As we can see from the ticker on the right side of my blog here we have about 34 days until OpenForce North America, with OpenForce Europe currently underway. I'm working farily hard right now to get marketing an other materials ready for the IowaComputerGurus booth at the conference.
I'm looking forward to the opportunity to meet many members of the community and clients that I have yet to meet face-to-face. So if you are going to OpenForce, post a message here, or drop me a line and lets arrange some time to at least say hello. I'll also be available at Expo hall in booth #606!
Posted by Mitchel on Monday, October 06, 2008
In an effort to provide information in an easy to find fashion, and a manner to additionally help offset the massive amounts of time spent writing tutorials for posting on this site I have published a small reference book "DotNetNuke Installation, Upgrade, Backup, and Restores: Best of articles from MitchelSellers.com". This is simply a print representation of information provided here in this blog, in an effort to provide helpful information that is easy to keep at your fingertips! No more googling trying to find that article again.
If there is interest in this format, I'll continue to aggregate content in this manner and offer little publications like this. Don't worry though, content here will continue on as always!
Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, September 25, 2008
From Mitchel: I'm happy to announce that Tom Kraak of Seablick Consulting will lend his expertise in the area of DNN Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and DNN Ecommerce as a guest blogger on MitchelSellers.com. You may already know Tom from his own blog or have seen him lurking around the DNN forums, DNN conferences and community events … welcome Tom!
Mitchel recently relaunched his company website and while certainly functional and visually pleasing, there is room for improvement on the search engine optimization front. So let’s help out a good friend and business partner by applying my DNN SEO Quickstart Guide to IowaComputerGurus.com (ICG.)
Title and Description Meta Tags
First, let’s change the home page title from "Welcome to IowaComputerGurus Inc." to "DotNetNuke Modules & Custom .NET Development | IowaComputerGurus." The title now contains important keywords and at the same time much better reflects the company and its mission. While branding is important, I do prefer to put keywords first and the brand name last especially for product and service oriented small businesses.
While it can be challenging to stick to the recommended limit of 65 characters including spaces for page titles, we do have slightly more freedom when it comes to the meta description (about 100 characters more to be exact.) With that in mind, let’s rewrite "Welcome to IowaComputerGurus Inc. a Des Moines Iowa based software consulting firm. Specializing in .NET and DotNetNuke solutions" to something more enticing such as "As a Microsoft Certified Partner, IowaComputerGurus provides information technology consulting services with a focus on .NET and DotNetNuke software development." Remember, as opposed to the page title, the meta description carries almost no weight as a ranking factor and therefore acts more like a pay-per-click ad with the main purpose of attracting clicks in search engine result pages (SERPs) by accurately describing the page content.
Here is one more suggestion of a meta title and description combination, this time for the Custom Module Development page:
Custom DotNetNuke (DNN) Module Development | IowaComputerGurus
IGC specializes in the development of custom DotNetNuke modules by following DNN programming best practices and a proven approach to software development.
Link Building
Yahoo! Site Explorer reports about 9,000 off-domain, incoming links to the ICG home page, which in part contributes to the healthy 5 Google toolbar PageRank. However, the majority of these incoming links are from Mitchel’s own blog as well as the dotnetnuke.com forums, where Mitchel is one of the most active participants. So I recommend diversifying by seeking links from relevant business partners, affiliates and organizations (such as the Microsoft Partner program, the local chamber of comments, etc) and reputable directories. Furthermore, it’s important to pay attention to the anchor text of any links to be acquired going forward. I do realize that this is not always possible, but if the opportunity does arise, Mitchel should request keyword-laden anchor text such as "DNN Module Development" and "Free DNN Modules" pointing to the appropriate pages.
Quality Copy & Content
In regards to website copy and other textual content, IowaComputerGurus.com is a bit too wordy for my taste. I would eliminating some of the corporate jargon and then rewrite the copy starting with the home page by injection keywords and key phrases gathered from free tools such as this one, that one or even Google itself (search for "DotNetNuke" and scroll to the bottom of the search engine result page to find the "searches related to" section.) Also, short of combining MitchelSellers.com with IowaComputerGurus.com, I would reserve case-study type articles for ICG to satisfy the hunger of search bots for fresh and original content.
XML Sitemap
I usually shun DNN’s native xml sitemap implementation and use a 3rd party tool such as this one instead, but for a site mainly build around traditional DNN pages it works quite well as all relevant pages are indeed present in sitemap.aspx. While that’s a good start, I still don’t like the idea of having the lastmod, changefreq, and priority nodes read all the same for every single page. Call me picky, but that takes me straight back to my Notepad "drawing board." And lastly, to get the most of an xml sitemap, I suggest submitting it to Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer, and Live Search Webmaster Center.
Robots.txt Exclusion Protocol
Mitchel currently has no robots.txt file in the root directory of IowaComputerGurus.com (server returns a 404 HTTP status code), which signals to the search engines that access is allowed to all resources served by the website. That’s not an ideal situation as some of DNN’s supporting directories and files have no business being indexed and subsequently appearing in SERPs. To remedy that, I usually recommend using dotnetnuke.com’s robots.txt implementation as a base and then adding exclusions specific to your website. In the case of ICG, I would at least additionally disallow /home/ctl/privacy.aspx, /home/ctl/terms.aspx, and /forums/afv/ to restrict access to the privacy statement, terms of use, and certain areas of Active Forum.
That wraps up part one of my SEO overhaul of IowaComputerGurus.com. Check back in a week or two as I conclude this series with a closer look at local search, search engine friendly skins and menu systems as well as Url rewriting and canonicalization.
And as always, comments and questions are appreciated.
Posted by Tom on Friday, September 19, 2008
DotNetNuke site administrators often are tasked with maintaining their sites as well as ensuring that a proper backup/recovery plan is in place. An important part of this is to have a proper site backup, therefore I am re-visiting my two previous versions of backup guides in this updated article. I will walk though the items needed for backup, and considerations when creating the backup, specifically if you are looking to migrate a site to a different server. I will then discuss the process to create a backup in both SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005, and lastly I will quickly touch on the third party options available for performing site backups.
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Posted by Mitchel on Monday, September 15, 2008
After my recent change to the new skin design on this site I decided that I need to work on a method to incorporate display for larger images, that under normal situations would break the layout of this site. Most recently I have made a few simple portal configuration changes that allowed me to incorporate a lightbox script, so now I can easily get large images to display like this! In this entry I walk you through the process to obtain the files, load them into DNN, and then to configure Ventrian's News Articles to allow its use.
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Posted by Mitchel on Friday, September 12, 2008
This is my ninth revision DNN Upgrade guide. Many portions of this upgrade guide are the same as previous versions, however, there are some new items and many minor changes/clarifications. In addition notes have been provided for users on shared/remote hosting environments to help guide the way to a proper upgrade.
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Posted by on Thursday, September 04, 2008
I have previously blogged about the streamlined upgrade process that can be used to ugprade sites starting with version 4.6.2 and later. With the upcoming release of DotNetNuke 4.9.0 (targeted for next week) I thought I would take some time to get all of my installation guides updated, with the most current information to ensure that everyone was ready for the new version as soon as it comes out. Given the enhancements provided to the core in 4.6.2 the upgrade process from this version and later is VERY simple! The following two step process will help you upgrade to your site to the most current version. Instructions are also included regarding items of consideration for users in shared hosting environments.
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Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, September 04, 2008
A while back I made a post regarding the Packt CMS Award nominations, well DotNetNuke has made it into the finals so I thought I would post a quick message out here to all people recommending that you vote for your favorite, DotNetNuke or not. Also don't forget that there is a category for OpenSource MVP as well!. http://www.PacktPub.com/award
Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, September 04, 2008
I am proud to announce that Version 4.1.0 of the Documents module has now been released. To many people this has been a much awaited release as it provides fixes for many "painful" issues that have plagued the module since version 4.0.0. Below you will find a listing of all fixed items for the 4.1.0 release.
DOC-7200: Issue with no category selected defaulting to country list
DOC-7201: Default sort options not properly performing sort
DOC-7202: Display in other languages can result in wrapped headers
DOC-7544: Incorrect spelling in resource file for column heading
DOC-7491: Module doesn't default to full width to fill container
DOC-7490: Alt text on down arrow reads "Move Up"
DOC-7710: .DNN File Missing minimum version specification
With this release I can now say that we have a stable code base to further enhance and start adding new features. I will be working with the team over the next few weeks to create the "roadmap" for what will become version 4.2.0 of the module. As we start to finalize exactly what will become this new version I will be sure to share it here via this site. I appreciate everyone waiting for this release and appreciate all feedback on the new release.
You can download the documents module and read more information about it via the "Documents Module Page" on the DotNetNuke.com website.
Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, September 04, 2008
Recently I have been fielding a number of questions regarding DotNetNuke development environments and the valid URLs associated with them. People that have been setting up local instances of DotNetNuke for testing or development, then trying to expose the site to a larger group for validation. The process to make this work is very simple, however, for individuals unfamiliar with DotNetNuke settings it can be a bit difficult to determine exactly what needs to change. This post investigates the DotNetNuke concept of Portal Aliases and will show an individual how they can be used to solve this specific business need.
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Posted by Mitchel on Friday, August 22, 2008
I have recently been given the opportunity to preview the upcoming Active Forums 4.0 release. In this starter review I will give my first opinions after working with the module for a short time and experimenting with the new features. A full review of the module will come after it has been released and I am able to test/work with the full edition.
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Posted by Mitchel on Sunday, August 17, 2008
After a change of heart I have decided today that I will be attending OpenForce '08 this fall, I will also have a booth in Expo Hall that I will be sharing with another company. So I'm looking forward to another sucessful conference and opportunites to put faces to names. From the schedule of events it looks like this fall's conference will have plenty to offer for everyone. For full information on OpenForce you can visit the information site OpenForce08.com.
Just like last year if there is anyone that would like to meet with me specifically during the conference please feel free to contact me anytime to arrange!
Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, August 13, 2008
This afternoon Joe Brinkman of the DotNetNuke corporation announced that RC1 of DNN 4.9.0 was just released to DNN 5.0 beta testers. Full details on this announcement can be found in his announcement post on the DotNetNuke Forums.
For site administrators this release is a bit of good news, it replaces the planned 4.8.5 security release that was announced previously. In addition to the security tidbits included this release will include a few DNN 5 fixes that are backported to work in the DNN 4.x platform. For those that will be leary of going to DNN 5 right away it will get some added features that many consider much needed.
Expect to see some more postings here about the upcoming release as I start my testing/upgrade processes to start updating the various documents hosted here.
Posted by Mitchel on Tuesday, August 12, 2008
With the high amount of usage of the DotNetNuke upgrade and installation guides that I have posted on this site I see one very common question. Where can I obtain DotNetNuke version ____? Once a release is considered non-current, it becomes slightly harder for individuals to locate the older versions, in this article I'll provide a step-by-step look at the process for finding and downloading "legacy releases" of the DotNetNuke Platform.
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Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Recently on DotNetNuke.com I noticed that PACKT Publishing is running a contest for Overall Winner, Open Source CMS Award<./a>, Best Other Open Source Content Management System, and Open Source MVP's. These theree categories are where DotNetNuke and contributors to the DotNetNuke community can have an opportunity to acheive some press about the product and their contributions. It would be great to see DotNetNuke somewhere in the winners circle!
Posted by Mitchel on Monday, August 04, 2008
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