Digging My Blog

Today ScottW announced the release of the Customization Guide for the Telligent Evolution Platform . There are a lot of ways you can customize the look and feel of your Telligent Community and Telligent Enterprise site. While there is a lot of content on this site, we thought it would be helpful to put...

We're always working on something cool at Telligent , whether it be an entirely new product or some type of addition or extension to Community Server . Some good examples are some of the things we came up with in Hackathon II, including the couple of IM clients that work with Community Server messaging...

The last couple of weeks have been very busy and very different for me. Two weeks ago today I relinquished my hold on the ASP.NET Sites' Team, where for nearly the last two years I have been working on www.asp.net , forums.asp.net , weblogs.asp.net and wiki.asp.net . I transitioned to the Telligent Product...

Yesterday a colleague wrote, "It's hard to believe you had 27 blog posts in one month a year ago." I think that his disbelief was triggered by my lack of regular posts recently compared to my abundance of posts then. Last night I took a look back through some of those posts from this time last year to...

Like a lot of you reading this I have spent a lot of time recently using and working with Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook , LinkedIn , MySpace , Community Server (!!) and more social networking applications and platforms. One of the more interesting features that some of these sites offer is the ability to...

I had the pleasure of working on a great project earlier this year with two very talented co-workers: Wyatt Preul and Ben Tiedt . I served as the Technical Editor for their new Wrox book, Professional Community Server Themes . Between the awesome information provided by Wyatt and Ben and the excellent...

Following the lead of Jose , Jayme (one of the newest CS Team members) and Kevin ... My three entries for the Community Server 2007 Theming Extravaganza were all blog themes. SnowScene is a fairly simple alteration of the Vanilla theme that adds a background image and some transparency to provide a Vista...

I ran into an issue today that I had not seen before where clicking the RSS link from a Community Server blog presented an error message like this: At first I thought there must be something wrong with the feed, but after a bit of troubleshooting and some time spent with Fiddler we found it was something...

This post is as much for my sanity, to clear my mind, as it is for sharing my thoughts. I have a couple of after hours projects going on right now and a couple that I would like to start. I have been working on a few things for the Community Server Theming Extravaganza . I have two blog themes ready...

I've spent some time over the last couple of months working with Chameleon, the new theming engine introduced in Community Server 2007 . I was highly confused at first, even after reading Ben's great blog series, Introduction to Chameleon . However, after digging in and working with it the info from...

I almost forgot until I read Kevin's post that today is Telligent's 3rd anniversary. I remember the day I first read about the forming of Telligent and about Community Server . That was a special day for me because on that day, 3 years ago, I knew I wanted to be a Telligenti . Since that time I have...

Yes, we messed up some things last week with the rollout of the *.asp.net sites. We failed to properly inform all the bloggers of weblogs.asp.net that they were getting an upgrade. The new skins blew up some existing blog sites. We failed to replicate some functionality that already existed on forums...

First I must apologize to friends and family who I usually keep some type of regular contact with, I have been slammed lately. I do see the light at the end of the tunnel, though. By the end of next week I think my life will return to its normal chaotic state - which will be a welcome relief from its...

Jose Lema, the leader of the free world - um, well, at least the leader of the Community Server dev team - reported today that he has started providing information about Morpheus . Morpheus is the codename for the membership, roles and profile updates to Community Server 2007. While Morpheus is new to...

It looks like I have added incentive to creating a new theme for this blog. Scott Watermasysk just announced a contest, the Community Server 2007 Theming Extravaganza . Prizes include a MacBook, XBOX 360, and Amazon Gift Cards!! I think that means I'm done working for the day - time to get my Theme on...

It's been a few days since I made a post. Really busy around here and rather than post half a dozen little posts, I'll just group everything in one big one. C & J - Thoughts and Prayers First, and most importantly, I just found out that the wife of a dear friend was involved in a serious accident...

I spotted a nice looking template this morning in my OpenDesigns.org RSS feed that I think would make a great CS2007 blog theme. The template is called Snow Flakes and you can see a preview here . Below is a screenshot. I like the colors and the layout, but the one thing I think I would remove would...

Update (3/28/07): source code posted here . Update (4/3/07): I did not realize until today that Keyvan Nayyeri had already created something similar, SyndicationAds, as part of the Community Server MVP's Alabaster CS Module Package . Shout out to Keyvan who beat me to the bunch by about 7 months. In...

I get about 50 spam comments a day. The built-in spam rules along with the Akismet mod do a great job of catching 98% of the spam comments. One or two a day tend to sneak through, but it isn't a big deal to manually delete those. I tend to get one or two false positives a week as well. Because I am a...

For my family members who faithfully read my blog (Hi Mom!) though they have no idea what I'm writing about most of the time I present you with this excellent short description of Community Server by Design MeltDown (via Jon Broom ) along with some screenshots and links to sites that use it. My description...

Nearly 3 months after Scott W piqued our interest with a tease about Community Server 3.0 skinning, Ben Tiedt has begun publishing his Introduction to Chameleon . According to Ben, skinning will be much easier in v.3 than it has been in previous versions of Community Server: Over the past several months...

Last week after adding Eric Duncan's PostIcon mod, I decided to do some other UI mods to my site. Most of the changes were done to give it a cleaner look: changing the home page to show excerpts only, removing some of the left side content, adding some background color to the post footers to create a...

If you're reading this post from my site rather than through RSS and you happened to come via the home page or some other post listing page then you may have seen the new post icons listed beside some of the post titles. How easy was it to do that? Eric A. Duncan's MiXX PostIcon package rocks! Really...

Scott W shows a new skin , running the most brand-spankin' newly committed CS code of course. Is this a preview of a skin coming in CS 3.0? I sure hope so - I really like the looks of that one. I can imagine mine with shades of blue or shades of green. I can imagine James Shaw with shades of orange....

Friday I answered a question in the forums on CommunityServer.org about adding an blog list in the sidebar . I had done this before to this site on previous versions of CS. I had not taken the time to do it yet, so for maybe the first time in my life it thought, "No better time than the present!". My...

Today is day 2 as part of the CS Team at Telligent Systems. That's the biggest news of course, but along with a short bio I sent out to the rest of the team yesterday I let some other tidbits go that I had been holding pretty close to the vest. More information (and pictures in some cases) to follow...

I put together a server control that is a Wrapper for a simple Google Map that will display a Google map along with a marker for one passed in Address/Location. While it can be used practically anywhere I created it for the purpose of using it with Community Server, specifically on the profile page....