On Thursday August 23rd, 2007 I have in conjunction with IowaComputerGurus Inc made the Image Shrinker and File Categorizer applications available for free.  Both of these applications have previously been available for $9.99 and $14.99 respectivly.  This was done to provide helpful utilities to the users of this site.  Below is information regarding each of these products, for detailed information and for download instructions please visit the individual product pages.

Image Shrinker

This is an image resize utility that will allow you to re-size multiple images at one time to one of multiple set sizes.  The resizing methods will preserve the aspect ratios of the starting image.  Additional options exist to allow the appending of a file suffix.  For more informaiton click on "Image Shrinker" on the left under "Software"

File Categorizer

This is an application that can help you arrange your image files.  After installation you set the application to listen to a specific folder on your machine, then after each image is added it is put into a categorization queue.  You can then view this queue and assign images to the queue to a specific category.  After a category has been assigned the application will rename and move the file to a location based on the assigned category.  This can help greatly with arranging incoming digital images.  For more information click on "File Categorizer" on the left under "Software"

As most of you know the keep alive services that were provided by Host-Tracker.com are no longer going to be truly free, at least not for a service that will accurately keep an ASP.NET web application alive.

I currently have a utility where I could host a keep alive service for individuals however in the beginning it would be simply that a keep alive service, there would be logging/reporting of the sucess/failure of the requests it would just make sure that every 10 minutes your URL was called to prevent the application recycles.  Future modifications would be made to provide reporting interfaces, however, it might be a few weeks to a few months out.

Is there an interest for a reliable Keep Alive Only service?  I would charge $20 a year for 5 sites, $35 for 10 sites, and other pricing available for those with more than 10 sites.

Please click the following link to vote in the poll! Keep Alive Service Poll!

Today I recieved a very disappointing e-mail, host-tracker.com's services are no longer going to be free.  This was a horrible upset for me as I have been using their services for well over 1.5 years and was very happy with the service I received.  They are now going to a payment service that will cost me about $300 a year to use.  So for those of you that are currently using host-tracker be prepared to pay for their services, and if you need more than 5 URL's tracked you will be at the $300 a year mark.

Now, I know that there are a few other options and I will give you some information on them.  Pingdom.com offers a similar service and for $9.95 a month will monitor up to 5 sites, every minute and provides you with SMS alerts and even a web-service API to check your site uptime and history.  I have worked with their service a while back and it was impressive, it is a bit more then the basic host-tracker service however their extra features are great!.  Also there is this nifty alerter application that you can use with their servcie that I wrote for them a while back http://www.pingdom.com/services/api-applications/ 

Otherwise you also have http://www.keepaliveforever.net but I found their services to be a bit lacking.

I have a solution in the works, but I do not have a dedicated server to host the application on.  Once I can secure a hosting environment am planning on launching my own service and I will try to keep it free, otherwise the yearly fee will be under $25.  Stay tuned for more information.  If you have any recommendations/offers/suggestions where I can find a web server to host my monitoring application on the cheap please let me know!

This is just a reminder to all of you that OpenForce '07 is coming up in the near future.  This conference is the first conference offere that focuses around DotNetNuke and is going to be a very good time.  There are a total of 24 sessions over three days and will feature many individuals from the DotNetNuke Community.  You can see a full list of information via the website at http://www.openforce07.com.

I will be there presenting with Philip Beadle (http://www.philipbeadle.net) talking about WAP module development, AJAX, and Silverlight.  It should be a very fun session.  I am looking forward to meeting many members of the community!  Post a comment below if you will be attending!

I just released my ASP.NET Global Error Handler HttpModule that can be used to capture application level errors and send e-mail notifications to a specified individual.  For more information and to download this item please click on the following link. Click here to visit the ASP.NET Global Error Handler Download Page

I have had many requests in the past few weeks to look at building a module that would wrap around the Telerik radSchedule component that is due out in the near future to allow instant drop-in to DNN as a module.  I contacted Telerik to try and obtain permissions to re-distribute this if I built it and this is the response I got.

We had a detailed discussion with my colleagues and decided that at this moment we cannot offer you Redistribution rights as your product will not offer significant functionality to our RadScheduler component and this scenario will contradict with our License agreement terms. In fact this is one of the most important requirements that every customer needs to abide to in the cases when there is redistribution of our components as part of commercial products. It is always hard to turn down someone's business, and I am hopeful that we will have other opportunities to cooperate in the future.

So basically I get two things out of this.

• Making their module a drop-in usable item in DotNetNuke is not an enhancement
• They expect all customers to wait until they build it themselves "in a future release"

I am deeply saddened by these series of events as I thought this would be a great contribution to the community and something that I might have even been able to cooperate with them on, however, that does now appear out of the picture.

I just wanted to keep all of those that have asked up to date. Now I am off to talk to Infragistics to see what they say!

As some regular viewers of this site might notice, I have just implemented a new forums system.  This was done due to an "issue" with the DNN Core forum that was previously utilized. 

Due to this "issue" I was not able to migrate content over from the existing system.  I apologize for the trouble!

Keep an eye out in the next few weeks for a review on the ActiveForums module (The new forum)

As I am sure that many of the regular readers of this site have noticed I recently changed my website navigation structure and overall skin design. As part of this site re-design I switched away from the standard DotNetNuke Menu control to using the “Css NavMenu” provided by Snapsis. This article is a detailed review of this skin object and the ease of use to implement as well as the noticed benefits over the standard DotNetNuke menu.

It was brought to my attention this morning by a reader of this site that in DotNetNuke 4.5.2 and later that the querystring ?base is added after the URL in the link from a sites logo.  I am not sure of the reasoning behind this however I do know that some individuals are seting event log errors due to this added parameter.  Luckly the fix is VERY simple.

To fix this isuse you will need to modify the /Admin/Skins/Logo.ascx.vb file on your DotNetNuke Installation, you simply have to remove a few charasters from the line that sets the navigate URL.  Below is the before and after.

Change This:

To This:

Once you save that file you should then notice the appropriate link in your logo. I am not sure WHY this is the way it is, but there doesn't appear to be any issue with this modification as it is simply taking you to the root.

As you might have noticed I have just updatd this site to use a new menu structure that is powered by the CSS Nav Menu provided by Snapsis.

After I have had a few days to gather feedback about the module and its use I will be posting a very detailed review of this tool!

Please share your thoughts on the new layout below!

Recently there has been a large demand for blank DNN skins that only have a content pane or multiple content panes.  This afternoon I have taken the time to package a "Blank Skins" package. 

This package currently includes two skins one for a fixed with site with multiple panes (top, left, content, right, and bottom) and one with a single content pane.  This is based off of the DNN-Blue skin and includes the minimum amount of skin items to work with DNN.

NOTE: DO NOT APPLY THIS TO AN ENTIRE PORTAL!  These skins do NOT have a menu, login/logout links or any needed items.  They should ONLY be applied to SPECIFIC pages.

You may download the files here.

One problem I recently encountered myself is one that I see appearing every so often on the DotNetNuke forums. I was working with profile properties and I set a property as required but accidentally forgot to set it to visible. I then proceeded to update the preferences that require a valid profile for login. I am now effectivly locked out of my site as I did not have that property set for my host or admin account. In this article I will provide you the information needed to reset the custom properties and to get you back into your site.

Recently I have answered a number of questions regarding what to do when you accidentially change the login tab setting in "Portal Settings" on a DotNetNuke website to a tab that does not have a login module. This situation which is very easy to get yourself into is also one that is VERY easy to get out of as long as you are able to directly connect to SQL Server. If you are unable to connect directly to the SQL Server to run queries it will be a bit more involved to resolve the issue. In this posting I will discuss the very simple SQL Script needed to reset the LoginTabId value and get you back into your site.