I accepted a position with Sogeti in Cleveland as the Microsoft Practice Lead. Sogeti is a subsidiary of Cap Gemini with locations all over the world. I'll be starting on the 26th of this month.

It will be great taking a break from the corporate world and going into consulting. Another great aspect is being able to focus on Microsoft solutions.

So if you're in the Cleveland, OH area, look me up.

I'm at CodeMash in sunny Sandusky, OH... ...sunny yes, 33 degrees to go along with it.

CodeMash has a full venue of presentations covering a wide variety of topics. It's a good size event for the area.

Here's some pics from CodeMash in Sandusky, OH:

Joe Brinkman (DotNetNuke) and Me (Pat Santry)

Two great ASP.NET promoters in NW Ohio.  Read More »

I updated the DNN framework to DNN 4.4.0 last night. I was a bit worried since this was my first upgrade using an outside hosting provider. I currently use Server Intellect and have no problems with their support, so I figured I could upgrade and if there were a problem drop them a note.

The upgrade went very smooth, no issues were encountered. This version is known as the performance version and is significant. It includes compression, white space removal, as well as some code rewrites to reduce the size of the binary. All in all I'm pretty impressed with this new version, performance improvements were the goal of this release, and it looks like that's what they did. Good work DNN team!

 CodeMash is coming next week in Sandusky, Ohio. I'll be there:

CodeMash

If you're going to be there drop me a note webmaster[@]wwwcoder.com.

The RedmondGadgets.com site hit a major milestone today. Google has been busy updating their PR database this week, and RedmondGadgets.com finally got an initial page rank of 5. A PR of 5 is very good for a site that is only about 2 months old. This would mostly be due to aggressive marketing of the site as well as an article writing campaign. This site has been growing in traffic and receives about 300+ visitors per day. Of course this is short of the 4000+ received by my other site WWWCoder.com, but it's early.

I have been signed up for a while. About a year ago someone sent me an invitation to LinkedIn.com. I never used, but recently I started looking into the site again and adding some of my contacts.

For those who don't know, LinkedIn is an online networking tool for professionals. You can look folks up who work in the same area, industry, skills, or whatever keywords may be in their profile. It's pretty interesting to do keyword searches and see who gets displayed. After looking through a couple contacts in my contact list, I noticed that many are in there and added them (I'm up to 8 directs, and hundreds of thousands 2 and 3 degrees below me).

If you're looking to build your network then you owe it to yourself to check out Read More »

Here's something I found completely by accident and it's so obvious I can't believe Vault.com hasn't locked this down. Vault.com provides surveys and information on employers. Basically they'll provide summary information and if you click on the link you can then view the details for a fee. Using Google you can get at all the employee survey information only available by subscription at no cost just by passing the following query:

inurl:http://www.vault.com/survey/employee/ site:www.vault.com Read More »

I'm pretty excited about the recent launch of my new weblog, RedmondGadgets.com. It has continued to increase in traffic. From getting dugg over at digg.com the first day of launch on a story about the Xbox, to continued interest being generated being a site devoted to Microsoft consumer technologies. It is a jump from my flagship site WWWCoder.com which is devoted to ASP.NET developers, but my hope is that RedmondGadgets.com will exceed the traffic that WWWCoder.com gets (about 4,500 visitors per day).

RedmondGadgets.com stays true to the weblog format, whereas Read More »

I thought this was an odd one, apparently my name is so associated with the term DotNetNuke that in my RedmondGadgets.com contact us page, there is no mention of DotNetNuke, just my name and the Google Adsense ads that are targeted on the page are related to DotNetNuke or CMS. The rest of the pages are getting ads that are appropriately aimed at gadgets, but that page gets DNN information.

What's in a name?

Have you just started up a website or weblog and now want to get people to visit? It used to be a matter of submitting the site to search engines and eventually some traffic would build up. That’s no longer the case, now you have to build your case with the search engines. Many search engines have built into them algorithms that check for the popularity of the site. You need to know how to build your site’s reputation in order to get search engines to notice you.

Build Credibility at the Start

When you first go and purchase your domain name, one piece of advice I can provide is to register your domain for at least 5 years, if you can go for 10 years then do that. This makes the search engines “think” your site is a valid site, and not some quickly propped up spam site. Google for instance checks the domain registration information for how many years your site has been registered.  In addition, they may also check to see the informat ... Read More »