As you may or may not be aware, I am a moderator on the Bytes Technology Forums, overseeing classic ASP forums but kicking around other areas like HTML/CSS, JavaScript/AJAX, SQL Server, Access, and .NET forums - basically a bit of a jack-of-all trades. Recently the mod team has been discussing a desktop assistant for drafting and composing posts from a background app that sits dormant in your status bar until you decide you want to use it. My online colleague insertAlias (aka Curtis) has just finished...

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I'm about to set up a new website, powered by DotNetNuke (my favourite CMS at the moment, mainly because it's free), and I want to install a Counter-Strike game server onto the same machine. I also want a little module that will show visitors to my site how many people are logged onto the CS server and some basic stats. Sounds simple right? The problem is that when Counter-Strike server is installed, the database name is generated at random. So I can't create a connection string that points to a...

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Hi guys, Well, the portfolio page has changed a bit! I've added this really cool Javascript effect known as FancyZoom, and extended to work with Prototype and Scriptaculous. As an aside, DotNetNuke has native compatibility with two Javascript/AJAX frameworks - Project Atlas (or ASP.NET AJAX) and Prototype, but can't be made to work with any other frameworks like Mootools, jQuery and so on. Funky little way of saving space on the page with a nice UI effect. Only downside is no AJAX, but DNN works...

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If this posts, then I've successfully installed a very funky little module on the DotNetNuke framework, called metaPost, which provides Metaweblog API functionality to the DotNetNuke Blog module! It means that I can use Windows Live Writer, or even Microsoft Word, to post direct to my blog(s)! Anyone running a blog on DNN needs to give this module a try, at least until the DotNetNuke core team build Metaweblog API functionality into the Blog module (which is planned as part of a future release, but...

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One word - don't. I have just done the upgrade myself (from 4.8.4 to 4.9.0) to find that a lot of functionality has changed - core underlying cache module (and individual per-module cache controls), some URL rewriting stuff has been fixed (I am writing a URL rewriter for DotNetNuke, but in the meantime am using the free Friendly URL Rewriter by Bruce Chapman of iFinity Solutions, OZ. The new default skin is much nicer though - certainly helps with inspiring one's own ideas. Speaking of which, what...

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benjaminhowarth.com is finally live!

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