Site Admin

Spam Busting

Armand du Plessis — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:02:00 GMT

We've updated all the Spam Rules this morning and added several new filters to the site which should resolve the current wave of spam that has been plaguing the dotnet.org.za blogs.

Server Restored

Armand du Plessis — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:43:00 GMT

The much hyped Tornado never hit Johannesburg yesterday but unfortunately something of similar proportions struck down our dotnet.org.za hosting server.

At around 00:30 last I received a notification that something went wrong with the server. We worked with Voxel engineers and eventually installed a new server which was ready at around 06h00. At around 08h00 this morning we had most of the configuraton done and data restored and this site was live again. Kudos to the guys at Voxel for the speed with which they were able to get the new server up and running.

Unfortunately during the restoration of some other services the site became unavailable again this afternoon for a short period but was promptly restored. To make life a little interesting and the language a bit more colorful I had a power outage in the middle of the restore at my office which complicated things a bit as well but currently everything should be back to normal.

On this site I'm aware of two issues, the SSL certificate hasn't been restored yet so Information Card based logons won't function and the email services are still offline. These will be reinstated soon.

If you come across anything else please let me know! We apologise for the outage. Armand

Two Minor Site Tweaks

Armand du Plessis — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 17:24:00 GMT

Two minor tweaks to the site this afternoon:

Careers - Posts from blogs in the Careers Group will no longer display in the default main feed. They will all be aggregated under the Careers heading only. More changes to that section soon.
Individual blog sitemaps. Got a request from Rudi this afternoon to render blog specific sitemaps. The functionality exists by default in Community Server but was only accessibly by browsing to /GoogleSiteMap.ashx?apptype=blog&app=blogname. I'm rewriting urls so you can now use http://dotnet.org.za/yourblog/sitemap.xml should you wish to use your individual sitemap somewhere where ownership of the /blog is required.

Below is the extract from my siteurls_override.config should someone be interested in a similar override for their Community Server installation (Note that requests to .xml is mapped to ASP.NET in my installation. This won't work without a similar mapping) :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<Overrides>

    <Override xpath="/SiteUrls/locations/location[@name='weblogs']" mode="add">

        <url name = "siteMapRedir"  path="##blogdirectory##sitemap.xml" pattern="##blogName##/sitemap.xml" physicalPath="/" vanity="GoogleSiteMap.ashx?apptype=blog&amp;app=$1" />

    </Override>

</Overrides>

Twitter Feed

Armand du Plessis — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 01:33:00 GMT

For those on Twitter there is now a Twitter feed for all new posts on dotnet.org.za available at https://twitter.com/dotnetorgza. If you follow the dotnetorgza user you will get notified via a Tweet whenever there's a new post.

This thanks to Kyle Beyer's Twitter Module.

Dotnet.org.za Subversion Access

Armand du Plessis — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 22:08:00 GMT

In the past the maintenance of this site has pretty much been a one man show with the sad effect that when I'm busy very little is done in terms of updates or additions to the site. As one example - it's a shame that months after the upgrade to Community Server 2007 the site is still running the default theme . (there was reasons besides my lazyness but I won't go into them :)) While that is one area that will be addressed towards the end of August with a new theme and layout there is new services, CS modules and other additions released almost daily which unfortunately I don't always get around to implementing on the site.

Now in the past several members have kindly offered to assist with maintenance so in the coming weeks I want to make the process of enhancing the site a whole lot more agile, opening up the site and getting more people involved in this. In the past there hasn't been an easy way for someone to e.g. add a Digg option to his blog posts without bugging me until I gave in they give up. Hopefully with the new process this will be become a whole lot easier.

Here's a quick overview of how I see the new process working :

Step 1) Add and Commit - I've cleaned up the Subversion repository, excluded irrelevant folders etc and will be giving members interested in contributing to the site Subversion access. Just send me an email on armand@dotnet.org.za if you are interested in contributing and I'll create your account and send you credentials. (You wouldn't need to compile CS to contribute, it's a compiled build with just the web files required to run the site). If there is a CSModule, Theme or any other addition you feel you want to add to your blog or to the site you can do that on your local copy and once happy with your addition commit the changes back.

Step 2) Beta - Most members is probably familiar with continuous integration and the site will be setup in a similar fashion. beta.dotnet.org.za will always be running the latest version from Subversion. CruiseControl.NET will be monitoring the repository for commits and will automatically deploy your additions to the beta site. If the server is still online after your commit and we're happy with the addition we can move on to the next step and deploy it.

Step 3) Live - For the final step I'll configure a private CruiseControl.NET project which will allow us to make the current beta build live. This step will initially be only available to myself and later to selected other members.

Most of the first two steps are covered or in place already and I hope to have the remained ready by next week so that we can start accepting contributions.

Any other thoughts, comments, suggestions or ideas on this?

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Community Server 2007 SP1

Armand du Plessis — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 09:31:23 GMT

Last night I upgraded dotnet.org.za to Community Server 2007. Below is the complete list of the fixes and improvements from this release:

User Experience Improvements

Corrected width of modals in the Control Panel.
Updated Control Panel to hide Manage Licenses for non-admins
Updated "Default" theme comment styles to correct overflow styles.

Help text clean-up and Improvements

Fixed email template typo
Changed messaging for license restrictions on Points, IPBanning, Reporting
Missing Resource issue resolved on Blogs.aspx page.
Added XML Comments to Controls
Feature Enhancments and Bug Fixes/Updates

Updated folder line and icon URLs in the content selectors.
Updated avatar handler to support passing username on querystring to retrieve avatar
Updated ConfigurationForm to correct an issue that occurs when multiple appended/prepended tabs are defined.
Fixed issue with CA:Callback control
Fixed premature searching issue in the RelatedIndexPostList control.
Fixed searching issue where you couldn't search within a section
Fixed issue with how MailGateway stores and uses the encoding name on messages
Fixed issue with threading caused by not passing the post object when checking Reply permission for replies to a post
Fixed MailingLists object not setting the SettingsID
Fixed cs_system_SampleForum setting owner information, which throws off permission checks in MG for the admin user on the Sample Forum
Fixed: Admin & Anonymous user’s LoweredEmail was never set in CreateCommunity so some MembershipAPI lookups (FindByEmail) would never work
Fixed: Bad redirect from forum moderation “Approve & View”
Fixed: Duplicate key exception thrown for non-existent threads
Corrected rounding error when selecting colors using the ColorSelector.
Corrected russian language issues with the DateTimeSelector.
You can now approve a post that starts a thread and it will still be visible in the forum.
The mark as read button now only shows to those with permissions to view it (moderators) or thread authors whenever enable status tracking is enabled.
Changed TinyUrl HttpHandler away from using a 302 statuscode to redirect to a 301 to help SEO

Homepage Cleanup

Armand du Plessis — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 22:52:00 GMT

After having a look at the main page of the site and the relevant site overlays on Google Analytics I decided to make some changes to the home page tonight. I removed all the unnecessary links and irrelevant stats and instead just rendering a clean post list of the last 25 posts. (To remove the cached styles you might need to refresh the page in your browser)

The changes include:

Removed unused links and stats.
Dropped the Google Ads from the main page.
Reduced the forums component to a single forum for site support and issues related to this site only. The core focus of the site is on South African .NET blogs and the forums weren't really utilized. (As an alternative the Microsoft forums at http://forums.microsoft.com is a great resource for technical support, monitored by both Microsoft MVPs and Microsoft staff members a well structured question is guaranteed a quick response. Those forums will soon be folded into the new Microsoft.Communities initiative which should make it even better)
Unused links from the blogs main page and the rest of the site will be cleaned up with the 2007 upgrade.

We'll be upgrading the site to CS 2007 soon but more info on that once a date has been decided and the skin finalized.

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Site Down

Armand du Plessis — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 07:54:00 GMT

Unfortunately for reasons still unknown the site stopped responding and no requests were processed. We suspect it's a silent protest against those "Retirement Ads" that Google Ads displays on the home page every now and then but we will be looking in to it in more detail to avoid a similar situation occurring again.

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New Server

Armand du Plessis — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 07:57:00 GMT

I moved the site onto a new server this morning and while everything should be working as usual should you come across something not working please let me know over here. The old site is still online until all cached dns entries expire and all traffic is routed to the new box. Both machines is hosted at Voxrox so they just share a database until we shutdown the old site.

Two other small changes this morning includes modification of the AngryPets ReverseDOS HttpModule configuration to treat certain paths as trusted to avoid 403 (Access Denied) errors when editing existing posts (Thanks Ernst for pointing that out) and re-enabling the Community Server reporting module again.

Later this week I'll be uprading the site to the new Community Server 2007 Beta 1 that was released last week. (That is if I can decipher the impact of the new licensing options :P)

Hardware Upgrade

Armand du Plessis — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 09:25:00 GMT

Just a quick heads-up on an upcoming hardware upgrade :

We've ordered a new server (Dual Xeon/2GB RAM) from our host to replace the current server which should be operational by next week. This should address the slow response from the past couple of weeks.

The site shouldn't be offline more than 2 hours during the migration but I'll post some more details closer to the time of upgrade.

We'll also take advantage of this time to make some usability changes to the main page and blogs area and introduce a couple of enhancements and cosmetic fixes.

Performance Tuning

Armand du Plessis — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 22:08:28 GMT

We've done some performance tuning to the dotnet.org.za database which hopefully improved the general site responsiveness noticably. The server is also getting another 1GB of RAM as a late X-Mas present which should improve things further.

Google AdSense

Armand du Plessis — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 23:28:00 GMT

While I've been very hesitant before to include any form of advertising on dotnet.org.za I've decided to run some Google Ads on a trial basis for the new site. As you'll see I've tried to keep the ads to a minimum with only some textual ads on the communal sections of the site and a single 468x60 block at the bottom of individual blog posts. (The block on individual blogs will only show up in single post view and not when viewing your blogs aggregate post list)

I want to emphasise that I'm not aiming to profit from the content contributed by members but that there is some costs involved in maintaining this site and I'm hoping the Google Ads will contribute in a small way towards those expenses.

Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts on this.

Just a note on the implementation. I'm using Michael Trefry's new company Custom Community Systems' "Post Advertisement Module" to manage the ads on the site:

What is the Post Advertisement Module?
The Custom Community Systems Post Advertisement Module is a Community Server Module and Control Panel Add in that allows you to manage injection of advertisements (or essentially whatever content you like) globally for all blog posts, or individually at specific Weblogs.

Features

1.       Control Panel management or advertisements makes it easy to change on the fly.
2.       Separate advertisement settings for Web and Syndication
3.       Targeted advertisements for individual blogs.
4.       Self managed Role assignment allows you to define roles that can manage their own post advertisements.

I made a small change to limit the ads to single posts but apart from that it's one of the neatest CSModule integrations I've used. On the new user registration page I'm also using their Registration Add-In which allows new users to easily setup a new blog and gallery at registration.

Site Upgrade - I

Armand du Plessis — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 21:07:00 GMT

I've upgraded this site to Community Server 2.1 SP2 tonight. As part of the upgrade the site has been given a complete face lift by Community Server skinning guru Jaxon Rice from www.soup.co.za! And it's not just looking great, web standards compliance have also been improved significantly. (If things look a little strange you might be seeing some cached content, usually a ctrl-f5 is enough to refresh the cached files)

While almost everything is back to normal there is a couple of small outstanding items I still need to migrate as well as some minor UI tweaking to the new skin. Some of the outstanding items we're aware of are listed below. Should you notice something else please let me know by leaving a comment on this post.

CardSpace login not migrated yet - Need to do some minor tweaking over the weekend to get rid of the annoying "page contains both secure/unsecure.." messages. I'm also removing the requirement for your Infocard and user account email addresses to match.
Spam Cleanup - Over the next couple of days I'll be adding a module to clean up all old comment spam from old posts as well as put a job in place to ensure posts are kept clean spam free should the occasional spam comment slip through the CS Spam filter.
We'll make a couple of minor layout changes to address some small issues picked up during the upgrade.

Then some other changes we hope to implement over the coming few weeks :

Better support for promoting South African software articles published by users on the site.
Better promotion of the local forums to get the content levels up to a level where it's a viable local alternative to international forums.
Investigating other avenues like integrated source control to host local open source software projects on the site.
We're open to any other suggestions to improve the quality of content on the site and to make it a showcase for local software development talent.

If there's any other add-ons, suggestions or comments please let us have it. Both positive and negative comments welcome!

Thanks for all the great contributions to the site. We hope to really make 2007 a great year for dotnet.org.za.

Armand

Site Upgrade and Downtime

Armand du Plessis — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 10:54:00 GMT

Yesterday I posted that the site will be upgraded today. However the upgrade will only start tomorrow (2007/03/04) at 15h00.

Just a note that the site might be offline for a couple of hours while the upgrade is in progress.

Feed Excerpts

Armand du Plessis — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 08:45:33 GMT

As most of you have probably noticed, a couple of days back we switched the aggregate home page and blog home page back to only displaying 500 character excerpts from posts.

There’s a couple of reasons for this change:

The home page sometimes exceeded 400k which impacts negatively on page load time
It's in line with most other community blogs, i.e. http://blogs.msdn.com, http://weblogs.asp.net etc
The majority of visits to the site is via aggregators.
Better exposure for individual bloggers, where readers might in the past just read the posts on the main page they'll now click through to your blog if the post seems interesting.

Good change, bad change? Feel free to comment!