We recently deployed a report library for our online application and one of the parameters that exists for almost all reports is what locations to run the report for. Fairly standard huh? So far so great. When we went and looked at how the parameters were presented we were surprised there was no way to adjust the width of those drop down lists, they are hard coded to 184px, this cut off almost half the name of the locations for a lot of our clients, made it very unfriendly to our users.

After some Google searches and a Twitter post basically discovered the only way to really change those is a CSS hack. Thanks to Brandon Hays for his blog post on it located here (Changing the Size of ReportViewer Parameter Dropdown List). Take a look at that blog post for the theory behind this solution. Our problem was that Mr. Hayes stopped a little short of what we needed and so...

Read More »

As I start building more skins, look for a new skin club site soon, I find more and more little things that need a tweak or two to make them portal specific instead of static. The DNN label help icon is one of those. Here is a simple way to change it so your site can have different icons per skin.

*Warning this does involve two small edits to files in the core of DNN. DNN updates may or may not overwrite these changes. Backup your site before making any changes and changes are made at your own risk!

Some history on the DNN label control. Way back when in version 3x one of the contributors came up with the nifty label control for DNN. It solved a few problems, like having help in the user registration and login dialogs and providing localization with the localization provider. However, like all things it has a few limitations one of them being there is no way to change the little help icon for one portal and not for another. Keeping with the multi portal aspects of DNN this is something of a puzzle...

Read More »

I was thinking of building out a site for free skins. I know there are hundreds of free and some are bad skins out there why do we need another site to show them off?

I was thinking this site could be a gallery presentation of skins.  Skin developers would put up pictures of the skins they want people to see and then we allow users to vote. The winning design for the last month would be available for download by members.

Members would pay a small monthly or yearly fee and most of that fee would go to the skin developer the month they are the featured download. Or maybe a portion of the fees based on how many times theirs is downloaded?

Anybody think this is a good or bad idea?  Why or why not? Should this club focus on just DNN or is it valid to have other CMS’s?

On Twitter Antonio Chagoury came through with a nice little tweet about his new tag cloud module, DNN Universal Tag Cloud.

The module is a nice tight package and integrates into the search provider for DNN so you have to have that enabled on the portal. I was able to quickly install the package without any problems on my DNN install and add it to my Blog page without any hiccups at all (look to the left here to see it in action).

The setup for the module is very simple and straight forward. Click on settings and pick where you want the tag cloud generated from, how many tags to generate, if you want an RSS feed of the tags, and if people can sort the tags. Click update and the tag cloud is there. Clicking on a tag takes you to a search for that term. You can even designate an outside search results page such as Google if you want, great for generating a little extra...

Read More »

Usually I stay away from posts like this because I end up with my foot in my mouth but its starting to get to me more and more. Many people and sites try to gauge how popular a site is by where its rank is on Alexa.com. If you haven’t used or looked at Alexa please do so you can see what I am talking about, I’ll wait for you.

Back? Okay!

‘What’s the problem?’ Alexa uses a browser toolbar to track what sites are visited and for how long. Supposedly they don’t collect personal information but that a different discussion. Using this information they rank your site against other sites.  Now the hilarious thing is computer technical sites rank consistently lower than comparable non technical sites. I suppose one reason is that computer techies and geeks don’t install these tool bars all that much (too many problems and increases load times for the browser). The main demographic for these type of sites is totally ignored and discounted or at least skewed to the low end.  So the ranking is totally unfounded....

Read More »

In a meeting and client started playing with super glue, a golf tee, and a ruler. This picture was the result.

Since I have started doing more and more WordPress work (who would have thunk it :)). I have to start paying more attention to the things that make WordPress work the way people want it to work.

 

*For those WP people out there I don’t think WP is any easier than DNN to use or tweak to do things I want, it’s just different.

 

Here is a link to 40 WordPress Tricks and Hacks - http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/40-most-wanted-wordpress-tricks-and-hacks/

One thing I notice absent in a lot of these articles is reference to building a site map for Google and other engines to use to help crawl the site. So I am adding in my suggestion to always add the sitemap plug-in to your WordPress blog. The plug-in can be found at - http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/.

UPDATE: If you are using WordPress.com and not hosting your own they already supply an xml site map for you. (Thought I should add that.)

...

Read More »

This last week I was looking at domains for a project and wouldn’t you know it some of the domain names were taken by cyber squatters, imagine that. After some looking around I found a few of the domain names I was looking for for sale on a variety of domain resellers. What these b******s were asking for these domain names is outrageous! No content, no traffic, no marketing  just a name. This exercise got me to thinking what sites, and to a lesser extent domains, are worth and how they are valued.

In my opinion a going concern of a site should be worth more than a domain name but looking around that doesn’t seem to be the case. If you are curious here are five of the better sites I found to value a going domain. Of course like all things in the business world what something is worth depends on if you can get someone to buy it.

Site Value Check – uses Google page rank, Alexa traffic ranking, back links depth, average popularity...

Read More »

Okay sounds like a proverb or something but when I coach kids in swimming its what you do. You tell you show them and you make them do it. One of the best ways to learn right?

So the new design is blue and has these little playdoh guys I think are neat. The blog has gotten a little bit of a work over and the other pages will get some enhancements and design elements as I get to them. The great thing is most of this design work is done with CSS. I really think that I am starting to ‘get’ it. Of course I still have a long ways to go but I have to say the 960 grid system and @nokiko’s grid program have been a big helper. I put the new skin together in less than a day. Yes its sort of simple and the menu needs some color work but I ran it through the W3C xhtml checker and it actually came back with only 2 errors. One is a DNN attribute on the form tag (don’t think I can fix that one) and the other I think has to do with a div tag inside of a span tag, again not sure what to do on this but I figure I did fairly...

Read More »