Sometimes in the online world when approaching a project people seem to classify the issues facing a website as a technology issue. It's as if building a web site is this mysterious thing wrapped in so much technology it's just too much handle. Just sitting in the office of a technology provider gets nerve wracking; hearing all the techno geeks spitting out acronym after acronym and having no idea what any of it means - html, Ajax, XML, HTTP, Java, ASP, .NET, Web services, Web 2.0, what all does it mean?!

I'm here to tell you not to worry about all those acronyms, phrases, and geeks telling you what to do, do what you know. Websites are nothing but a different way of doing your business; bricks and mortar are the traditional way, but they both have something in common and that's people. In this article I'm going to discuss community sites since they're a growing influence on the web and generating plenty of interest.

Community; what do you think of when you hear community? Think ... Read More »

I blogged in the past about my daughter's Jonas Brothers fansite and the traffic it receives. It gets over 7,000 people per day, and has over 5,500 registered users since the end of March of this year. My daughters went to a Jonas Brothers concert in Cleveland yesterday and the band brought out breakfast to the girls for being the first ones to show up. They then posted the video on YouTube, and the... Read More »

DotNetNuke developers now have an event of their own, DotNetNuke OpenForce '07 is to be held in Las Vegas in November. I'll be presenting on "Building a Community Site with DotNetNuke". I'll be covering all the great tools that DNN provides for the site administrator to build a community site and generate some user activity. Be sure to attend and meet all your fellow DNN'ers.

Another career change for me. I left Sogeti recently and moved on to Blue Chip Consulting Group. I was at Sogeti for a pretty short amount of time as the Microsoft Practice Manager, but in my new role I will be a Solution Architect. The new role enables me to focus on technology and use my web skills to build some great solutions.

I'm pretty excited about Blue Chip, they are growing fast and doing some great things.

We purchased a Nintendo Wii for my kids for Christmas. A little while ago, my three year old walked out of the living room, and suddenly the Wii no longer would work. Basically it wouldn't take any game disks. So I did a little searching the web and found out about Nintendo's excellent customer service and our warrenty. So we called Nintendo to tell them about the Wii no longer working. The person on the phone said no problem a new Wii will be sent out in a matter of days, just return the old Wii using the package provided. No cost at all.

Now this is how customer service should be.

Check out this video at on10, four video monitors hooked up to Vista using very large high pixel wide screen monitors in vertical display mode.

http://on10.net/Blogs/tina/vista-monitors-unleashed/

Nice!

You are invited to the April meeting of the C#/VB.Net Special Interest Group (see below).  To reserve your seat, please reply to this e-mail with 'RSVP" in the subject line.  Outlook users can use the enclosed attachment to set a reminder.  For more information, please visit www.ClevelandDotNet.info.

Topic: DotNetNuke, presented by Patrick Santry (Sogeti USA Corp.)
DotNetNuke is a Versatile open source web application framework ideal for creating, deploying and managing interactive web, intranet and extranet sites.

Patrick Santry was an original core team member and on the first Board of Directors fo ... Read More »

Three monitors are the way to go and thanks to my Q1 I am there. Basically I have three monitors, two hooked up to my workstation, and one on the Q1, then on my Vista workstation I have win2vnc hooked up to control my Q1 from the workstation keyboard. I created a wallpaper for the PCs to make one long scene between all three monitors for the atheistic feel.

Looking under my desk, I really need some cable management.

I presented on DotNetNuke Module Development yesterday at the Pittsburgh Code Camp. Overall it was a very good event with about 175 people in attendance. There were three sessions going on at the same time each with a good showing.

It's great to get out and meet new folks who are into technology and being able to talk about DotNetNuke. The food was good too.

So I just blogged a couple days ago about my daughter's Jonas Brothers Fansite, and now she's over 1500 unique visitors per day and made it to the first page of Google when searching on the Jonas Brothers. That is a 100% improvement in traffic in a matter of a couple days. Simply incredible, the power of the tween is amazing.