Renovating MLS

Newsletters..

2009-04-27T16:30:00.002-06:00

Back in the old MLS days, I had a custom script that I used to send out my newsletter. It wasn't necessarily efficient, but it got the job done. There was no error handling, if an email failed it just went away. I had set up an easy way for people unsubscribe etc.. It was all a hack on the old snitz stuff. When I upgraded to DNN, I decided to just use the built in newsletter module. I figured that it would work well enough.. I suppose it was somewhat of a step back. I know that a lot of folks have complained about the built in newletter sending capabilities. To be honest, I don't know if I was having any problems or not. I knew at least some of my emails were going out because I was getting a traffic spike and I'd been tagging my links for Google Analytics and could see the results there. But aside from that, I had zero visibility into my email campaigns. I also thought that the sending mechanism was a tad tedious, and allowing people to unsubscribe was very painful. I had to tell people how to log into their accounts and go to their profile and unjoin the role to which the newsletter was sent. That made for some unhappy people. Also, I had a list of approximately 7600 email addresses, and I was sure that a good number of them were no longer valid (the list is 9 years old). I needed to scrub the list. I looked at building my own solution, but knew that I just didn't have the time to mess with it. I looked around for a solution. I came across Bulk Emailer from Interactivewebs.com.au a while ago. I had just purchased their feedback form module and liked how it worked. At the time, I didn't want to spend that kind of money on an email sending module. I went back and took a look again and they now have a demo that you can download. I decided to give it a test run in my real environment.

I dowloaded and installed the module following along in the PDF manual that is included. Configuring everything took a little time, but I persisted. I set up the bounce email address, pointed the module to it and had at it. A really nice feature of this module is the ability to write and HTML page and the module will then convert it to the correct format, replace tokens, and send it on its way. Much the same way my old system did. I took one of my old templates, reformatted it a bit, and sent a couple test emails. Things looked good, so I sent the email out to everyone. It took longer to send out all the emails than I thought it should. My understanding is this can be adjusted, and I will do that. It took about 7 hours to send all 7600 emails. Overall, I'm impressed. I now know that nearly 1800 of the addresses in my list were bad, I know approximately how many people have read my emails, and I've had about 30 people be removed from my list. Not bad.

There are definitely some things that I would like to see changed. The opt-out page blocks users from getting any emails at all through the system. Since I don't currently run multiple lists, it's not an issue.. But if I did, there's no way to allow the users to opt out of only one list. That could be a problem. I think that the structure of the mailing lists could use some refinement. Right now, you can send an email to either a list, or a dnn role. I think that instead of sending directly to a list, you should have to create a list and then assign the DNN role to the list. A little better integration with DNN roles as far as unregistering would be nice.

In the end, this is a "buy" module. I'm very happy with it. I'll be placing my order soon.

New features...

2009-04-23T11:47:00.003-06:00

Since I last blogged, (way too long ago I know) I left the company I was working for. I now work for the leader in web analytics and online business optimization. It was a very good move, one that I'm glad I made. With that move came a little less time after hours working on work. I've been able to spend a little quality time with MLS and dotnetnuke.

To be honest, I don't remember everything that I've done to the site since then.. Most of it pretty minor. But here is what I'm working on right now:

Upgrade active forums to version 4.x - with that upgrade comes the loss of support for banner ads in the way that I am using them.
Implement active social - i really think this is the future for my site
Implement new banner ad system - still debating between smokeranch and a new player. I've been wanting a better banner system for a while since the built in one sucks. The loss of support in the new forums just made it that much more needed. So it will be done in conjuction.
Revamp the skin using as much css as possible. I've done a pretty good job with this one. Right now I've cut the skin file size in less than half. I still have a little more work to go on this one. I'm also including a couple skin objects to cut back on modules.
Implement new email newsletter module. I'm using the default DNN functionality and it's confusing to the end user, and not very easy for me.. so I'll be upgrading this.
Implement snapsis' css menu system to replace the solpartmenu
Upgrade the cutesoft editor to the latest version.

In conjunction with the skin, I've been working on the templates for active social and active forums. I've also revamped the menu. I've got things looking pretty close to the way I want them. I still have a little work left to do, but it's coming along nicely. Right now, my three big hold ups are waiting on a new build of active forums, waiting on a new build of active social, and needing the cash to buy the banner rotating module. Everything else is pretty much in place.

So there's a quick update of where I'm at now.

How Cute!!!

2008-09-11T22:24:00.001-06:00

Well, after a really rough summer at work, I finally got the time to sit down and spend some cycles on the text editor. I've caught a lot of flak for disabling the text editor and just leaving a text box with no formatting capabilities. But the alternative was crippling the site for 15% or more of the site visitors.

The plan has been to implement the Cute Editor from Cutesoft all along. I just hadn't had time to get it done. I made the purchase a few months ago and have been working on customizing the provider to do some pretty cool things. So here is what I've accomplish so far.

First shot, nothing special here.. Just the editor in DNN:

Ahhh.. Here is where the magic starts... I modified the provider to open the image gallery into the web space I provide for paying members. There's a virtual directory off the root that's pointed to the directory structure outside of DNN where each member has their own folder. The provider now uses their username to map their space to their folder in this directory. Based on their role membership, the users either get a basic editor with few features, a feature rich bar with gallery and image buttons.

The image dialog box also maps to the user's directory. I was able to enforce their normal disk space limits by setting a securty config file for each role that had different space limits.

I'm in final testing and will be releasing it on a limited basis in one or two forums for a week or so. If all goes well, I'll turn it loose on the whole site.

Synching users

2008-07-28T11:31:00.002-06:00

I finally figured out how to get users synced between my DNN installation and an external FTP server. If you'll remember from way back, I provide web space for paying members of my site to store their photos and whatnot to post in the forum. I needed to export user names and passwords from certain roles in DNN to an FTP server that uses a database for its authentication.

Here's how I did it. I found a module called User Sync Manager from DNN masters. http://www.dnnmasters.com After installing the module, I set up a database to export the user information to. I added a profile in the module that synced to a table called UserSync in that database. Initially, nothing was getting synced and I was getting really confused. I then found out on a thread in their forum that the module requires the users profile in DNN to be modified since the module was installed. I then told all my users that needed FTP access that they had to make a change in their profile to initiate the sync process. Now here's where the magic happens.. I only needed users from a certain group to have access. USM doesn't export role membership data, so I had to figure it out. I wrote a SQL script and put it in a scheduled job that drops the old FTP access table then joins the exported data with the data in the DNN users table. I then select out the users who are in the userroles table with a roleid that corresponds to the role that I need to give access to. It's a complex query, but it works beautifully.. Here's the query(edited for security):

select lower(replace(s.username, ' ', '')) as USERID, s.password as PASSWORD, (s.firstname + ' ' + s.lastname) as FULLNAME, NULL as FTPMAXSPACE, NULL as FTPMAXFILES, '100' as FTPFLAGS, u.userid as DNN_USERID
INTO auth.dbo.ftp from
usersync.dbo.usersync s inner join dotnetnuke.dbo.users U on s.username = u.username
where u.userid in
(select userid from dotnetnuke.dbo.userroles where roleid = 4)

You'll notice that I do some text processing in there as well. The FTP server software doesn't support spaces in the usernames, so I strip out all the spaces and lowercase all the usernames for good measure. The password is left in tact. Next I combine the user's first name a space character and the last name in at FULLNAME column then set some required fields for the FTP server. I select all this information into the the FTP table.

To take it a step further, I needed to give a select number of members a higher disk quota on the FTP server because they paid for additional space, were moderators, etc. I wrote another sql query to update the FTPMAXSPACE column with the space needed based on thier role membership. In looking at it now, this script could be edited to make it a little more efficient. I'm still doing a join, when I don't need to since I copied out their DNN userid to the FTP database in the first step. I will problably make those changes soon.

Things have been running on this new sync solution for a couple weeks now and I haven't seen any issues and my users are once again happy. Some are still confused about having to edit their profile to get their access, but we're doing our best to steer folks toward the post in the forum that explains it all. This module has really turned out to be a lifesaver on this project. I was at a loss on how to keep these in sync. I hope that sharing how I made this solution will help someone else who is struggling to get this module working in their environment. I know that it would have helped me.

A pain in the editor...

2008-06-23T10:45:00.003-06:00

When I launched the site, I wanted a uniform text editor for the users to use all over the site. In the forums, in the blogs, in the private messages, etc.. I settled on the default FCK editor for the time being with the plan to move toward CuteEditor or something else as time and finances allowed.

After the hardware drama, I started getting tons of complaints from many different users that they couldn't post or were getting a ton of errors in the forums. It seems that the FCK editor is not very freindly to MAC users and users of browsers other than IE... I tried to work through it, but finally I'd had enough of the whining. I disabled the FCK editor and made all the forums use just a default text box. The complaints have died down. People now have a hard time posting photos and urls, but they're working through it.

I fully plan on implementing the CuteEditor soon. Right now my budget is tight, but within the next few months, I'll have it up and running. I'm really excited about the possibilites that CuteEditor creates.. Online image editing, user uploading and whatnot.. When I get closer, I'll share more information on my implementation. I have the demo version up and running, I'm just trying to figure out how to recompile it with the changes that I'm trying to make...

Return of the world's worst blogger...

2008-06-12T23:36:00.003-06:00

So here I am, 5 months later.. I still get regular traffic to this blog, so there must be at least a few people interested in what's happened..

In my last post, I mentioned that the server I was running on started having an occasional hiccup on the raid controller. After nursing it along for about 3 weeks and actually putting a replacement raid controller in, something gave and the whole thing went south fast. The server crashed in late January and wouldn't boot back up. The server crashed late at night during a massive snow storm. I braved the storm and drove downtown to the colo center and started to work on the server. After a couple hours, it became clear that whatever the resolution was, it wasn't going to be quick. I put a maintenance page up on one of my other servers and sent all traffic there while I figured out what to do and got some sleep. The next day, I woke up and started looking at the server. I was trying to recover it to the point that it would boot. I was unable to do so. I made the tough decision to roll back to the old site that was on my other old server. I did that while I put together a plan. I had hours and hours of work that was lost on this "new to me" server. I had to recover the data if at all possible. I purchased some data recovery software on the net, built a bootdisk with all the drivers I needed and loaded it up. I had to go buy an external usb drive to copy the files onto. I hooked everything up, fired up the bootdisk and after a day of trying different options and configurations, voila! There were all my files from DNN, the database and everything! Almost all the files were in tact. There were a few DNN core files that were corrupted, and then a good number of the user files that were corrupt. All in all, nothing that was irreplaceable was lost. I put together a virtual server in MS virtual server and proceeded to rebuild the site. It took a few days, but I got it up and running. I copied the VM up to my 3rd server that runs MS virtual server and brought the new DNN based site back online.

It was clear that I needed some brand new hardware with a warranty and everything. If I have this much riding on a website, I need to put it on decent hardware. I was able to procure, through a member of my site, a factory re certified HP DL360 G5.. It's a really nice server. I loaded it up with memory and hard disk space. I'll be able to run on this guy for years.

Once I got that server online, I scheduled a night to move the VM over to the new server. I scheduled a backup job to run each night that backs up the database and the DNN install directory to the portable USB drive every night. I have tested a restore in my developement server and it works great, so I am now satisfied that if something went horribly wrong, I could recover a lot easier. The hope is however, that nothing ever goes that wrong again..

Take a breath, plug your nose, and jump!

2008-01-08T11:02:00.000-07:00

Well, I did it.

I had originally set a date of December 27th to complete the upgrade. With the rush of the Christmas holiday, I didn't have time to get everything done that I needed. So I moved it the 29th. I ran into some difficulty importing users, assigning them to roles, and importing receipts, so I bumped it again. This time, I was as ready as I was going to be. January 1st I launched MLS 3.0. The cut-over went fairly smooth, but we did encounter a few hiccups. First problem actually had nothing to do with DNN.. It was a hardware failure. The built in raid controller in the server I'm using started throwing errors and not writing. I had to shut down and reboot the entire server. It's been pretty solid since then. Knock on wood.

Hock your wares..

2007-12-14T15:07:00.000-07:00

Next on the list to tackle was the classifieds. I initially wasn't sure what I'd do with this. I underestimated the importance of this feature of the site. Recently I closed down the old classifieds to new listings in preparation for the move to the new site. I've had several complaints from people that wanted to list something, but we faced with the page stating that I wasn't allowing any more till the new site was up.

I've looked at a couple classifieds modules on snowcovered and wasn't really impressed with what I saw. I put them on the back burner, as I was more concerned with the forums and other items. I still kept an eye out for any modules that would be useful for the classifieds. I've known about Ventrian's property agent for a long time, since I signed up for his site, but just always dismissed it as a real estate listing module. I never really looked at it that hard. As I've been looking into the membership model and setting up Ventrian's subscription tools, I got a glimpse of what people have been doing with the property agent module. From selling cars to making dealer listings, there are a lot of cool things going on with this module. The best part is, due to Ventrian's license, which gives you access to all their modules for one fee, I already own the rights to use it. Needless to say, I quickly decided to use the module for my classifieds. I'm still working though setting it up the way that I want, but the flexibility of this module is just amazing. There are a few eccentricities that I've noticed, but nothing that is insurmountable. I have my categories set up and the basic classified listing page done. I need to expand the listing page to include a few more fields and edit the listing template to show contact info for the member that is selling the item. Overall, I'm very happy.

Vote for your favorite..

2007-12-12T10:17:00.001-07:00

So I mentioned the photo contest last time and how I wasn't sure what I was going to do about it. I'd contacted a local guy that does some DNN development and asked him to look into writing the contest for me. We net, I outlined my requirements and he said he'd get back to me. A few days ago, he sent me a note pointing me to digcontest. It's a contest module written by the folks at dignuke.com. This contest module is very close to what I need. Close enough in fact, that I will probably modify the contest to fit the module a little more.

On another note, I've completely given up on converting my old forums over to active forums. I keep running into errors while trying to run the converter. In addition, I've noticed that the converter only moves users over if they have made a post in the forums. I have many paying users that never have made a post, so their accounts wouldn't get migrated. I've decided to just import the users with the DNNmasters user import manager module. This way I can import everyone, add them to certain roles, and I can have a fresh environment.

Fitting it all in...

2007-11-28T14:24:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a lot of analysis and research on the home page of MLS. I'm not very thrilled with the current home page. It just doesn't reflect the dynamic nature of the site and all that goes on. Apart from the default forum page and the active topics page, the homepage is the most visited page on MLS. It also has one of the highest bounce rates (People that only look at 1 page and leave.) I suspect that is because the content on the homepage only changes once per month or so. (Although I hope that will change as I get DNN online.) I hide all the ads in the left column for paying members of the site. In the right hand column, there's a link to help that rarely gets used, and a poll system. I can never come up with good poll questions, so it keeps the same ol' boring poll for months. The welcome at the top was an attempt to get into search engines, which I think was somewhat successful, but it takes up too much room. The photo changes each month. It's the winner of a contest between all the members on the site. Everyone votes and the winner gets a prize. I manually have to change this image each month. Below the image is more intro fluff to try and get SE placement. Then finally, WAY below the fold, is the latest news. I also manually update this text each month.

In an effort to get the bounce rate down, I want to redesign the page to either lead these visitors deeper into the site, or leave by way of one of the pay per click ads from Google or eBay. In addition, I need to make the home page easier to update with news and images. With these goals in mind, I set about trying to cram everything I could onto the 1024x768 homepage including the kitchen sink. I moved stuff around constantly, trying all sorts of configurations. Nothing ever really looked right. Things were squeezed and too hard to read, or not there at all. The ads were again banished over to the left hand side, out of sight out of mind. I wasn't getting anywhere, but I WAS getting frustrated. I sat down with my wife one night and asked her what she thought of the page. She's no exert in the field of web design, but she sure looks at a lot of web pages, so her opinion would do! She agreed that stuff was crammed in and difficult to read. I explained that I wanted to get all these different elements in, but was having a difficult time getting them to look right all together. She then suggested that maybe scrolling some of the content would help.

Now I'm not a fan of animated web pages and moving stuff in general, but this did get me to thinking. What else could I do to get everything there easily accesible and used maybe the same principal of not showing all the content at once? Then it hit me, a lightbulb illuminated above my head. Maybe I could use some CSS tabs or something like that. The thought of creating the tabs scared the daylights out of me, I'll be honest. Then I thought, maybe there's a module already out there for this. Off to snowcovered I went. After a few minutes of searching, there it was, AJAX Tabs by Gumbosoft.. The solution to all my problems. This module allowed me to put the top posts module and the recent blog entries module on their own tabs right at the top of the page. The AJAX tabs also can be scheduled to appear and disappear based on dates, so I can put a membership special, or a special show report or something else on a tab to promote it, and schedule it to automatically appear when I want it to. I cut the size of the photo contest winner down a little bit. I didn't want it to overshadow the whole page and stick out like a sore thumb like it was before. Here's what I've come up with:As you can see, it's very similar to the old page with some refinements. The ads on the left will stay there, though I will re-arrange them so that the eBay ad is on top (My best performing ad by far), then followed by the GR magazine ad and then an Amazon.com ad. (Don't know why I bother with that one.) The Google adsense ads have been moved from the left column to right under the photo winner and recent content tabs. I'm hoping that this placement will help improve the adsense performance. My adsense revenue has been consistently trending downwards for the last couple years. I didn't meet the $100 minimum check amount this September, the first time ever since joining adsense. I've been in the program for 4 years. I'll rant some other time about adsense and my beef with the way things have been going.

As before, the ads in the left hand column and the adsense ads will be hidden for paying members. This is done using Scott McCulloch's subscription content module. A very handy utility I must say. There will still be a banner in the top right corner from one of my directly related sponsors. I'll be using the DNN banner ad module for that.

Just under the ads, is my latest news section. In order to keep me off the homepage, I'm using the active forums top posts module again. I've created a special group in the forums that will be just for my "Dispatch" or news updates. When I make a post in there, it will automatically show up on the home page in it's entirety. Cool.. Then below the latest news, the intro text. Hopefully it's not too far down the page for search engines. Another thought I had was to have a tab on the top that would only show on a visitors first access to the site, then it would always show the top forum posts. I'm not sure that's possible, but it's not a requirement.

For the photo contest. I plan on either writing a custom module myself or pay someone to do it for me. Either way, there will be a winners module and that will be on the homepage and on the main photo contest page. Voila, I never have to touch the homepage again unless I want to do something special!!

Keep in mind module containers, fonts, colors, and the menu, are all still being worked on. They will all change quite a bit as I continue refining the look of the site. The layout itself however is pretty close to where it will end up with maybe some minor changes here and there.

Lots of progress...

2007-11-26T15:52:00.000-07:00

So I think that we have determined that I am one of the world's worst bloggers. I just forget to take the time to sit down and do it. So, without further ado, I'll start in on the latest developments.

New hardware is in place.

Well, new to MLS hardware anyways... If you remember MLS currently runs on an 8 year old dual PIII 833 mhz server with 2 GB of RAM. It currently shares this power with several other websites, with FTP and mail services. I have a second server where I set up several VMs using MS virtual server and have been slowly moving some of these services to those VMs.

A couple weeks ago, we were going through the datacenter at work and cleaning out a bunch of old servers that had been decommissioned. Among them was a stack of Compaq DL360 G1 servers. We set them out on the loading dock for the recyclers to come pick up. At that point management told us we could take anything that we wanted. I knew that most of the stuff was pretty useless, (8U server anyone?) but I figured that I could put together one server from all the parts. I was able to put together a 1U DL360 G1 with two PIII 1 Ghz processors and 4 GB of RAM. Company policy requires drives be destroyed, so I couldn't get drives, but I have a pair of spare drives here at home, so that wasn't a big deal. I installed Windows 2003 server R2 and SQL 2005. I took it downtown to the colocation facility and racked it last Friday. The deal I made with the guys at the colo facility is that I have to have everything migrated off the old 2U server by the end of the year and have it out. So there it is, my deadline to get MLS moved over to DNN.. The end of the year.

This new server will be dedicated to MLS on DNN, with maybe a few other smaller websites that will run on DNN as well. I'll still keep the old site online on a VM on the other server, but I'm not sure how much of it will be functional.
I hope that a deal that I'm working on (I'll talk about later) will allow me to afford to purchase a pair of brand new HP G5 dl360s. The way I'm setting things up, migrating from the current servers will be a snap because they are all VMs, so I can just move them over to the new hardware and adjust the resources available to each VM.

Upgrading

2007-10-07T16:28:00.000-06:00

So I decided to upgrade my dev environmet to latest build of DotNetNuke. Mistake. Of course I backed everything up prior and made sure it worked. I kept getting all kinds of wierd error messages. I finally decided to just start up from scratch. Not a big deal really.. Just set me back a day or two. So I'm currently rebuilding with the current build of Dotnetnuke. I was able to get my hands on the skinning guide for Active forums, so I'm going to start tackling that again.

I've been at a loss of what to do for the articles section of MLS. The majority of the articles I have a very image heavy and some are as long as 50 pages. Most of the article management systems out there for DNN are meant for much shorter articles. The image management capabilites aren't that great and they display the article in one page. Not good from a readability standpoint when I'm usually publishing 30 - 40 pages. I was exited to see this week however that DNNMasters has mulitiple page content on their roadmap for later this month. I'm going to be dowloading the demo of their current version later today to try it out. I look forward to seeing if I can make this work in my environment.

On another note, one of my other hobbies is collecting rare vinyl records from the 80s and early 90s new wave/alternative scene. I've got about 800 pieces in my collection. I sold my turntable some 10 years ago when I got married and my records have been stored in the basement waiting for this week to arrive. I was at the local Costco Friday night and saw that they had the ION iTTUSB turntable in stock. I've wanted one of these for a while, but they've always been out of stock at all the online outlets or local stores when I had the cash to get one. I immediately grabbed one and put it in my cart. It was only $119, compared to the $159 that I saw it for at Bestbuy later that day. I feel like I got a good deal on it. I have it hooked up to my PC now and am listening to the 12" extended remix of the Cure's "Hot Hot Hot" as I type this. I'm happy with the quality of the sound coming out of this thing. I'm excited to start recording all this old vinyl into FLAC and MP3 format so I can enjoy it all in a more portable format!!! I think the 160GB Ipod is definately on my Christmas list this year.

Comfortable in my own skin...

2007-09-24T14:08:00.000-06:00

First off, an apology for the whole 2 or 3 of you who are following this.. I haven't posted in over a month. I got pretty sick for a couple weeks and didn't feel like doing much.. In addition I've been working on my home office.. A place that isn't a computer on a folding table with a folding chair where I currently do all my work.

So I've had this internal dialog with myself over the past few months about what to do for the Dotnetnuke skin for MLS. Do I do my best to port over my current template or do I completely redesign the site? I've opted to adapt my current template over to DNN for now. Why? I'm going to be causing enough problems with throwing new forums, classifieds, account management, and other features at all my users. The last thing I need to do is confuse people even more by having the site look totally different. So I'm about 80% done in converting my current template over to a DNN skin. Some things like hiding the left hand sidebar of ads for paying members was done in the template. I had to remove that and just put a content pane there as the ads are now going to be shown using a module. So far it looks pretty good. I'm trying to cut back on the number of tables in the template. I'm trying to increase load times. I'm having trouble getting the footer to show correctly. I will work on that later this week.

On another note, I'm growing increasingly annoyed with Active Modules, the developers of Active Forums. Their support forum is a moderated forum, so you have to wait for your posts to get approved before you can get any kind of answer. The problem is, they never approve posts. I've had at least 5 or six posts never get approved. My latest, a question on skinning and specifically, the availability of a skinning guide is gone into la la land forever it seems. I submitted a support ticket about some errors I was seeing in the Snitz conversion module and I got a response back that they'd look into it after the latest release of Active Forums. Well, the release came and went. I went into the ticket system and asked for an update. A week went by with no response. I asked again for an update, no response. I finally got frustrated and found an email address for Will, the owner (I think) and asked what was up. He replied and said that they had updated the conversion tool a couple weeks earlier. Well, how the hell was I supposed to know? No one is answering my queries through their ticket system and the forum and download area was never updated. The zip file still has the same version number and everything! I downloaded the conversion tool again and attempted a conversion. I got past the initial error I was having, but lo and behold, a new error just saying that it can't convert X forum. No details or anything. I forwarded the error on to Will, and big surprise, I get a wall of silence. Argh!! It would be faster to write my own damn script.

Builders Logs (Blogs)

2007-08-21T13:13:00.000-06:00

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..

2007-08-13T15:26:00.000-06:00

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

2007-08-10T13:40:00.000-06:00

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...

2007-08-06T11:47:00.000-06:00

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..

2007-08-03T13:47:00.000-06:00

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..

2007-08-01T15:43:00.000-06:00

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

2007-08-01T14:38:00.000-06:00

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..

2007-08-01T12:05:00.000-06:00

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...

2007-08-01T01:10:00.001-06:00

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