Builders Logs (Blogs)

One of the new features that I wanted for MLS was the ability for paid members to create a Blog or Builder's Log as I am calling it. Many of the members start a topic in the forums chronicling the building of their railroad, their most recent modeling project, etc. The problem we've found with that is if you want to follow someone's progress on their project from beginning to end, you have to dig through all the 'attaboys' as I call them and all the random questions. A blog takes all the 'attaboys' and questions and separates them out in a way that makes it easy to follow. I'm not 100% satisfied with the core blog module, but I just need to experiment with it more. I need to figure out if there is a way to just display summaries text only in the recent blog posts module.

I made the mistake of letting my plans slip in an email saying that I was going to introduce blogs. My main competitor found out and quickly threw together a blogsite based on some php powered blog script. I was furious at first, but then I remembered, I have a ton more people that come to my site and will use my site. So to hell with him.. He can copy me all he wants. Imitation is the best form of flattery.

The membership model..

Shortly after starting MLS, I started getting queries from people asking where they could send in money to support the site. The old site that closed its doors had a paid membership that gave people additional benefits beyond the basic free membership. After I started realizing the costs of running a busy site like MLS, I decided to offer a paid membership. Admittedly, the paid membership had very little in the way of value. You get some cute gold stars in the forums, less ads on the site, an email address on the server, 100mb of space on the server to store photos etc to share in the forum, and the warm fuzzies that you're helping keep the site you love online. There's very little content that I hide, mainly because the system I have in place makes it very difficult.

DNN provides the ability to show different content to different users by using groups. This is a great step forward from what I was using. The problem is, how to add people to that group easily. The built in DNN functionality doesn't work that well. Some of the shopping cart options aren't that great either. So I started looking around. I found the "Subscription Tools" module by Scott McCulloch pretty soon after I started looking. I actually paid the membership to his site long before I started my conversion because I knew how valuable his modules were. The subscription tools are great, and his other modules like Child Links and Private Messages are must haves. Give Scott a visit at Ventrian and join his site with the Gold membership!

Staying logged in

So I turned my moderators loose on the system a couple weeks ago. They have been making test posts and getting to know the new system. One item that they noticed was that the system never kept them logged in even though they had checked the 'Remember Me' box. I had noticed this before as well, but didn't give it much thought. I figured I had something configured screwy in my browser or something. I did some digging and came up with a post in the DNN forums where they talked about this very issue. Apparently the default for DNN is to set the cookie for only 1 hour. I'm not sure of the logic behind a cookie so short. I guess if you have an ecommerce site or something. Anyway, to change the config to allow cookies longer than an hour, open up the web.config file and find this line:

<forms name=".DOTNETNUKE" protection="All" timeout="60" cookieless="UseCookies">
</forms>

Change the 'timeout="60"' to however long you want the login to be remembered in minutes. I have it set to 64800 or 45 days.

Another thing that my small sampling of users found was that the default password length was messing them up. I generally use a strong password by default on all my accounts, so I wouldn't have ever found this. By default, DNN requires a password that is 7 characters long. That's too long for a site like mine. I did some more digging and found this line in the web.config:

<add name="AspNetSqlMembershipProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider" connectionstringname="SiteSqlServer" enablepasswordretrieval="true" enablepasswordreset="true" requiresquestionandanswer="false" minrequiredpasswordlength="7" minrequirednonalphanumericcharacters="0" requiresuniqueemail="true" passwordformat="Encrypted" applicationname="DotNetNuke" description="Stores and retrieves membership data from the local Microsoft SQL Server database"></add>

See that 'minRequiredPasswordLength="7"' entry? I changed that to 4. I'm only going to require my users to have a 4 digit password.

Users are happy for now.

For the Roundhouse Irregulars...

One of the features that has been a thorn in my side from day one is live chat. It has the fewest users, but creates one of the highest resource hogs in terms of server resources. My current solution is a hack of Conquer Chat, a free asp based chat application. I modified it to require authentication and it authenticates from my forum DB. I also created a script that got the number of and the names of chat users and call that from my main forum page.

Chat rooms for DNN have historically been either very basic or very expensive. That was until a few weeks ago. Swirlhost released an upgrade to their SwirlChat module that is absolutely fantastic. It has all the features of the chat rooms that cost in the hundreds of dollars.. The big bonus here, it costs only 40 clams. Additionally, they are happy to improve the program based on customer input. If you're looking for a chat room for your community web site, SwirlChat is it!!

First things first..

Probably the most important area of MLS is the forums. It's what draws people in. It's the majority of the content on the site. As such, it's the area that makes the most money. The forum sponsorships and the other advertising that is there pay the majority of the bills. I need to be careful to make the transition on the forums as painless as possible. I need to keep as much of the functionality of the Snitz forums as I can while providing new and improved features.

There are several different forum options for DotNetNuke. I looked at all of them. Like I mentioned in one of my past posts, I had wanted to use the ASP.NET forums. Unfortunately, they never completed their DNN integration and decided to privatize the whole system. I was a little disappointed. YAF (Yet Another Forum) .NET has a DNN module, but it didn't seem to integrate into the rest of DNN very well. The DNN core forums are still very young and don't have a lot of features. All the other solutions at the time I was investigating them were open source or free. (The ASP.NET forums, now known as Community Server are no longer free. In fact, they carry a pretty steep price tag for a community site like mine.)

That brings us to Active Forums from Active Modules. I was impressed with these forums from the get go. All the features I wanted were there. Even some that I didn't even know I wanted were in there. One big feature they advertise is a converter from Snitz to AF and DNN. That there alone was worth the cost if it works. The biggest draw back for me was the cost. In the past, I have been really hesitant to spend a lot of cash on software for the site. The other drawback for me was that all of the websites that I could find that ran Active Forums had very little traffic. Usually there's only a post or two per day. MLS generally receives over 200 to 300 posts per day. In addition, there are usually at least 75 to 100 users on the site at a given time. Mariette Knap of Smallbizserver.net calmed those fears. Smallbizserver.net is run entirely on DotNetNuke and Active Forums. There's a lot of traffic there and the forums are very busy.

After much debate, I decided that I would fork out the cash and purchase Active Forums. I dropped the money on the Enterprise license. I have it installed on my dev server and have been experimenting with it. I downloaded the conversion module, but it doesn't seem to work. I've submitted a support ticket on it and was told that they were in the middle of an upgrade to AF and would look at the conversion script after that was done. They released the new AF version yesterday, so hopefully the conversion script is not far behind.

The point of this blog..

So here's the point of this whole blog. I have spent a ton of time looking for guidance in what I'm doing. The DotNetNuke forums are difficult for me to follow for some reason. Too much info I guess. Most DNN blogs center around development and not converting an existing thriving site over. So I decided that I would document the process in a blog for others who are in my same situation. I can't be alone. Can I? I know there are plenty of popular sites out there that run on DNN. How did they get to where they are at?

I felt that I needed to give background on myself, MLS, and how I got to this point. Please leave comments and suggestions. I am not a DNN expert, I'm learning as I go and will post what I learn so others can learn from my experiences. There will be a flurry of posts over the next week or so as I bring you up to speed on what I've accomplished so far.

Enter DotNetNuke

I first came across DotNetNuke in early 2003 as I was preparing to write my own content/article management system. I thought the idea was great. I was really excited to see such a cool new system that was open source come on the market. The problem was, the system was new, and there weren't many modules that were useful to me and I lacked the skills to code my own modules. I felt the technology was not mature enough to use at that time, but decided to keep an eye on it.

At the same time, I was looking at the asp.net forums. I was impressed by these forums. They solved my aging forum problem, but did not solve my user management or content woes. Then, it was promised that they were going to integrate it with DotNetNuke.. Ah Ha! But alas, they never completed the integration satisfactorily.

As I was debating on what to do, everything was was "put in the hole" (railroad term, look it up). The wife and I were informed of the impending arrival of our twins. All expansion plans, redesign plans, anything other than every day operations on MLS were put on hold. My moderators led by the amazing Dwight (shout out to Dwight, sup man) took over maintaining law and order for the most part. I tried to make updates as often as possible. It took about 2 years for our lives settle back into a manageable routine.

I pulled my old plans out of the mothballs and started working on things again. This time, DNN was much more mature, much more stable, and had a good selection of modules to help get my site moved into a new era. There are still some gaps between functionality on the current MLS and the new DNN counterpart. Most notably the photo contest. I decided earlier this year that I was going to overlook the gaps and press forward with the conversion regardless. I'll fill in the gaps later. If I wait for everything to fall in my lap, it'll never get done. The initial schedule I set for myself had today as launch day. Unfortunately I didn't make it. Some of problem is financial delays, some of it is due to time constraints. Regardless, I got it started at least. 3, almost 4 years in the making!

A little about MLS..

During my teenage years and early 20's, my hobby was computers. I messed around building PCs and playing games for hours. As I started getting into computers for work, their fun factor started diminishing. I'd sit in front of a computer all day for work, then I'd come home and sit in front of the computer all night. I decided that I needed to find another hobby. I'd received a train set as a boy and loved it. I played with it non stop. I found that I still had an interest in model trains. For some reason this time however, I was drawn to G Scale, or Large Scale trains.

I started frequenting an online forum about large scale trains. In June of 2000, that forum unexpectedly shut down leaving about 1000 of us stranded without a place to shoot the breeze. At the time I had just started working for Ikano and had the ability to quickly throw something together. I found some forum software, put it up and sent some emails to my buddies letting them know of the url. Word quickly spread. 7 years later we have around 6,000 registered users, with about the same number who visit regularly and never register. It's grown from being a forum only to an online magazine with articles, contests, polls, classifieds, and more. We're the largest, most popular web site on the internet about G scale trains and small scale live steam.

myLargescale.com (from here on known as MLS) started using the classic ASP based Snitz forums. As the membership grew and wanted more features, I developed additional functionality and connected it to the forum database tables. Here's a run down of all applications that I either custom wrote or adapted to use my hacked Snitz forum.

• Membership Model (Paid members see less ads, get web space for photos, an email address on my server, paid only content, etc.)
  
• Chat
• Forums (Of course)
• Classifieds
• Vendor Listings
• Logo Shop (cafe press links, depending on membership level send you do different shops with different prices.)
• Photo contest
• FAQs
  
• Webring
• Banner advertising (Regular banners and forum sponsorship)
• Others I am sure I'm forgetting

After countless hours of development, I had a great site going. The members who come and participate in the forum are amazing. They are really the reason for the success of the site.

As the site has grown, some problems inherent in the system have become very obvious. The first problem to really get noticed was my article/content delivery. When I wanted to post an article, the author would send me a Word document. I would spend 40 to 60 hours copying and pasting, reformatting and splitting up the article and fitting it into my template. A 40 page article took me almost a month to convert. I needed some sort of content management system. Most of the commercial systems were way too expensive for a hobby site, and there weren't a lot of open source solutions that really fit the bill. I actually drew up plans for and started to code my own system, another hack at the tired Snitz database.

Another problem has been user management. My custom solution got developed enough to get the users taken care of, but I never really finished the admin piece. To this day, I am still firing up Query analyzer and updating the database directly for a lot of the functions I do on a regular basis. Not very efficient.

Next, is performance. This has really become an issue over the past 12 months. MLS is running on 8 year old hardware. It's a dual PIII 833 mhz with 2Gb of RAM. OS is Windows 2000 Server with MSSQL 7.0 running as the database. It's redundant hardware with 4 disks in a RAID 10 configuration. The Snitz code isn't necessarily the most efficient, and the database has grown to about 600 mb. Not large by many standards, but for an internet forum, it's pretty big. The slowness is most noticeable when someone searches the forum. It'll bring the website to a crawl and the server to its knees.

A little about me...

Hi, I'm Shad. No, my best friend's names aren't Meshack and Abednego, and I'm not named after a fish. I was lucky enough to marry a lovely woman and together we've had six (6) beautiful daughters. The girls range in age from 11 down to the twins at 2 years old.

Internet infrastructure has become my specialty. Want a web site running on 60 + servers load balanced between two data centers on opposite sides of the country? No problem, I'm your man. I'm a server hardware, wires, and operating systems kinda guy. I AM NOT a developer. Writing code is not my thing. That being said, I've written my fair share of code. The majority of it has been classic ASP VBScript code with a little bit of ASP.NET.

I've been working with the Internet for over 10 years now. I started my career as a lowly tech support agent for America Online and worked hard to learn everything I needed to know to support applications on the Internet. It became my passion so to speak. After AOL, I worked for US Robotics supporting PCMCIA (People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms) modems and network cards. When USR was purchased by 3COM, I was laid off. I took the opportunity to get all the classes and training that I needed to get my MCSE certification. After several years of short term contracts at Novell, Intel, and several other companies, I ended up at a national Internet Service Provider. Ikano Communications. Ikano isn't an ISP in the traditional sense. They provide back end services for smaller ISPs. Dial up authentication, web and mail hosting, billing, callcenter support, DSL, wireless internet, etc. I believe at one point the company was one of the 10 largest ISPs in the country if you combined all the smaller ISPs we provided services for. While there I managed hundreds of servers serving thousands of web sites and hundreds of thousands of email boxes. I set up my first load balanced web farm. Ah, the fond memories I have. I gained a ton of knowledge and experience in my four and a half years there.

I left Ikano to work for a supply chain management company. I was there for about a year before I left and ended up where I am currently employed. I've been there for almost two years now. I am one of two main web administrators for one of the country's largest low fare airlines. I'm responsible for a web site that brings in over 10 million in sales almost every day. There's a lot involved in running an environment that large. I will most likely post about my challenges and triumphs from work here in my blog as there are some things going on there that are definitely applicable here. The main focus of this blog however, is going to be on my little side gig, my night job, my pain in the arse, myLargescale.com