Kevin Tunis

GraffitiCMS vs WordPress

Kevin Tunis — Sun, 03 May 2009 23:06:00 GMT

While WordPress has lots of super cool features this seems like a no-brainer. Its not. As I want all the cool features of WordPress but I want it built on the .NET platform. Oh there is a few options built on the .NET platform besides GraffitiCMS like Oxite and blogengine. One that stands out to me is built on Oxite is Tobin Titus site http://tobint.com/ intriguing theme, good use of putting twitter in the header of the blog. So why did I choose GraffitiCMS – this may be a ploy on words but it really is “Content Made Simple” hence the CMS on the end of Graffiti. First the built in admin page which lets you add widgets, change themes and look at usage reports is first rate. Changing themes is a snap and when Telligent gets its market place done you will be able to add more themes, widgets and add-on from within the admin page. While I started a blog on Lockergnome to use Chris Pirillo’s WicketPixie theme in hopes that the “Social Me” would provide the interactivity between social networks which may be a step in this direction, it was not what I was expecting. I have also been following what Robert Scoble is doing on his theme and what they are doing on http://building43.com. This might prove to be interesting and hopefully a site unrestricted by walls and will let you follow and carry on a conversation from any of the social networks. Right now I am using Disqus for my comments (real easy to add to GraffitCMS, see http://simpable.com/code/disqus/) and my comments are connected to Friendfeed to carry on the conversation. I have been changing themes looking for something that brings it all in -currently I am using Adonis Bitar FreshG1.0 - GraffitiCMS Theme. So let me ask – have you moved from Wordpress to GraffitiCMS or have you left GraffitiCMS and went to Wordpress or some other platform? If you have moved over to GraffitiCMS , tell me why and what are you hoping to achieve with GraffitiCMS . If you have left GraffitiCMS for another blogging platform, what is it and what are you doing with it?

Blame it on Friendfeed

Kevin Tunis — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:04:00 GMT

Okay, I am having a hard time keeping up on my blog and I’m passing the blame on Friendfeed. Why, it’s that darn real time link over on the right side between standard and best of day. Well not entirely Friendfeed as I have my twitter and other feeds on there too and I have had a lot of new followers recently – thank you all for following me on twitter and Friendfeed. So how do I make this work, I really like the idea that Scoble talked about in his post “Interactive blogging experimentation ”. I am looking at more ways to interact with the social networks from within my own blog. This is one of the reason’s I have just recently added Disqus to my blog that integrates both Facebook Connect and a “post to Friendfeed option at the bottom of my comments.

Microsoft Online Services has Some Limitations

Kevin Tunis — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:33:00 GMT

Recently I had emailed Kevin Wang to find out who I talk to about SharePoint Online. I had some questions about Microsoft Online Services that both we and our customers were asking. Kevin put me in touch with Troy Hopwood, in which he answered the following questions.

Q. Is there a way to create a public facing SharePoint Site?

A. In the current release, anonymous access is not supported. This means there is no way to create a public facing SharePoint Site with SharePoint Online. Many people have requested this so we’re definitely looking at this.

Q. Community Server SharePoint Package – I had tried to install CommunityServerSPDeploy.wsp into SharePoint Online. I than tried to add/build some of the web parts; this also did not work. I can see a benefit to hosting applications like Community Server Evolution in a cloud. Right now I am seeing some of the same issues when we hosted SharePoint on Windows Terminal Services (in fact this looks to be the same). Any ideas on how we could possibly do this? I think for SharePoint to truly be a service in the cloud there is going to have to be more scalability. I know its coming and there is a lot of work to be done.

Also take a look at these conversations on twitter.com

http://www.tweet2tweet.com/lliu/tunis/

http://www.tweet2tweet.com/joeloleson/tunis/

A. SharePoint Online does not support deploying custom code. This means solutions, web parts, coded workflows, etc. Again, this is something that we’re looking at.

Q. Exchange – in Exchange Online “Documents” go to the “Open Location”. It says “Type the address of the Windows SharePoint Services server or Windows file share to open:” If I put the url assign to you for your SharePoint Online site in here, this does not work. What do you use to make this work?

A. For this, I assume you are talking about the documents tab on the Outlook Web Access client? I just tried to open a location using a SharePoint Online site and was not able to get it working either. I am not familiar with this feature and whether or not it should be supported so I’ll pass this along to a few other people and see what I can find out.

Live Streaming with Windows Mobile 6

Kevin Tunis — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:46:00 GMT

Qik.com for Window is in alpha and I have been testing it on a HTC PPC 6800 . I have brought these issues up with Roy Bhaskar in emails and twitter: first the application is only broadcasting the audio part and not the video; second, it is not broadcasting to my profile. I had used Qik on a N95 test phone from Westlink Communications and really like the way it broadcast. But what I wanted is something that runs on Windows Mobile. This brings me to my post Live Streaming with Windows Mobile at Windows Mobile Connection where Bill Fisher has offered some great suggestions. I am currently looking at Inca X and from this video Live Media GPS looks great. I will let you know more about it after I get it downloaded. Have I given up on Qik, no, I still think they have one of the better applications out there.

Buying the ultimate video production PC from Dell

Kevin Tunis — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:12:00 GMT

In making the decision to buy a PC that could be used for showing video from the PC to the TV and also bringing the TV to the PC, the first choice was a XPS 420 taking full advantage of Windows Media Center. The goal is to be able to create 64 bit applications with Visual Studio 2008. The other objective is to purchase this with 4 GB of memory and later add 4 GB more. So this meant ordering it with Windows Vista 64bit an option that was not available on the XPS 420.

After a few tweet with @LionelatDell and emails with my sales rep mo_peterson@dell.com , it was decided that we order out the Precision T3400 with a compatible Nividia card that is similar to what the XPS 420 has. Again we were assured that we would have the same experience as we would with the XPS 420. Since we received the Precision t 3400 last week, we installed the audio tuning card sent separately, a TV Wonder HD 650 PCIe Combo TV Tuner. But we could not find a way go from the PC to the TV which should have been on the video card. Expecting supreme video, the card we have has one output and uses a cable splitter to go to the two monitors; this card is a NIVIDIA NVS 290 unlike the one that is on the XPS 420 which is a ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO 128MB. On this machine we are also running; a Logitech 9000 for streaming and Skype and Maxtor hard drives on USB this is creating a issue. When we install the Logitech 9000 cam, it knocks out the hard drives; if you unplug the drives, install the Logitech 9000 and plug in the hard drive, it knocks out the Logitech 9000.

We have Dell support coming out on Wednesday, June 18 2008 to take a look at this to see what can be done. We also notice that the power supply is 375W; shouldn’t this be higher running the two monitors plus TV and the hard drives? Your thoughts -suggestions or do you use Windows Media Center or something else to watch videos, internet TV from your PC on your TV. If so, let’s discuss it over on http://twitter.com/tunis or http://friendfeed.com/kevintunis

Revisiting the Graffiti CMS Theme

Kevin Tunis — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 22:33:00 GMT

After several attempts to start from scratch on the Graffiti CMS theme, I opted to modify the “Gulf Coasting” theme from Kevin Harder. Looking to make this theme more “social”, I would like to find a way to break down the walled gardens of the social networks and make my own site the principal that I work from. Based on an article I wrote back in 2003, I still feel that each person should have an application similar to instant messaging unlike the browsers we have today that you will access using a mobile or desktop device. Within this application you will be able to add your video, word processor, spreadsheet and you should be able to have conversations with others at random. Your data will be stored in offsite knowledge databases that will have the capacity to transfer video/audio to text to make these accessible in search. This is one of the reasons I have been looking at Silverlight; after some testing I think I can make it determine which video application I am on live: Ustream or Qik and it will show it on the site. I have also been looking at Windows Live Messenger as I can add it to the site to emulate the instant messenger experience through some workarounds; this lets me “tweet” to/from Twitter though sometimes this conversation is one sided which means it still needs some work. I am also looking for a widget that works with Graffiti CMS that is similar to Chris Pirillo’s “Social Me” page http://chris.pirillo.com/social-me/. Anyway this is an update on what I have been doing on the site using Graffiti CMS and this is very much a work-in-progress.

30 years in the making…

Kevin Tunis — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 21:06:00 GMT

I was to graduate in 1977, in which school was hard for me. Let me go back to grade school in Satanta, Kansas, I was always having issues with reading and basic math and concentration on study was difficult. At the age of 10 or 11 (I am not sure as dates and times are still difficult even today), teachers said that I had dyslexia. It was at this time my parents found Calvert’s Academy, a school for dyslexia in Albuquerque, New Mexico; this school was named after it founder, James Calvert.. Being in a rural area at that time, Satanta Kansas grade school was not capable to handle or train dyslexia students as it is today. After 1977 I did take some college classes though I did not have a high school diploma. I simply told the colleges I was not concerned with the credits and they let me take the classes with the acknowledgment that I would not get any credits. Now let me bring you forward to 2006, while driving down the road I heard a advertisement on the radio about getting a high school diploma, not a GED, but a diploma. So I stopped and wrote down the phone number and the contacts name - Sublette Community Learning Center. After calling Irene Perez, I signed up to get my diploma on-line through Southwest Plains Regional Service Center. Though it took me two years, the first year was with Bill Nichols and the second year Tamina Fromme took over. I was actually done in December 2007 but graduation wasn’t till May. It took me 30 years but I did it and on May 11, 2008, I received my High School Diploma!

New Graffiti CMS Theme

Kevin Tunis — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 18:05:00 GMT

After several attempts to get the theme the way I wanted. I emailed Scott Watermasysk in which he replied that it was the CSS I was working on. I finally ended up deleting the theme I was working on as it simply was not responding at all. I did however get my theme to basically look like I wanted by modifying the theme that Rich Mercer ported from Free CSS Templates designed by NodeThirtyThree. In retrospect I am finding it seems easier to convert or port a theme to Graffiti.

Some of the items that still need work;

After you click on a post the title is not linked and shows up as gray in color supposed to be white
Need a RSS icon or text to link to my feeds
Sort order of my feed needs to be reversed – newest to the oldest

Creating a Graffiti Theme from Scratch

Kevin Tunis — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:34:00 GMT

This the second in a series for Graffiti CMS (graffiticms.com); after migrating my blog from Community Server to Graffiti CMS, I decided to create a theme from scratch instead of using the ones that are available or converting a WordPress theme. I thought I would start by going over to Visual Studio and create the theme there so I can get the look I wanted. My general idea is that I want both the left and right side bar on the left side of my content so I can take advantage of Graffiti’s widgets. I have managed to do this with one of the prepackaged themes that came with Graffiti – so I kind of got an idea of how to do that. First I just wanted to show the title and make it a link back for home – here is the basic idea http://www.screencast.com/t/a1Wj8bii . Now here is where I ran into some issues with CSS, when copied the html I had to make some changes. Below are the style.css page and the view layout.view page that Graffiti uses. When using the html the page looks like I want it with the title position but in the layout.view page, the title is not in the location I wanted; it is in the top left and it seem that no matter what changes I make it does not affect the title. I have emailed this to Graffiti-Beta@Telligent.com and I am moving this over to the forums http://support.graffiticms.com/p/104/305.aspx#305 I will keep you updated here. I’m sure this is something simple and the guys at Teligent can help me get my thoughts around this.

Style.css

body

{

margin: 0px;

background-color: #000000;

font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

font-size: medium;

font-weight: normal;

color: #FFFFFF;

}

#header

{

margin: 0px;

height: 150px;

}

#logo

{

margin: 40px 50px 10px 50px;

font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

font-size: x-large;

color: #FFFFFF;

}

Layout.view

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<head>

<title>$title</title>

$macros.Style("style.css","screen")

$macros.Head()

</head>

<body>

<a href="$urls.Home" title="$data.Site.Title">$data.Site.Title</a>

</div>

</body>

</html>

Graffiti CMS – Migrating your post from a Community Server Database

Kevin Tunis — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 20:14:00 GMT

After downloading GraffitiCMS, I had decided that I would like to keep my post from Community Server blog.

Backup your Community Server SQL Database (just in case)

Create a new SQL database for your Graffiti site

Run the SQL Query's - Graffiti_SQL_Schema.sql and Graffiti_SQL_Data.sql in this order

Go to _config/settings.config file and change the AppSetting Key "DataBuddy::Provider" value to "DataBuddy.SQLDataProvider

Download and install Jayme Davis alpha migration tool http://ndepth.net/blog/graffiti-beta-is-launched

Copied the connectionString from my Community Server connectionString.config file and pasted into the Connection String field; then entered my Application Key and User Name. After you press the get data button you should be able to select all your posts or just the ones you want to imported into your Grafitti blog from your Community Server blog.