I like CSS but it seems like it takes so much more time to develop and troubleshoot CSS sites than table based designs. (Okay you CSS people can send all the comments you want but that's my experience.)

Hopefully I can change that for myself with a new framework I found, the 960 Grid System. The website has a more complete overview but basically what the framework aspires to do is codify the layout of sites on a 960 pixel wide grid system with that width split up into 12 or 16 columns of equal width with a gutter between each column. For people like me who tend to think very linearly this is about like drawing on graph paper.  The whole framework minified is about 4k or 5k and saves me from writing a lot of the CSS that I would need write to build the same site. I know this framework isn't for everyone or every site but artistically layout impaired developers like me its a blessing and very effective tool.

@Nokkio (on twitter) has developed a DNN skin and system based on this idea which can be seen...

I am a developer not a designer! I think most of the people I talk to on a regular basis say this at least once a week. Most developers, okay the ones I hang out with, don't have a lot of artistic ability. I don’t mean they aren't creative, I mean how else can programmers deal with visualizing all the variables and interactions of data, text and logic. What I mean is, hand them Photoshop and you will not get one useable graphic from them much less a straight line.

Knowing this I went looking for tutorials to make myself a better designer. Know I know quite a bit about CSS and something about how it works but trying to develop a skin for DNN with CSS is something of a mystery. Now, with this tutorial http://www.subcide.com/tutorials/csslayout/, I feel a little better about trying to get going on a design. Still can’t draw a straight line but when I learn how to do that I’ll be able to show it with a better page design.

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The Back Story When building Version 3, well that’s what we call it, of our online safety tracking and compliance software we created a small monster. In the initial stages  of design I added in the ability to send users alerts about events that happen. For example a person in a Kansas grain elevator gets hurt and the incident is added to the recordable incident list and the manager in New York knows about it and can get an investigation going on what happened. Really helps the corporate guys stay on top of things right! After the first iteration of reporting I intended to move this to a purely online alert system with daily overview emails so users didn't get deluged with emails. I tried to change to a full web based system and users revolted! (Yes, users are revolting sometimes but this was users demanding to get more rather than less emails and worse yet it was the users who pay the bills!)

The Problem At the time it was no big deal if an incident happened the alert email got sent to maybe 20 people...

In one of my previous articles (SSRS – The Report Viewer ‘spinny’) I described how a simple meta tag had halted and frustrated our attempts to get the report viewer control to work and act as we expected. One comment to that article was how to remove the offending meta tag.

It turns out this is very easy in ASP.NET and in DNN it can be done with any module with the simple inclusion of a small bit, one line, of code. You could also add meta tags if you needed for some purpose.

1: Page.Header.Attributes.Remove("http-equiv")



Adding this line in a module should remove the offending meta tag. I have only tested this on a few pages but it works in those instances.  Luckily DNN only has a few http-equiv attribute meta tags so you could progmatically add back in the ones you need. If there were more (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533876(VS.85).aspx)...

Imagine our surprise when we first started deploying reports some 8 months ago in DotNetNuke and we could never see a ‘spinny’ for any of our reports. Sure when we developed them and did the preview we would get one and when we deployed them on pages outside of DNN we saw it but we could never figure out why, in DNN, it would never show. Until IE8 came out, that is.

IE8 has a wonderful little feature called Compatibility Mode and combined with Fiddler (http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/) we were able to notice that the spinner appeared when the site was switched from Compatibility mode and back to regular but not when the page first loaded.  Forcing the site to load everything again with Alt + F5 seemed to make the spinner appear as well. Watching fiddler while doing this we saw a few things happen. JavaScript files appeared to be reloaded and CSS files appeared to be reloaded. This made us think that maybe some little bit of bad JS or some malformed CSS was causing the ‘spinny’ to not show. So we stripped...

Where I work, yes I sometimes work, full time we have run without ssl for a long time. In some ways it was a lack of need in others it was a lack of understanding of why we need it, not on my part but sometimes management still thinks like its 1970. Finally this last week we have gone through the painful process of putting security on all our public facing websites. Doing so always brings out legacy problems and the little quirks in your code and sometimes in other third party services. One of those quirks turned out to be Google Charts.

Google Charts doesn’t work over ssl it simply redirects to Google.com. We needed a solution to avoid panicking our users with the dreaded "some content came from an unsecured page" warning in the browser. After some research we wrote this little http handler to grab the chart and stream it to the page under ssl.

In order to use the HttpHandler we simply added a class to the App_Code folder but you could easily compile it to its own assembly if you wanted.

Add...

Some users have the wrong idea of why they are forced to log in to a site. Well if you only want to have them log in once and not be logged out while the site is in the browser here is one way. This is above and beyond the 'Remember Login' checkbox and really good for long data entry forms!

Great article on fixing a small SEO problem in DNN from Eguana Solutions - if you are serious about making the DNN sitemaps reflect the correct priority of your pages this is a start.