Chris Hammond

.Net System.drawing questions.....

Alright, so I've been using the TTTGallery for MONTHS now on my DNN sites, it's great, does exactly what I need, minus one or two things I can do manually.

So tonight, I've added some text to my photos I took at our race today, branding the images as mine on my site, so people don't take them and use them elsewhere.

I upload them to the gallery via FTP as always, the TTTgallery creates the thumbs, all is well. Except that I then look at the thumbnails. They don't have the text that was added to each of the images. Click on a thumbnail, you see the original image, and the text that's supposed to be there.

Here's the gallery, so you can see the thumbnails, no text whatsoever on them.

and then the first image in that gallery

I added the text with a simple watermarking program that I wrote 6 months ago in vb.net for this specific purpose, is it writing the data for the text in a manner that the TTTGallery just ignores this "new" data when it creates the thumbnails?

What's going on here, anyone have any idea?

cDotText Version 00.30.00 released for DotNetNuke 2.0

DotNetNuke 2.0 default skin tweaks

I've made a few tweaks to DNN 2.0 for my test site that I am using. They are as follows.

If you've made the Body background in your default portal.css file to a dark background color you lose the text on the Tab Admin strip when logged in as a admin or host user. To fix this I added the following colored text to this page.

Admin/Skins/Admin.ascx

<%@ Control language="vb" CodeBehind="Admin.ascx.vb" AutoEventWireup="false" Explicit="True" Inherits="DotNetNuke.Skins.Admin" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="DNN" TagName="LinkActions" Src="~/admin/Containers/LinkActions.ascx"%>
<table width="100%" border="0" summary="Table for design" id="Table2" style="border-top:1px #CCCCCC dotted;border-bottom:1px #CCCCCC dotted;border-right:1px #CCCCCC dotted;border-left:1px #CCCCCC dotted;background-color: white;">

You also get the same effect when editing some modules with the default skin, so change the following (red) on this page

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="4" border="0">
       <tr height="*" valign="top">
        <td id="ContentPane" runat="server" valign="top" align="center" class="ContentPane"></td>
       </tr>
      </table>

I believe Properly created skins wouldn't have these issues, but the default skin for DNN 2.0 looks to just be missing a few things. Hope this helps you out.

cDotText Version 0.2.2 released!

cDotText V0.2.2 has been released today. This version includes a minor fix for the module that adds blogs to a .Text installation. Upon creation the URL was not being displayed properly to a user, so they did not know where there blog actually existed at.

This may very well be the last version of cDotText that is released for DotNetNuke 1.0.10e as I am now devoting my time to developing cDotText for DotNetNuke 2.0. Unless of course I find any other major bugs in 0.2.2, at which point I will release fixes for those. I'll also plan on putting up a source code version for download, as well as the standard PA installer for cDotText.

I'll have another release of cDotText later today, version 0.3.0 that should support DNN 2.0.

Where to go for SQL replication advice?

Does anyone have any suggestions on where to go for SQL replication questions/consulting?

Here at work we've setup a replicating system, but it doesn't work well, so we are hoping to find a better out of the box solution.

We have one master database that holds all of the information for all our properties. There are 5-6 tables in that database that have a property code field that is property specific. We need to replicate this whole database out to 150+ properties. The catch is that in the 5 or 6 tables that have a property code column, we only want to send the data for that particular property to each property, we don't want to send all the information, for all properties, to every property. The rest of the tables should all replicate as normal. We also want to get property specific data and pull it back into the master tables.

Anyone have any experience with anything like this? Any place to begin looking?

Thanks for your help!

DNN2 is out! Time to play!

Well, the day has come, DotNetNuke 2.0 has been released. Now developers and site admins scramble to upgrade, maintain, fix, and play with their web sites. I'll be spending the week upgrading the cDotText module to run on DNN2, along with preparing a few of my web sites to be upgraded to the new version. I'll have to wait on some modules to be upgraded, mainly the TTTGallery so that it runs on DNN2, once I have an image gallery I can get solo2.org converted over.

First off I'll probably upgrade ChrisHammond.com as it doesn't do much, or get much traffic. I'll also have to upgrade DnnCart.com, SoloPerformance.com (way down the road) and get sccaforums moved over to my web server so I can get it running on DNN versuses PostNuke.

Hope everyone enjoys 2.0, and a huge thanks to the Core developers of DNN!

Long slow day...

Looks like a slow day on weblogs.asp.net! I've been out all day working on the car. It was time to change the oil, so of course I used Mobil 1, even the tiny little Mobil 1 filter that costs way too much for something that small ;)

Helped Dave clear out the SPS trailer, he then went and packed the trailer with all the store supplies for our Trek to Kansas City tomorrow for the Kansas City Region SCCA Solo II event.

I then came home and cleaned the car, once at a carwash, and then again by hand. I had a horrible time cleaning it, I'm pretty sure I missed a few spots for some reason, but it's dark now and I can't see what all I need to finish. I'm taking the car over to Dave's house shortly to load it on the trailer and then we'll head out for KC around 5am.

Hope everyone is having a great weekend, first event of the year, hopefully I'm not too rusty!  

More PR for blogging... Fast Company article

Here's some more PR for blogging, and I must admit, I've started using blogging as a marketing tool over at SoloPerformance.com. It works very well, and I hope to expand the usage to help SoloPerformance expand their market reach.

Reminder, get my resume online!

cDotText V0.2.1 released! Minor fix for V0.2

There's a minor fix to the sub-domain method of cDotText that required a new release. The files are available for download in the downloads section of DnnCart.com.

cDotText is a module to ease the integration of .Text blogs into the DotNetNuke portal framework. It currently only functions on the DNN Framework 1.0.10, but will be ported to the new 2.0 framework shortly.