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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So lately, I've been clowning around with DotNetNuke's scheduler engine. I'm in the process of creating a Twitter module for DNN for my day job. Apparently, the day job's website and intranet are pounding the "hell" out of the Twitter API, causing none of the updates to show after a specific amount of API requests are passed (probably between 65 - 100).

How do I resolve the issue? Well, I decided to cache the requests in a database that I control via the RSS feeds that twitter provides. Doing that, and creating the corresponding user interface, enables me to "pound" my database as opposed to the Twitter API, which then ensures that content is always being displayed.

That's all great, but it stinks if I have to manually update the cache myself, which is where the DNN Scheduler comes into play. I created a scheduled task (I will do my best to post a blog later about it), and my life should have been hunky dory. Unfortunately, if you don't set up the scheduled task using the exact class name and assembly...

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So I was bouncing around on a project I'm working on for my "day job," and I noticed a tremendous number of Text/HTML modules being used as a summarization for the function of the page.  Using the Text/HTML module in that function is fine, but it's not taking advantage of linking to other pages on the site or token replacement, it's kind of a waste.

How do you get around that though?  Well, every module in DNN has an advanced setting where  you can specify header or footer text.  In the case outlined above, this works perfectly.  One of the benefits of using this is with less modules on the page, page loads become a little more efficient.

For work, I recently had to expand a system disk for a VMware VM.  Of course, the conventional wisdom is that you cannot expand the system disk.  But did I let something like common sense stop me?  No!

Basically, I converted the VM.  The VMware converter allows you to P2V (physical to virtual) and V2V (virtual to virtual) computer systems (mostly servers).  But, one option allows you to convert one machine between ESX hosts.  During the conversion process, you can state how large you want the disk to be.  Once at that point, you can expand the size of the disk.  Afterwards you can run the vm with the completely expanded disk.  I'll post a more detailed walkthrough later.

This past Monday, I gave a presentation at the monthly St. Louis DNN User Group meeting on the basics of  integrating ASP.Net AJAX in DotNetNuke Module Development.  I thought it was a decent presentation, but hey, I am a little partial.  Here's a the sample project I used.  It includes building a dynamic data dropdownlist and communication between two modules.  Feel free to download it and play around.  If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a line.

OpenForce is back!  I went to it last year and thought it highly useful and worthwhile.  It's still in the planning phases, but it'll be during Nov. 10 - 13 at the Mandalay Bay Casino in Vegas.  If you use DotNetNuke or are even thinking about it, I suggest you go.  I'll post more details as I find them.

Ok.  My alarm clock system is working fairly well.  The last few days have been pretty nice waking up to music I love.  Anyway, so I made a few changes:

• Some "nice" red light/green light images have been added to display alarm enablement.
• The alarm can be stopped without shutting down the application
• Added a nice date/time stamp of when the alarm will sound.

So far, the alarm will still only go off at 6AM.  My next step will be to add custom times. 

If you're interested, the standalone application is located here, and the source code is available here.

I finally got subversion up and running.  Now I can actually do development!  I'll post some stuff later on how I got Subversion running on Ubuntu Server.

Next month (4/21), I'll be giving a presentation on AJAX integration into DotNetNuke Modules.  If you're interested, the meetings are at TricorBraun, and they start at 7PM.  if you have any suggestions or ideas, please post a comment.  Thanks!