OWS is a basic scripting engine. It works off of basic actions such as Query, Template, Email, If, Else, If-Else, Redirect, Variable and Assign, etc. By string together these actions is is possible to make choice based upon query parameters to allow adding/editing/deleting of records as well as data tables. OWS itself does not have a native format for storing data in the DB, instead it uses tables that you create. This provides for much better control and performance over tools such as XMOD.

In playing with OWS, I've create a couple different modules. One of these modules is currently active on this site on the About page labeled articles. While most of the articles module is completely hidden it has a complete admin interface which allows for adding/editing and deleting of articles. I have a couple of other modules that I've started, but are yet to be completed. I almost forgot ... in case you plan to distribute modules you create, there are instructions availabile on the OWS Wiki to create a Private Assembly (PA) for distribution.

In the near future I plan to post these modules to a software page and make them freely available. I have a couple of other things I'll release on the software page including a TCP client.