As from today, no new posts will be written here at http://weblogs.asp.net/joeriksson. My blog has moved to:
http://joeriksson.com
Please change any bookmarks you might have, and also your RSS subscriptions.I will try to redirect current RSS links to the new ones with the help of the External Feed URL.
This blog will continue to exist here just for reference, in case I or someone else wants to read some of the posts again. Articles from June 30 and forwarded, have been synced over to joeriksson.com as well, but without comments.
Tomorrow the first original joeriksson.com post will be published at the new address.
If you experience any problems witht this move (accessing the site, RSS feeds etc), please let me know.
In today's screencast I want to show you another, in the line of, what I call "hidden" features of Community Server. Namely the import function in a photo gallery. IMO it's not located in a place where you might expect it to be. You will find it under the 'Advanced Photo Settings' in the control panel of a gallery. I believe it should go under Common Tasks and/or Manage Content. It would be more logical, and easier to find.
Although the screencast is recorded with CS 2.1 Beta 1, this function was also in CS 2.0 (at the same location). I believe this is a feature that comes all the way from the preceding nGallery application, it was present there as well in very similar appearence. .
So what can you do with it? Well, you can upload a batch of photos (for example via FTP) to your web, into the folder created for the gallery you want to import pictures to. Then, as you can see in the screenshot above, you can import them either to the root of the gallery, or to a sub gallery. This is of course much faster than uploading the pictures one by one if you have a lot of pictures to upload at once.
The import job is a so called CSJob in CS. It is within the same thread as most other jobs by default, and it's interval is by default set to 15 minutes. So have patience if your photos doesn't show up at once after you've pressed import. The interval can be changed, but be aware of the side effects on other jobs and your site's performance if you do that.
OK, enough talk, let's roll up, roll up for the Magical Mystery Tour, step right this way!
Watch the screencast (Flash, opens in a new window)
I am planning to move from weblogs.asp.net to my own domain - joeriksson.com - on the first of august. Not because I am in any way dissatisfied with having been here at weblogs.asp.net. It has been a really good home. But it's more because I want to be able to use more features and add-ons that currently is provided here, and I cannot configure the installation here myself. :-)
So the new home will be hosted by ASPnix, where Rick Reszler has been so kind and made a home for all CSMVPs (I believe most of them already lives there).
One of the new features that will be added to the blog with that move is a media library (where you will easily browse through all the screencasts I have produced, and will produce). I will also use Ken's Lighbox implementation for viewing pictures. We will see what more it can bring.
For those of you that are reading this through your RSS reader or similar, I will try to redirect the RSS link (with the External Feed URL feature of CS 2.1), so hopefully you won't have to do anything. But in time it could be good if you switched to the new RSS link. This blog will still be here for a while, but the last post will just be a reference to the new blog at joeriksson.com.
Unfortuneatly, I probably won't be able to bring all comments with me to the new blog, but most of the posts are already moved with CS 2.1's blog mirroring feature.
So until August first, I'll go on posting here as usual.
Did you ever wonder what the statistics of views for your blog posts really mean?
Well, I did, and I posted a question about it in the forums of CS.org. After a while, I got a good explanation from Kevin Harder (Community Server Team Member). He explained it liked this:
"Generally speaking, "Views" is the number of times somone viewed a post on the web via a browser, and "AggViews" is the number of times someone viewed the post via the RSS and Atom feeds.
More specifically, the web view count is only updated in the EntryView control. This is displayed when you are viewing a single post. If you are viewing a list of posts, such as on the blog home page, the view counts of the posts are not updated.
The AggViews works by embedding an "AggBug" invisible image into each post in the RSS/Atom feeds. When someone views the posts in a feed reader that allows images, the image pionts back to a handler on your CS site that updates the AggView count for that post."
Adding to that, if you look at the number of views for each post, you can see that it is a link. The link leads you to a page which shows referrals to that particluar post. That page also provides you with a drop down box so you can look at referrals to other posts you have made.
Friday and screencast time again! This time on a feature some have talked about before. Dave Burke has some excellent tips for using them here, Adonis Bitar talks about how he uses them. I am talking about Text Parts, or as they seems to be called now, "Snippets".
If I would give a quick overview explanation of what they are, I would say they are shortcuts to inserting text snippets into your blog posts. The text could be just text, or, as Dave showed in his article above, HTML snippets. You create a snippet by giving it a name, which will be the shortcut you use later, you give the snippet a link and/or some text to replace the shortcut with.
When you want to use the snippet (or shortcut) in a blog post you just type it within brackets (i.e [MySnippet]) and when you submit the post the snippet/shortcut is replaced with the link and/or text to replace with. Knowing that, you could probably see that there are numerous areas in which they could be used. You could use it for adding text or HTML that you use a lot in your posting, or for example use the Text Part framework in developing a CSModule giving the user a special snippet which gives instruction to your CSModule, and provides much more advanced uses of the snippets.
In todays screencast, I want to show you just one area that I myself just started to use snippets for. I realized that there are no quotes function in the blogs like there are in the forums. You know, where you can put a quote in a block with different formatting so it is easy to recognize as a quote. So I made to two snippets for that, one start quote and one end quote. Sit down in your favorite chair with a freshly brewed cup of coffe, relax, and have a look. :-)
Wacth the screencast (Flash, opens in a new window)
I'd never have thought I'd write an article about skinning. I am not very good at CSS. But sometimes you learn when you have to, although what I'll talk about in this article is in no way anything complicated.
In Community Server you know you can change the skin of your blog to a skin that's installed at the CS site where the blog is. But sometimes you might want to change how that skin looks, even if most of it looks really good. If you're at for example weblogs.asp.net or some other CS hosted blog site, you can't do that since you don't have access to the files of the skin. But CS has a workaround for that called CSS Overrides. With that function, as you can hear from the name, you can override what's in the original stylesheet for the skin you are using. So of course, you need some way to figure out what the name of the CSS classes are that you want to modify. But mostly, the skins are available to download for free in some way.
In my case I wanted to chage the header picture for the Paperclip theme. I looked in the CSS file for it and found the class was named 'masthead' with that information I could change the header picture by overriding the masthead class's background-image as shown in the picture below.
Now it's good if your new image has about the same dimensions as the original one, at least in width.
How do you move your blog to Community Server 2.1? Well, of course it depends on what blog you're on today. When I started thinking about this I stumbeled on a BlogML project of Keyvan which he mentiones in this post.
His own words about the tool from the readme:
"This control helps you to import your blog content from another blogging tool which supports BlogML standard to CommunityServer 2.0 or vice versa."
I am not sure if it will work for CS 2.1 as well. Check it out.
But another way to do this, hit me when I was sitting and playing with the new blog mirror functionality in CS 2.1 (Control Panel - Administration - Blogs - Blogs - Mirrors button for your blog). Of course, I could create my new blog on my CS 2.1 site, and add a mirror for my old site, let it replicate and then remove the mirror. So if the functionality provided by the blog mirroring is enough for you, you'll have a built-in blog migrator in CS 2.1. Pretty cool!
Blog mirror functionality in Community Server 2.1
Now, you won't get any comments with you, some of the links will still point back to your old site etc. But there might be reasons you want to keep your old blog for a while anyway. You might have RSS subscribers that you don't want to recieve errors if they haven't had time to change their links for example.
In any case for me it was quite enough to use the mirroring to move my blog. and this could be used for, I guess, any blog that has a RSS feed, which makes it very useful for a migration tool on top of what is was meant to be used for.
When it comes to moving your RSS readers over to your new link, you could use the new External Feed URL feature and redriect your readers to your new site automagically. I haven't yet tested that myself though.
External Feed URL for syndication
In June I talked about having a videogallery in Community Server. I referenced an article by José Lema where he talks about the videos.aspx and how to modify that file to get a more Google-like videgallery.
Today I implemented a videolibrary on my Community Server Sweden site. But since the videos/screencasts I do is 800 x 600 they don't fit in the new CS 2.1 skin within a forums post (José's modification links to the respective forums post for each video). The video gets truncated. So what I wanted to do, was to instead link directly to the video/screencast file itself, and also to open the video in a new window. Also I wanted to create a new menu button for my video gallery, that also became the selected button when I went to that page.
So what I did, was to first get the videos.aspx the way I wanted. To do that I modified José's modification in the following ways. (Red text shows the parts I changed)
First, change the row:
<a href="<%# Globals.GetSiteUrls().Post((int)DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "PostID")) %> "><img src="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "VideoImageUrl") %>" width="200" height="150" border="0" /></a>
to
<a href="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "VideoUrl") %>" target="_new"><img src="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "VideoImageUrl") %>" width="200" height="150" border="0" /></a>
Then change:
<a href="<%# Globals.GetSiteUrls().Post((int)DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "PostID")) %> "><%# Formatter.CheckStringLength(DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "Subject").ToString(), 35) %></a>
to
<a href="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "VideoUrl") %>" target="_new"><%# Formatter.CheckStringLength(DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "Subject").ToString(), 35) %></a>
That's it! Now a click on the video thumbnail or the video title in the video galleri will open the video in a new window.
As for the menu button, that was really easy. Just followed the instructions from Dave Burke's excellent article in the subject. The results can be seen in the picture below. Yes the site shows in a strange language......it's swedish.
Click the picture to view it in larger scale. On the flickr page click 'All sizes'.
View the video gallery live!
I guess most of you already know, but I thought it was worth mentioning again. After have been eagerly waiting, like children at christmas waiting for their christmas gifts, Community Server 2.1 Beta 1 is now available for download. Check Rob's announcement!
Some of the new features can be found in that announcement. Here at weblogs.asp.net we have been spoiled with running 2.1 for a while back now, and it looks really good even under the surface IMO. So there'll be much more to blog about as we go forward.
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