RTur.net

Updater for BlogEngine 2.8

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:59:00 -0500

BlogEngine.NET 2.8 was just released to the public, and if you feel lazy going through the steps to upgrade, here is how to do it easier. Download little utility from the link in the end of this post, watch short video with example how it works and you should be able to upgrade without breaking a sweat. One thing that is not mentioned in the video is that this utility if it finds issue it will try to fix it and log this into log.txt in the same directory where you run it. You might want to check this log file to make sure it did a correction properly.

BeUpdater.zip (7.45 kb)

Woopra Update

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:50:00 -0500

This real-time customer analytics service just released public beta 8.0 and I tested it with BlogEngine.NET to make sure they still work great together. If you a fan of statistics then you might like it a lot, this service provides functionality similar to Google Analytics with a stress on real-time activity. It is done very well and works great, and with Google dropping services (yep, I’m going to miss Reader) it is not a bad idea to have a plan “B”. I would not recommend to run both at the same time, this might generate too many service calls – although I did it for some time without noticeable downsides. The way it works you create account with Woopra and they give you a script that you add to your admin/settings/custom code/trailing scripts. Then you just go to Woopra site and log in into your dashboard.

Dashboard provides usual information about your visitors, showing those reading posts right now and giving charts and graphs you’d expect from decent analytics service. It is free for 30,000 monthly “activities” and if you need more than that you probably can afford to pay for more calls and some extra niceties.

Overall it looks pretty impressive and if you into this kind of things at least give it a try, took me just few minutes to get it up and running.

Jcarousel extension for BlogEngine

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 20:05:00 -0500

This new extension for BlogEngine will let you save images for multiple albums and display any album in carousel-like fashion in your posts and pages using jCarousel plugin for jQuery. It is light-weight and pretty easy to use. I reused code from NivoSlider as foundation, making few improvements and adding ability to create thumbnail images on the fly. You install it from dnbegallery.org and access extension UI under admin/appearance where you should see "Jcarousel" in the menu list in the right side-bar. There you can upload images. To display album on the page as in this post, you add "CAROUSEL:AlbumName" to the post, substituting quotes with square brackets.

[CAROUSEL:Album1]