ScottAllender.com

 I've been meaning to write this post since Sunday evening, but things just kept getting in my way. This past weekend (10/16 – 10/18) I had the privilege to volunteer at Coders for Charities (C4C). Like I said in a previous post, I viewed this as an opportunity to use some skills and experience that I have built up over time to a community that has given me loads in return.

C4C (at least the way it was set up this year) was a 72 hour event where the geeks of St. Louis got together and cranked out some code for much deserving charities. This year, the majority of the participating charities needed website work. As a matter of fact, the majority of the site work was done using either SiteFinity and DotNetNuke.

So very recently, I redesigned my site, which I now like, but will probably change it again in two months (it's my site thank you very much).  When I redesigned my site, I left off the syndication button, which was the primary way to subscribe to my blog.  This caused someone to reach out to me because they could not subscribe.

My site is powered by DotNetNuke, and I love this application/platform.  It's flexible, (depending on what's installed) it's light, and it's easy to use (once you get used to a few things).  One of the very few things that has irked me about DotNetNuke though, is if you syndicate a module (like a blog) the browser doesn't pick up on it.  The majority of all the browsers now support Live Bookmarks, and the little RSS icon is one of the first things I look for when I come across a new feed.

Real quick update on doing something for a really good cause.

 A brief look at my first foray into teaching a class in my local community.  It was quite fun if you don't want to read the post.  :-)

A quick hit of my DotNetNuke presentation at St. Louis's Day of .Net.

Quick review of what I covered during my MarketSTL presentation on using Social Media Networks in Business.

Let me start off by saying that I love Gmail's Spam Filter. In the words of Tony the Tiger, "It's greeeaaat!" That said, I got my first piece of spam today that somehow made it through Gmail's filter.

Here is the content of the email:

新しいメールアドレスをお知らせします



新しいメールアドレス：mr_isaac_caleb1200@yahoo.co.jpI am isaac caleb bank manager of BOA Bank in Burkina faso.I would like you to indicate your interest to receive the transfer of 10.5M Dollars.I will like you to stand as the next of kin to my late Descease customer whose account is presently dormant,for claimYours faithfully,mr isaac caleb- Mr Isaa a Caleb



Does this sound familiar? To me it sounds like the Nigerian schemes that went through the world a few years back. I only think this because Gmail's spam filter made sure that crap never reached me.

Anyway, in case anyone is wondering I regard this as spam because:

If I'm a bank employee, I'm not sending my bank related emails through Yahoo! If I'm going to send email from...

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Today, I was presented with an interesting problem. How can you use the same content for two different website, but account for some very minor changes in your DotNetNuke skin? After thinking about it for a little bit, I decided to override the base Skin class. Turns out, with an RESX or XML file, this is a pretty darn elegant solution.

First, let's take a look at the code. In order to do this properly, the class being created needs to inherit from DotNetNuke.UI.Skins.Skin. This enables the class to pick up all of the appropriately used public properties and methods and provides the ability to add overridden/custom properties. In my particular case, the driving force behind the customization in the skin development was the URL name. I probably could use any PortalSetting (name, ID, etc), but I chose to go with the URL. It's easy enough to get. Here's what my code started off looking like:

public class MySkinDefault : DotNetNuke.UI.Skins.Skin{

    public MySkinDefault()

{...

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