I have just released a new version of the SQL Formatter/Colorizer utility.  This release is used to resolve issues caused by changes to the parent web service used for formatting!  You may download it for free from the "Software" section of this site.

Recently there have been numerous discussions on the DotNetNuke.com Forums regarding hosting providers and who one should go with and who they should switch to because they are unhappy with their current provider. During all of these discussions I have always recommended the company that I use for hosting 3Essentials. Since making this recommendation I have been receiving numerous e-mails regarding the process to actually migrate a live site over to 3Essentials so I thought I would write a short blog article that explains the basics of moving a website over to 3Essentials, in actuality these instructions SHOULD work for most providers, however ther might be some differences.

A common problem that I have recently encountered was trying to identify areas of my website database that were taking up the most physical storage space. At work I maintain a DotNetNuke installation that includes a 4.5 Gb reporting database and I was trying to pinpoint the exact sizes of ALL tables in my database and was having a few problems. I started using the "sp_spaceused" stored procedure but I had to run that for every table, I have over 200 tables in this database and it was just not feasiable for me to do it this way. Therefore I wrote a stored procedure that will perform all needed data calls and will return a result set with the data on all tables. In this post I will share the script as well as a few interesting things I learned while writing it.

Due to popular request this article is an updated version of my DNN upgrade process.  Below I will walk you through all steps necessary to upgrade your DNN website from a previous 4.x version to the most current version 4.5.5.  This article is the third revision of my upgrade process documents and has been enhanced with user recommended tips as well as includes new recommendations from my experiences installing new versionf of DotNetNuke.

Installing DotNetNuke can be somewhat difficult at times, therefore I am writing this article to give you a full step by step guide to installing DotNetNuke on a Windows XP Pro system. The instructions are similar for Windows 2000 and XP Home but might vary slightly, I have tried to note as many differences as possible. Windows Vista installation is similar but requires a few different steps relating to IIS.  This article is a re-visit to my first article of this type geared towards DotNetNuke 4.4.1..

DotNetNuke introduced a request filter option starting with DotNetNuke 4.5.3 that can allow you to take action on a user based on various request parameters. In this article I will walk you through how to setup the request filter to filter out requests from a specific IP address and will discuss in general what the settings are. In this example we will be placing a filter to block all traffic from a user with an IP of 13.12.15.45 and we will redirect them to google.com.

Recently in testing the new version of DotNetNuke 4.5.4 I realized that after upgrading with no errors that when I logged in as my host user I was only able to see the "Admin" menu.  This is a very simple issue to resolve, simply add a space to a non critical portion of your web.config and save the file which will trigger an application re-start.  Once the application has restarted you will be able to use the host menu!

Today I just released version 2.0.1 of my course gradebook module. This module is still free for download from the software section of this site. Included in this release are the below modifications.

• Corrected a course association issue that could cause errors on the "Settings" page
• Corrected issue where when editing a students grade a duplicate grade was inserted instead of the original grade being updated
• Streamlined general code layouts and commented sections that were not previously commented
• Added a module level configuration option to allow the sending of e-mails to users on the grading of assignments, message can be configured via tokens
• Added the display of a students overall grade to the "Edit Grades" page with a similar customizable format as the standard view page

For information regarding the tokens available in the student e-mails please see the sticky post on my forum. Please let me know if you have any questions

In the last month or so i was working on some modifications to the DotNetNuke forums module to meet some of their customers needs regarding usability. One of these items was to make the "My Settings" link open in a new window rather than moving the user from their current viewing page. This is a small modification that I thought was quite helpfule so I thought I would share the steps necessary to make the change.

A little over a month ago I posted a SQL Query that can be used to find the most popular links on a given portal. In that example if you had links that were being tracked that were files it would only show the fileid for the file and not the file name. Now since there has been a fair amount of reader demand I have created a new version of this query to actually show the URL for URL based links and to show the file name for file based links.

To successfully parse the "fileid=xx" portion of the results when needed I use the substring function to grab just the id so I can join to the files table to grab the file name. Due to the different methods needed for files and links I have done this via two queries and then used the "UNION" statement to combine the results for display. For you to use this on your portal you will need to be sure to modify the portalid value to match that of your portal.

Please post any comments/questions below

I have been notified of an error with the Course Gradebook Module version 1.3.1 where if you try to edit a users grade that you will end up putting a duplicate grade in the system.  I will provide a fix below that can be ran via the "SQL" option from the host account for anyone that is using the current version of the module.  Also in the next release of this module I will be including this fix as well as data integrity constraint code that will prevent this issue from occuring.

To perform the temporary fix simply run the below script from the "SQL" menu under the host menu.  Be sure to check the box next to "Run as Script".

Sorry for the troubles, if anyone needs assistance implementing this fix, or cleaning up any incorrect data please e-mail me!

This evening I have just released a new version of my Text/HTML Deniable module.  You may download this module for free from the "Software" section of this site.

Updates in this version include the ability to specify multiple deny roles as well as other general performance modifications.

I have noticed a number of posts recently on the DotNetNuke.com forums regarding numerous errors being reported in the event log relating to portal id of -1 and typically with a InnerException of "Value cannot be null. Parameter name: type". This issue can become very annoying and can have an actual effect on your sites performance as when the size of the event log grows you will start to notice performance slow downs. This article will discuss the root cause of the issue and a solution.

Today the DotNetNuke documents module 4.4.0 has entered the testing phase.  Anthony Glenwright, the other members of the team, and myself have completed all code changes and are now performing acceptance testing before the module is delivered to the DNN core team to enter in the release process.  Below is a listing of new features included with this version of the module.

• Alter file size display to show in MB if the file is larger than 1 MB in size
• Allow user sorting of the documents listing
• Bug fix on document import
• Bug fix for documents where the file was deleted
• Add reverse sorting to row sorting options
• Add ability to select any "list" for the categories list
• Add column to display download count
• Add option to specify "Default" folder
• Display warning message if the file is only available to admin

This is a complete listing of all items that are included in this version, along with the fact that this is the migration to ASP.NET 2.0.  For a full listing of the changes included you can view the roadmap in Gemini (http://support.dotnetnuke.com/project/RoadMap.aspx?PROJID=10).

To see some of the new functionality you can view the documents module instances on this site as they have been upgraded to the new version. On my "CIS204 Summer 2007" page I have user sorting as well as clicks display enabled. At this time I am not sure when the module will be released into the DNN release process, however, I will post here as soon as it has.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a very popular topic among the DotNetNuke community as well as in all other types of web development. I do not claim to be a master in SEO, however, I do have a number of tools that I use to help judge the SEO capacities of my websites and also a number of directories that I utilize to enhance the visibiliy of my website. In this article I will share some of these sites, links, and directories that might help improve your websites search engine placemen and/or popularity/visibility.