J-O Eriksson

My blog has moved!

joeriksson — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 09:47:00 GMT

As from today, no new posts will be written here at http://weblogs.asp.net/joeriksson. My blog has moved to:

Please change any bookmarks you might have, and also your RSS subscriptions.I will try to redirect current RSS links to the new ones with the help of the External Feed URL.

This blog will continue to exist here just for reference, in case I or someone else wants to read some of the posts again. Articles from June 30 and forwarded, have been synced over to joeriksson.com as well, but without comments.

Tomorrow the first original joeriksson.com post will be published at the new address.

If you experience any problems witht this move (accessing the site, RSS feeds etc), please let me know.

Screencast: Batch import photos into a gallery

joeriksson — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 07:43:00 GMT

In today's screencast I want to show you another, in the line of, what I call "hidden" features of Community Server. Namely the import function in a photo gallery. IMO it's not located in a place where you might expect it to be. You will find it under the 'Advanced Photo Settings' in the control panel of a gallery. I believe it should go under Common Tasks and/or Manage Content. It would be more logical, and easier to find.

Although the screencast is recorded with CS 2.1 Beta 1, this function was also in CS 2.0 (at the same location). I believe this is a feature that comes all the way from the preceding nGallery application, it was present there as well in very similar appearence. .

So what can you do with it? Well, you can upload a batch of photos (for example via FTP) to your web, into the folder created for the gallery you want to import pictures to. Then, as you can see in the screenshot above, you can import them either to the root of the gallery, or to a sub gallery. This is of course much faster than uploading the pictures one by one if you have a lot of pictures to upload at once.

The import job is a so called CSJob in CS. It is within the same thread as most other jobs by default, and it's interval is by default set to 15 minutes. So have patience if your photos doesn't show up at once after you've pressed import. The interval can be changed, but be aware of the side effects on other jobs and your site's performance if you do that.

OK, enough talk, let's roll up, roll up for the Magical Mystery Tour, step right this way!

Watch the screencast (Flash, opens in a new window)

Create a new CS skin in 5 minutes

joeriksson — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 07:35:00 GMT

This article is available at my new web at: http://joeriksson.com/archive/2006/07/26/Create-a-new-CS-skin-in-5-minutes.aspx

My blog is moving on 1st of August

joeriksson — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 07:48:00 GMT

I am planning to move from weblogs.asp.net to my own domain - joeriksson.com - on the first of august. Not because I am in any way dissatisfied with having been here at weblogs.asp.net. It has been a really good home. But it's more because I want to be able to use more features and add-ons that currently is provided here, and I cannot configure the installation here myself. :-)

So the new home will be hosted by ASPnix, where Rick Reszler has been so kind and made a home for all CSMVPs (I believe most of them already lives there).

One of the new features that will be added to the blog with that move is a media library (where you will easily browse through all the screencasts I have produced, and will produce). I will also use Ken's Lighbox implementation for viewing pictures. We will see what more it can bring.

For those of you that are reading this through your RSS reader or similar, I will try to redirect the RSS link (with the External Feed URL feature of CS 2.1), so hopefully you won't have to do anything. But in time it could be good if you switched to the new RSS link. This blog will still be here for a while, but the last post will just be a reference to the new blog at joeriksson.com.

Unfortuneatly, I probably won't be able to bring all comments with me to the new blog, but most of the posts are already moved with CS 2.1's blog mirroring feature.

So until August first, I'll go on posting here as usual.

Views statistics of your blog

joeriksson — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 07:31:00 GMT

Did you ever wonder what the statistics of views for your blog posts really mean?

Well, I did, and I posted a question about it in the forums of CS.org. After a while, I got a good explanation from Kevin Harder (Community Server Team Member). He explained it liked this:

"Generally speaking, "Views" is the number of times somone viewed a post on the web via a browser, and "AggViews" is the number of times someone viewed the post via the RSS and Atom feeds.
More specifically, the web view count is only updated in the EntryView control. This is displayed when you are viewing a single post. If you are viewing a list of posts, such as on the blog home page, the view counts of the posts are not updated.
The AggViews works by embedding an "AggBug" invisible image into each post in the RSS/Atom feeds. When someone views the posts in a feed reader that allows images, the image pionts back to a handler on your CS site that updates the AggView count for that post."

Adding to that, if you look at the number of views for each post, you can see that it is a link. The link leads you to a page which shows referrals to that particluar post. That page also provides you with a drop down box so you can look at referrals to other posts you have made.

Fun with snippets: Quote blocks in your blog posts

joeriksson — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 07:36:00 GMT

Friday and screencast time again! This time on a feature some have talked about before. Dave Burke has some excellent tips for using them here, Adonis Bitar talks about how he uses them. I am talking about Text Parts, or as they seems to be called now, "Snippets".

If I would give a quick overview explanation of what they are, I would say they are shortcuts to inserting text snippets into your blog posts. The text could be just text, or, as Dave showed in his article above, HTML snippets. You create a snippet by giving it a name, which will be the shortcut you use later, you give the snippet a link and/or some text to replace the shortcut with.

When you want to use the snippet (or shortcut) in a blog post you just type it within brackets (i.e [MySnippet]) and when you submit the post the snippet/shortcut is replaced with the link and/or text to replace with. Knowing that, you could probably see that there are numerous areas in which they could be used. You could use it for adding text or HTML that you use a lot in your posting, or for example use the Text Part framework in developing a CSModule giving the user a special snippet which gives instruction to your CSModule, and provides much more advanced uses of the snippets.

In todays screencast, I want to show you just one area that I myself just started to use snippets for. I realized that there are no quotes function in the blogs like there are in the forums. You know, where you can put a quote in a block with different formatting so it is easy to recognize as a quote. So I made to two snippets for that, one start quote and one end quote. Sit down in your favorite chair with a freshly brewed cup of coffe, relax, and have a look. :-)

Wacth the screencast (Flash, opens in a new window)

CS2: Skinning: Change the title image of your blog without access to the CSS file

joeriksson — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 06:51:00 GMT

I'd never have thought I'd write an article about skinning. I am not very good at CSS. But sometimes you learn when you have to, although what I'll talk about in this article is in no way anything complicated.

In Community Server you know you can change the skin of your blog to a skin that's installed at the CS site where the blog is. But sometimes you might want to change how that skin looks, even if most of it looks really good. If you're at for example weblogs.asp.net or some other CS hosted blog site, you can't do that since you don't have access to the files of the skin. But CS has a workaround for that called CSS Overrides. With that function, as you can hear from the name, you can override what's in the original stylesheet for the skin you are using. So of course, you need some way to figure out what the name of the CSS classes are that you want to modify. But mostly, the skins are available to download for free in some way.

In my case I wanted to chage the header picture for the Paperclip theme. I looked in the CSS file for it and found the class was named 'masthead' with that information I could change the header picture by overriding the masthead class's background-image as shown in the picture below.

Now it's good if your new image has about the same dimensions as the original one, at least in width.

Moving your blog to Community Server 2.1

joeriksson — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 07:33:00 GMT

How do you move your blog to Community Server 2.1? Well, of course it depends on what blog you're on today. When I started thinking about this I stumbeled on a BlogML project of Keyvan which he mentiones in this post.

His own words about the tool from the readme:

"This control helps you to import your blog content from another blogging tool which supports BlogML standard to CommunityServer 2.0 or vice versa."

I am not sure if it will work for CS 2.1 as well. Check it out.

But another way to do this, hit me when I was sitting and playing with the new blog mirror functionality in CS 2.1 (Control Panel - Administration - Blogs - Blogs - Mirrors button for your blog). Of course, I could create my new blog on my CS 2.1 site, and add a mirror for my old site, let it replicate and then remove the mirror. So if the functionality provided by the blog mirroring is enough for you, you'll have a built-in blog migrator in CS 2.1. Pretty cool!

Blog mirror functionality in Community Server 2.1

Now, you won't get any comments with you, some of the links will still point back to your old site etc. But there might be reasons you want to keep your old blog for a while anyway. You might have RSS subscribers that you don't want to recieve errors if they haven't had time to change their links for example.

In any case for me it was quite enough to use the mirroring to move my blog. and this could be used for, I guess, any blog that has a RSS feed, which makes it very useful for a migration tool on top of what is was meant to be used for.

When it comes to moving your RSS readers over to your new link, you could use the new External Feed URL feature and redriect your readers to your new site automagically. I haven't yet tested that myself though.

External Feed URL for syndication

CS2: Modifying José Lemas modifications of videos.aspx

joeriksson — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 07:24:00 GMT

In June I talked about having a videogallery in Community Server. I referenced an article by José Lema where he talks about the videos.aspx and how to modify that file to get a more Google-like videgallery.

Today I implemented a videolibrary on my Community Server Sweden site. But since the videos/screencasts I do is 800 x 600 they don't fit in the new CS 2.1 skin within a forums post (José's modification links to the respective forums post for each video). The video gets truncated. So what I wanted to do, was to instead link directly to the video/screencast file itself, and also to open the video in a new window. Also I wanted to create a new menu button for my video gallery, that also became the selected button when I went to that page.

So what I did, was to first get the videos.aspx the way I wanted. To do that I modified José's modification in the following ways. (Red text shows the parts I changed)

First, change the row:

<a href="<%# Globals.GetSiteUrls().Post((int)DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "PostID")) %> "><img src="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "VideoImageUrl") %>" width="200" height="150" border="0" /></a>

<a href="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "VideoUrl") %>" target="_new"><img src="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "VideoImageUrl") %>" width="200" height="150" border="0" /></a>

Then change:

<a href="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "VideoUrl") %>" target="_new"><%# Formatter.CheckStringLength(DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "Subject").ToString(), 35) %></a>

That's it! Now a click on the video thumbnail or the video title in the video galleri will open the video in a new window.

As for the menu button, that was really easy. Just followed the instructions from Dave Burke's excellent article in the subject. The results can be seen in the picture below. Yes the site shows in a strange language......it's swedish.

Click the picture to view it in larger scale. On the flickr page click 'All sizes'.

View the video gallery live!

CS2: Community Server 2.1 Beta 1 is released!

joeriksson — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 08:22:00 GMT

I guess most of you already know, but I thought it was worth mentioning again. After have been eagerly waiting, like children at christmas waiting for their christmas gifts, Community Server 2.1 Beta 1 is now available for download. Check Rob's announcement!

Some of the new features can be found in that announcement. Here at weblogs.asp.net we have been spoiled with running 2.1 for a while back now, and it looks really good even under the surface IMO. So there'll be much more to blog about as we go forward.

CS2: Screencast: Thread Status Tracking in Forums

joeriksson — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 07:05:00 GMT

In todays screencast I show you how to enable Thread Status Tracking in Community Server, and also enable it for a particular forum. Thread Status Tracking (TST) could be useful for i.e. a support forum where you want to be able to rapidly see which questions/issues are not yet solved and take action on those. Click on the picture below, or the link beneath it to watch the screencast.

Watch the screencast (Flash, opens in a new window)

Also, I promised in my monday post to talk about a solution that you could make with this function together with the features that the Email Gateway (EG) brings to Community Server Forums.

A simple support system on CS with Email enabled forums and Thread Status Tracking

Let's say you want to setup a customer support service for your customer. In some scenarios there could be reasons where you don't want the customers to see each others posts. They might be giving you some info about their environment under some NDA agreement etc. You could probably do some code to make users only see their own posts in the forum, but with the solution I am talking about you don't have to write a single line of code.

In the scenario I am describing, you might decide to enable on one hand an open support forum for everyone, and an e-mail support service for paying customers. So you set up an internal CS on your intranet, install EG, and configure a forum to recieve e-mails sent to support AT mydomainname.com. Since the paying customers are registered in someway, you have created and configured accounts (enabled notifications etc) for them in the support system.

The customers sends their support requests by e-mail, which ends up in the internal support forum as a post with a Thread Status 'Unresloved'. A technician replies in the forum to the post, which then gets sent to the customer by e-mail. The customer and support tech, continues their conversation in this way until the issue is solved.

After using this system for a while it becomes a knowledge base which the technicans can search for earlier answers to questions. If tagging is used they could also find similar issues easily by navigating by tags.

If I understand the Passive Mode of the forum mailing list, you have to enable that for the above to work, since you don't want to have all replies sent to everybody, just to the one that started the thread.

CS2: CSModules: Qgyen.Lightbox v2.0.60712 released!!

joeriksson — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 18:13:00 GMT

The CSModule I talked about yesterday is available for download from Ken's blog!

I am downloading and installing as I write. [8-|]

CS2: CSModules: CSModule implementation of Lightbox JS

joeriksson — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 07:26:00 GMT

A CSModule that I've used myself on a couple of sites, but haven't seen much written about is Ken Robertson's CSModule implementation of the Lightbox JS image overlay scripts.

This module enables you to insert thumbnails of your pictures in for example your blog posts by a specific text part. When viewing this thumbnail in a blog or a forum, and you click on it, it shows a larger image in the middle of the browser window, and the rest of the web page gets darker. I don't know if that's a good explanation for it, but let me instead show it with a screenshot:

You can also try it and se for yourself what it looks like here. When you've installed the CSModule, you just use the text part and give it the ID of a picture in your CS Photo gallery.

It would be cool to have a CSModule like this, that could show pictures from i.e. your Flickr account, and also to be able to determine what size it shows the expanded picture as.

CS2: E-mail subscriptions for forums with E-mail Gateway

joeriksson — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 07:31:00 GMT

Today on a topic that I haven't seen that much written on. There was a new whitepaper the other day on this topic, and there's been some posts about the E-mail Gateway (EG). But from what I have seen, mostly together with the blog by e-mail feature.

What I wanted to talk about in this post is what the EG brings to the Forums of Community Server.

First just a brief mention on how to e-mail enable a forum. After you correctly have installed the EG and installed the license for it, there is a new TAB in the forums settings called 'Mailing List'. In CS 2.0 you get there by Control Panel -> Administration -> Forums -> Forums -> Click on the forum name -> Choose the 'Mailing List' TAB.

On that TAB you should see this:

To enable e-mail for the forum click in 'Yes', provide a name for the mailing list which will show up in mails sent from that forum, and also type in an e-mail address that you want the forum to have. You can also set a Footer that will be sent in each e-mail coming from that forum. I won't go into the passive mode in this post. If you want to know more about that let me know.

After these actions your forum is e-mail enabled, and when you now go into that forum you will se an 'Email Available' image in the lower right of the forum page.

When you click that image (not the one above in this post if you tried that) it will take you to the E-mail Subscriptions page for that forum.

If you check the checkbox on that page, and then click on save, you will get all new posts in that forum to the e-mail address that you registered at the forum with.

But that's far from all. You can now also e-mail your posts to that forum, as long as you send the e-mails from your registered e-mail address to the address you created on the 'Mailing List' TAB above. For example you can start a new thread by just sending an e-mail. Or you can reply to an e-mail notification you got from that forum, and it will show up as an answer in the respective thread.

IMO, this is a a great feature of CS 2.0, on which you also could easily build upon for different purposes. On friday I will try to give you an example of a solution that could be made on top of this feature together with another CS feature without writing any code.

See there, I made a cliff hanger! Now you just have to read my post on friday, and you won't be able to sleep for the whole week ;-)

CS2: Screencast: Embedding a video in a forum post

joeriksson — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 06:43:00 GMT

On wednesday I talked about post attachements, and referred to a post by Keyvan Nayyeri on how to do attachements programatically. Today I thought I'd talk about attaching a video to your forum posts, which can be played right in the post itself. It's not really attaching a video to a post, it's more like embedding a player which plays a video located at a different location.

Community Server got this built-in and out of the box. It looks something like this:

Sorry for the typo in the picture and in the screencast. Discovered it when I had finished it all. :-)

Watch the screencast! (Flash, opens in a new window)