Ronney Black dot Com

Today all is well with IhostAsp.net and I.  It seems that my hosting package does not allow for multiple versions of dot net in the same domain.  The version of Dasblog which I was trying to install throouhh their control panel runs under dot net 1.1 and my domain is running under 2.  No big deal since I have learned how to use Dot Net Nuke's blog.  I recently spoke with tech support for the first time and they were really helpful. Thumbs up for IhostAsp.net  - a very good deal for nine bucks a month. I'm starting to move more domains to them. 

I have been using  easycgi for the last few years and their plans are reasonable.  But when they go down they are really down, nothing works. And that's been happening more than I like.  So far the all-time best web hosting company has been ORCS Web. They are fast - really fast,  and tech support is right now.  PowerDNN is almost as fast as ORCS Web and they specialize in dot net nuke hosting. Tony Valenti, the main man at PowerDNN is active in the Dot Net Nuke community and seems to really know DNN. But V recently pointed out what may be false advertising on their part.

I have a secondary portal at PowerDNN which is configured as a parent portal under my main DNN account. When I experienced difficulty with the images for the secondary portal not loading I contacted tech support only to be told that they don't offer support for secondary portals ! - WHOA, What was that ?  V went ballistic and suggested we contact the FTC and file a claim of false advertising. While I wouldn't go that far,  I plan to raise the issue in the future. For now, I am still moving domains to IhostAsp.net.  And besides, they have home field advantage, being located in the Cleveland area is always a plus in my book.

Wow - after giving them a nod of approval I may have to take it back - I posted a support ticket and apparently it was not read.  More later

Terry Buttram's funeral was today.  We worked together at the Cummings and Davis Funeral Home.   Terry, a fellow vietnam veteran, accidentally drove his motorcyle into the back of a parked semi. Since he was a member of the American Legion his post provided a fitting farewell to a distinguished and decorated veteran. Part of the farewell service allowed veterans to line up and give a final salute to a fallen comrade. As it turned out, almost every man in the church was a veteran, so the line was long .

Later the family let it be known that the war changed Terry in a big way.  And how could it not have.  Terry, a smart  and sensitive young  man, baptised and christian, was taken to the jungles of Vietnam and  assigned as a door gunner on a helicoptor.  Who knows what horrors he witnessed during his twenty-seven combat missions.  We never talked about our war experiences -  it's better not to wake up the dragon.  But, as Reverend Rogers so eloquently said, "Terry's war is over now".

Last night I found that I chould change the fckeditor skin  - that helped with the visibility of the icons.  A recent read od the fckeditor forum at the dnn site let me know that fck.css is the place to control fck's stylings - Maybe I can get it to stop screwing around with my html.

This morning I went over Lee Sykes videos on membership and the user profile. Now all I have to do is find a way to display / expose the underlying tables.  Maybe xmod or xlist will help me with this, It would be real cool if someone had a view of the user profile....

It would really please me to have a replacement set of images for the fckeditor toolbar since it seems we aree stuck with it. Dig this young ones - contrast is good. It lets more people easily see your stuff. Lack of contrast may seem to be cool but it sucks for those of us who are visually challenged. So fckeditor needs anoter set of toolbar images - with hight contrast.  FTB was great about that.

And now for DNN membership - I ned a module that will allow me to use an existing database with DNN - Connect/import my existing names to DNN membership - and leave the connection in place. I manage membership lists outside of DNN and will continue to do so - and I don't want to write a dnn module to do that for me - somebody must have done this and done it right.

Finally, at least for today, we need a newsletter module that does not require admin privilieges and that will use the aforementioned membership module..... Then DNN would be more cool.

So DNN blogs work moderately well - I'm still hung up on the seperation between summary and blog - I looked around for a wordpress installation to test and found one at my ihostasp.net account - along with dasblag and a gazillion other apps to fiddle about with.  It seems the ihostasp.net account is a great deal for $8.95 a month.  Multiple domains and sub domains - easy to use control panel and dot net nuke installed while you wait.

DNN is not bad  JUst have to wrap my mind around this goofy fckeditor - that's two days of work in itself and I'm reluctant to put things on hold for that. We'll see -

Meanwhile John is working his way through the VPN server on Ubuntu - A few weeks ago I prepared to configure Bigdaddy, My Toshiba portable dual boot ubuntu and xp pro.  John suggested that I try the vmware player and ubintu application.  Man was i ever happy with that hook up.  In a few hours, much of which was spent waitng for downloads, I had a fully functional linux system along with lamp, vi, ed, grep, samba,- I mean all the goodies. That was a goood night. And it got better when I popped up a terminal session and reacquainted myself with the shell commands.

With so many good vibes floating around I had a linux to the rescue moment. One of my clients is running a win2k3 server. I set up a vpn connection to the box but it has proven unstable. So I thought - how abount letting a tiny vmware linux vpn application run the vpn for us. Well that may or may not be suh a great idea John is fighting his way through it.  If anyone has any insight step right up weigh in.

For those of you who don't know, John Rosado operates Cleveland Pc Repair and is opening a new office on Bridge Road here in the next few weeks. I think the grand opening is November 5.  John has been handling my PC repair and network configuration work for the last seven months or so and I have been really please with his work.

I jusrt received a lengthly email from the support desk at Ihostasp.net - they explained that they provide the dasblog apllication install feature as part of a package thet they purchase from another vendor and consequenlty do not offer support for that or any of the other nineteen or so applications offered, while a little disapointed I am okay with that - what can I expect for $8.95 a month.   In any event dasblog fell off the radar after I have the DNN blog working the way I want.

I just talked with John over at Cleveland PC Repair Time Warner dropped off his connecting equipment and he has his routers routing. It's only a matter fo days before he can start offering his mix of services.

In my search for a blog I found that Dot Net Nuke - my current portal framework - includes a blog module which I like. The major problem I had with it was it's default method of creating a summary section seperate from the blog section.  Viewing a blog created in that fashion required that the user click a link to se the entire blog.  Not only was this a pain but also prevented search engines from capturing significant portions of the blog entry.

So a quick review of dnn blog furms pointed out that setting the limit blog summary to 999999  and entering the entire blog in the blog section while leaving the summary section yields the desired result. One fat entry with no summary. All is good in Euclid.