The Pantsless Coder

First Published Module (Timed Skins) – DNN 5 Version

dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:33:47 GMT

Change skins based on a schedule. Ever needed to have your site change skins for the seasons or the holidays. Now you can set up a schedule and get on with your work.

http://www.snowcovered.com/Snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=242&PackageID=16898

CodeMyPantsOff First Published Module (Timed Skins)

dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:07:44 GMT

Timed Skins

Change skins based on a schedule. Ever needed to have your site change skins for the seasons or the holidays. Now you can set up a schedule and get on with your work.

http://www.snowcovered.com/Snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=242&PackageID=16887

Online Jobsites and Politics – A Rant Maybe?

dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:52:29 GMT

In a time of economic crisis when the main discussion in Washington seems to be if there should be a stimulus or a jobs program its interesting to see how a political candidate advertises for help to build a website. Now I for one am happy to see that sort of work appear on a job site and most likely it will go to one of the lower bidders but what I find interesting is that a State Representative running for office would not think to add some verbiage into the job description such as ‘US candidates only’ or even something about ‘Michigan based providers given preference’. I may be wrong but even something as simple as a website, if it goes off shore, would be political ammunition for any opposition candidate or group. What do you think?

I think I will keep an eye on this Job on Elance - http://www.elance.com/c/rfp/main/rfpBid.pl?jobid=18976113

Find My DNN Portal

dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:16:35 GMT

Recently I have started helping out with some development and support for FindEightDigital.com. FindEight has a dedicated server and has smartly split up portals into databases that correspond to the level of traffic they receive.

This presents me with a bit of a problem because I need to discover what portal is in what database and its id. After looking this up in about three databases I decide to get my friend (http://zackue.com) to write me a little query so I can always find the right database. Here is the nice little query he came up with.

IF OBJECT_ID ('tempdb..##TempTemp','U') IS NOT NULL
      DROP TABLE ##TempTemp

CREATE TABLE ##TempTemp (ID INT, Name NVARCHAR(MAX ), DbName NVARCHAR(MAX))

exec sp_MSforeachdb 'IF OBJECT_ID (''?.dbo.Portals'',''U'') IS NOT NULL INSERT ##TempTemp SELECT PortalId, PortalName , ''?'' FROM ?.dbo.Portals'

select * from ##TempTemp;

My 5 Favorite Objects for DNN Portals

dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:57:43 GMT

Building DNN for clients sometimes can take finding some custom module on Snowcovered or building one yourself but there are some modules and other objects I really like to have in my DNN portal no matter what it looks like or does.

Oliver Hines Advanced Control Panel. This replacement for the control panel that admin and host accounts see is slick and optimized for the web. Makes working with the control bar just that much easier. (Download)
Oliver Hines Optimized Skin Objects. Something that has been long overdue for DNN! By taking out some of those post backs it really does appear to make the site peppier to end users. (Download)
Oliver Hines Primary Portal Alias. Now this little install is actually a core modification so you might want to think about it before installing but if you are serious about SEO and 301 redirects for your portal this is the modification to use. Especially if you don't want to or cant mess with IIS directly. (Download)
DNNDoneRight DNN Menu (Guess its now DNN Garden). This is a great menu with a lot of options for the menu including a templated version so you can style it exactly like you want. I particularly like the Mega Menu (Download)
Oliver Hines Google Analytics Evolved. Okay this is something that I think the DNN core should of done when they added in the Google analytics to the core but since they didn't we are lucky its open source so someone else could. (Download)

These are my 5 favorite things to include on portals. Do they make portal development any easier or help me add content to pages not really, they do solve some of the small issues that take so much time to solve each time a portal is started.

Have more you would like to add?

Work Smarter, Not harder (maybe?)

dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 08:23:17 GMT

Here are a four strategies you can use to get the most out of your time at home:

When is your peak efficiency? At what time during the day are you most alert, focused and ready to go? How long does it last?
Maybe you work best from 8am to noon. But, are so brain dead in the afternoon, you might as well be doing something else. Then perhaps you get a second wind after dinner for 3 or 4 hours, and voila, there’s your 8 hour day. Not quite your typical day at the office, but you’ve gotten twice as much done as you would otherwise. For some people it’s starting a 5 am, others like to work through the night.
The trick here is to pay attention to your internal clock and figure out when your energy is highest.
Do other things during your down time: Exercise, groceries, oil changes. If you are not the 9 to 5 type, then this works perfectly because you avoid the crowds at stores, the gym, and the garage filled with the people who only have time on weekends and after 5pm on weekdays. No line ups, no waiting around = more efficient.
Create a work friendly atmosphere. Not only have dedicated workspace that is tidy and organized, but make it inspiring and inviting. Hang art on the wall, have potted plants in the room, play music that helps you concentrate, buy comfortable furniture. Feeling good in your environment results in improved productivity.
Stir things up once in a while. If you are uninspired in your normal space, set yourself up with a laptop and work in the dining room or living room, or add a cell phone and go to your favorite coffee shop once in a while. Sometimes completely new surroundings will help you work better and faster. Plus, it’s more fun!

Being flexible and incorporating interesting strategies into your work habits are some of the best advantages of working at home. Do you have any unconventional ways of improving your efficiency and effectiveness?

Thinking of redoing your website?

dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:45:47 GMT

Let’s say you are a small organization, perhaps a nonprofit or business-to-business, and you are looking to redesign your website. This might include a new graphic design, new content and functionality. As with most small organizations, you do not have an IT department or Web guru on-staff, so you have turned to a Web development company to put it all together.

The question for you now is, what can you do to keep costs low, move the project along quickly and, ultimately, make the site successful?

Outline your website

The outline will illustrate the navigation structure of your current website. A good way to do this is in Microsoft Excel. In Excel, you would enter in each page of the site and where they fall within the site structure. For example:

Home		Brief description
About Us		Brief description
	Staff	Brief description
Services		Brief description
	Services 1	Brief description
	Services 2	Brief description
News		Brief description
Contact us		Brief description

So in the above example, the outline shows that there are (5) “primary” pages: Home, About Us, Services, News and Contact Us. Under About Us, there is a Staff page, and so on.

Now, this is something that could be done by your web development firm—most likely during the quotation phase. However, it may be beneficial to do this in-house. The reason being that in most cases, having taken the time to analyze the current website’s structure, you’re going to make changes.

Perhaps you will move pages, delete others or add new ones. Or, it may very likely spawn entirely new questions for the web development firm you hadn’t thought of before. It also gives a quick, simple guide to the website that can be used by both you and your Web development firm for sharing notes and progress.

Site Design: Custom vs. Off-the-Shelf

Typically, the two major cost items in a website redesign are the graphic design and moving content from the old site to the new (assuming no custom application development).

With the economy as it is today, we’ve seen many small organizations choose off-the-shelf graphic designs, versus creating an entirely new custom design. This can easily save 30 percent or more in the overall cost of the project.

Where to buy off-the-shelf? The short answer is that it depends. In most cases, the Web development firm will be utilizing a content management system for your new website. Each content management system typically has an online marketplace where pre-packaged designs can be purchased for very little cost. For instance, www.snowcovered.com provides over 4,000 designs (also called “skins”) for DotNetNuke websites, which can most often be purchased for less than $100. Once purchased, users can change the colors, drop in a logo and custom banner.

The downside is that you’re using a design that may also be used by anyone else. It reminds me of when I produced a video for an international manufacturing company several years ago. They chose a song from a shared music library. Three months later, we heard that very same song being used in a local A&W commercial.

New Content

If I could stress just one point above all others when it comes to a website redesign, it is this: if you plan to write new content, and you wish to write it in-house, plan for time. This is something I warn each and every client (and my clients will surely attest to this). If there is any one thing that will throw off the schedule for a new website redesign project, it is the time needed for writing new content.

Putting together the site outline is a great start, as you can “flag” which pages need writing and the progress of each. It also will allow you to create a rough estimate as to how many hours it may take (for instance, you may budget two to three hours per page, based on the page).

In addition, prioritize new content pages. You may determine that some low priority pages can go “live” later on, after the new website is completed so as not to throw off the schedule.

Points of Contact

Who in your organization will be the primary points of contact in coordinating the project between you and your development firm? Perhaps it is just one person, or perhaps there are several.

For example, you may have different staff members who are responsible for different portions of the project, such as:

Graphic design
Content
Database integration
IT

Knowing who to contact for specific questions or coordination will help the Web development firm streamline production and eliminate miscommunication and false-starts.

Search Engine Tip

When migrating your old site to the new, ask your web development firm to integrate what’s called “301-redirects.” Think of a 301-redirect as a helper tool for Google. What this does is assist Google and other search engines in mapping your old pages to your new pages. This way, the search engines are doing less work in re-indexing your website. What this means for you is that you will see little or no “dip” in terms of how your website appears in search results as the new website goes live.

OpenID – enhancing the DNN provider

dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:51:00 GMT

One of the aspects I really like in Stackoverflow is that it uses OpenID. Now a lot of sites use OpenID already but none have made it as easy as Stackoverflow has. This really should be viewed as a model to get larger adoption of the OpenID standard across the web.

What’s so great about it? Well the Stackoverflow site has used images of the big OpenID providers clear (Goolge, Yahoo, AOL, myOpenID) then a lot of the the lesser ones that are used a lot (Live Journal, Wordpress, Blogger ,etc..). Simply click an icon or image and Stackoverflow uses a little jquery to try and log you in or ask you for the username at that OpenId provider. Many sites and the DNN provider included simply present the user with a field to paste in the url of the OpenId provider. Not a problem, but not every user on the web knows what that url is or where to find it.

My first project to make my site operate like Stackoverflow is going to be to add so enhancements to the default OpenID provider built by the DNN core group. Maybe in time they will adopt this into the code (here's hoping anyway).

So looking at how this should be done I came up with this:

Create an array of the providers you want to use – for each one I need to include the:
1. Name
2. URL
3. The label if a username is needed
4. Picture or logo of the provider

So in a javascript file I am going to set up the first array like so:

var providers_array = {
    google: {
        name: 'Google',
        url: 'https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id'
    },
    yahoo: {
        name: 'Yahoo',
        url: 'http://yahoo.com/'
    },
    aol: {
        name: 'AOL',
        label: 'Enter your AOL screenname.',
        url: 'http://openid.aol.com/{username}'
    },
    myopenid: {
        name: 'MyOpenID',
        label: 'Enter your MyOpenID username.',
        url: 'http://{username}.myopenid.com/'
    }
    livejournal: {
        name: 'LiveJournal',
        label: 'Enter your Livejournal username.',
        url: 'http://{username}.livejournal.com/'
    },
    wordpress: {
        name: 'Wordpress',
        label: 'Enter your Wordpress.com username.',
        url: 'http://{username}.wordpress.com/'
    },
    blogger: {
        name: 'Blogger',
        label: 'Your Blogger account',
        url: 'http://{username}.blogspot.com/'
    },
    verisign: {
        name: 'Verisign',
        label: 'Your Verisign username',
        url: 'http://{username}.pip.verisignlabs.com/'
    },
    claimid: {
        name: 'ClaimID',
        label: 'Your ClaimID username',
        url: 'http://openid.claimid.com/{username}'
    },
    clickpass: {
        name: 'ClickPass',
        label: 'Your ClickPass username',
        url: 'http://clickpass.com/public/{username}'
    }
};

The next part will be to provide the right URL to the field – and if needed wait for a username or submit the form if one is not needed.

That jQuery will look like this:

var providers = $.extend({}, providers_array);

var openid = {

    cookie_expires: 6 * 30, // 6 months.
    cookie_name: 'openid_provider',
    cookie_path: '/',

    img_path: 'http://sstatic.net/so/Img/openid/',

    input_id: null,
    provider_url: null,

    init: function(input_id) {

        // turn off hourglass
        $('body').css('cursor', 'default');
        $('#openid_submit').css('cursor', 'default');

        // enable submit button on form
        $('input[type=submit]').removeAttr('disabled');

        var openid_btns = $('#openid_btns');

        this.input_id = input_id;

        $('#openid_choice').show();
        $('#openid_input_area').empty();

        // add box for each provider
        for (id in providers_large) {
            openid_btns.append(this.getBoxHTML(providers_large[id], 'large', '.png'));
        }
        if (providers_small) {
            openid_btns.append('
');
            for (id in providers_small) {
                openid_btns.append(this.getBoxHTML(providers_small[id], 'small', '.png'));
            }
        }

        $('#openid_form').submit(this.submitx);

    },

    getBoxHTML: function(provider, box_size, image_ext) {

        var box_id = provider["name"].toLowerCase();
        return '';
    },

    /* provider image click */
    signin: function(box_id, onload) {

        var provider = providers[box_id];
        if (!provider) { return; }

        this.highlight(box_id);

        if (box_id == 'openid') {
            $('#openid_input_area').empty();
            this.setOpenIdUrl("");
            $("#openid_identifier").focus();
            return;
        }

        // prompt user for input?
        if (provider['label']) {
            this.useInputBox(provider);
            this.provider_url = provider['url'];
        } else {
            $('.' + box_id).css('cursor', 'wait');
            this.setOpenIdUrl(provider['url']);
            this.provider_url = null;
            if (!onload) {
                $('#openid_form').submit();
            }
        }
    },

    /* Sign-in button click */
    submitx: function() {
        if ($('#openid_username').val() == "") return true;

        // set up hourglass on body
        $('body').css('cursor', 'wait');
        $('#openid_submit').css('cursor', 'wait');
        // disable submit button on form
        $('input[type=submit]', this).attr('disabled', 'disabled');

        var url = openid.provider_url;
        if (url) {
            url = url.replace('{username}', $('#openid_username').val());
            openid.setOpenIdUrl(url);
        }
        return true;
    },

    setOpenIdUrl: function(url) {
        var hidden = $('#' + this.input_id);
        hidden.val(url);
    },

    highlight: function(box_id) {
        // remove previous highlight.
        var highlight = $('#openid_highlight');
        if (highlight) {
            highlight.replaceWith($('#openid_highlight a')[0]);
        }
        // add new highlight.
        $('.' + box_id).wrap('');
    },

    useInputBox: function(provider) {

        var input_area = $('#openid_input_area');

        var html = '';
        var id = 'openid_username';
        var value = '';
        var label = provider['label'];
        var style = '';

        if (label) {
            html = '' + label + '';
        }
        html += '' +
					'';

        input_area.empty();
        input_area.append(html);

        $('#' + id).focus();
    }
};

Next blog post will be to bring this together with the DNN OpenID provider.

Please note I didnot write the original jQuery code but I will be integrating it into the DNN OpenID provider.

Rebuilding Stackoverflow in mine image!

dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:04:07 GMT

I love Stackoverflow! If you are a programmer and haven't heard about it or used it yet visit it today! Stackoverflow can be as addictive as any other social networking fad out there and more so because of the shear amount of content. The ideas behind Stackoverflow seem to me to be the natural progression of the older forum setup but if you want a clone you either have to pay (http://stackexchange.com/) or you can find and use one of the few clones out there. Quench (http://anantgarg.com/2009/12/09/php-stackoverflow-clone/) seems to be an okay start, there is a simple c# implementation by the guys at RA-Ajax (http://stacked.ra-ajax.org/), and there is a Chinese language site (http://cnprog.com/) that uses a clone that is available at GitHub (http://github.com/cnprog/CNPROG). Those are all great and good starts but since I use DotNetNuke all the time I wanted a module or series of modules that would allow me to duplicate the functionality of Stackoverflow without making core changes (of course) and still have a very flexible setup.

Since I am always looking for a subject for blogging about I thought this might be a good project to blog on a regular basis to keep me focused and moving down the right path. I will share my work and when I am done hopefully there will be a set of modules that can perform like Stackoverflow does.

Writers Block!

dylan.barber@embarqmail.com — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 03:06:37 GMT

I have writers block! I am not a professional writer, so times like this are real stressful for me. Usually I have no problem going on and on about useless stuff, as you can tell from my other posts. Sometimes I have ideas and post them and sometimes, well, its just the regular c*** that you find on other blogs.

I have ideas about what to blog about but I cant seem to get the mental block out of the way to write it all down. As my main boss would say ‘I don’t see as much mental vomit coming from you’, great visual huh?

How do you deal with writers block would love to see your ideas!