Community Server 2.1

How does Google know about the users on My Community Server site?

Jason Row — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 13:47:00 GMT

[reposted]

Every so often I like to Google my name and see what comes up (and curses to Jason Row the photographer for getting the top 2 spots today!). I then thought I'd check my wife's name to see what appears and what do you know, Google returns a result pointing to the profile page for the Community Server account that I created for her.

I haven't even told my wife about this account yet and even when I created it I don't remember making any entries in the blogs, photos, forums, or other sections of the site. And I can't find a single page that lists the users which a google spider/robot would follow to get her profile page.

I know with my new server I didn't get the Robots.txt file back up to prevent the search engines from indexing every page on my site. So, does anyone have any ideas or conspiracy theories as to how this is being done? Does google detect that I'm running Community Server and uses that info to locate more information that might not be public?

Comment from Ryan Rinaldi

"Go to your forum and check the "Most Active Users" list on the right side of the page. You'll find the link there."

Email notifications not working in Community Server? Try this ...

Jason Row — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 12:22:00 GMT

[reposted]

I realized that I wasn't getting any e-mail notifications from my blog and started to look into it this evening. I checked the cs_EmailQueue table in the CommunityServer database and noticed a long queue of backlogged messages.

So I started playing around with the settings in CS and got it to the point where the Contact Page would send a message but I still had a lot of messages in the queue that wouldn't send.

I narrowed things down to the EmailFrom colum where an e-mail address wasn't found in the text. See highlight in image below:

Once I replaced "Jason Row's Blog - Automated Email" <> with an address all was fine. The only issue is that this field would only get a properly formatted e-mail address through the Contact Page, comments would still generate the original text. I started looking for a stored procedure that I could edit to insert an addy but then I found that I hadn't filled out the Contact Info setting in the Administration section of my blog. By putting my email address there it would insert it into the text to give "Jason Row's Blog - Automated Email" <email addy>

Image of Contact Info settings

Uploading images to Community Server with Windows Live Writer

Jason Row — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 04:25:00 GMT

[reposted]

So let's see how it uploading images works. Hey! Look at all the options for working with images.

In Live Writer select the image and you can choose your border (dropshadow, photopaper, or inherit from blog), add a watermark, and even choose a transformation (b&w, sephia, emboss, sharpen, and more)

I'm not North America's favorite metrosexual software consultant nor am I a Cowboy to the waitresses in Montreal but I grabbed the first image I could find and it was one of me.

With a drop shadow -

with Photopaper and a watermark -

with a color pop transformation -

NOTE: From the comments on the original post someone asked how I got the images to upload. I used the FTP option to transfer the files to my server. Live Writer takes care of creating new files from the original sources and will upload them to your FTP server. Make sure your account can create new folders as well as new files on the server as Liver Writer attempts to create separate folders for each posting I believe. Also, when you first create an Account in Live Writer it doesn't give you the option to specify how to upload files (at least it didn't for me). You need to choose Weblog > Edit Weblog Accounts from the menu and then Edit your account. Click the Next button and on the second panel you choose your method for uploading. Damm this should be a post with images to make it clearer.

Configuring CS 2.1 to blog at the root

Jason Row — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:49:00 GMT

[reposted]

I wanted to upgrade my old blog, which was running .Text, to the new CS 2.1 beta2 candidate. Since I hadn't played with Community Server at all I hadn't realized how the paths worked for Blogs, Photos, Files, etc but I did know that I wanted to keep the URL http://jason-row.blogdns.com/blog/ for my individual blog since I've been using is for 2+ years already.

Once I did the install/uninstall/reinstall dance a few times I figured out that individual blogs are really not supported out of the box but I found Dan Bartels article CS2 Blogging at the root and I managed to get things configured quite nicely. I'm posting the highlights here as a reminder for myself.

Essentially there are 3 steps.

Step 1:

In the communityServer.config... you need to set the "defaultApplicationKey" property for blogs to be that of your single blog...

This will allow CS to use that applicaiton key if none is provided on the querystring (or in the path)

Step 2:

Next, you can remove the application key from the CS paths, by editing the "##blogdirectory##" transformer in the SiteUrls.config.... just set it to an empty string, and your applicaiton key, will now be coming from the default.. (Note the XML attributes / tags mentioned here are case senative)

Step 3:

Finally, you need to update the "location" tag for blogs in the SiteUrls.config file ... This is supported through use of a "physicalPath" attribute.

Since I wanted to use /blog/ in my URL I changed things to

Upgrading to CS 2.1 Final Release

I wasn't sure how easy this was going to be but I went with the "Copy the files in the Web folder to the root of your web site" option instead of creating a new folder and it worked out fine. I just had to repeat the steps above again.

I think there's still some wonkiness with various paths (http://jason-row.blogdns.com/blogs/ is still a valid URL) and I'm sure there's a better way to configure things but I didn't have much time to spend on this. I'm happy that my blog is back up and running so now I can post once again. Speaking of posting, I think I have to do a post on configuring BlogJet and Windows Live Writer to work with this setup, it's been a fair bit of trial and error with that as well.