jetlounge.net - technews : Community Server

How Do You Get That Code So Pretty in a Blog Post?

david — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 21:43:00 GMT

I use the following tools, all free..

Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition
SQL Server Express Management Studio
Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition

Paste a code snippet in any of the applications above and you'll get some friendly color coding. Then simply copy and paste into MS Word, or directly into your blog post.

Then top it off with Noah Coad's Word add-in. You can get it here. This is pretty basic and simply adds a shaded frame behind your code in MS Word. Note that the code he pictures in his blog is slightly different than the code available on his download page and will actually cause an error.

Line 11 of FormatCodeBlock() simply has an End statement. It should read:

End if

Add Referring Icons to Your Community Server Posts

david — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 16:45:00 GMT

I posted a while ago about a neat CS 2007 add-in that automatically adds referrer tags to your posts.

The code is pretty slick, and the author, Christopher Even made the module so you could add as many new referers as you'd lke. By default, in his example he uses text so you'd have:

Technorati | Yahoo! | Google etc,

I wanted to dress up my posts with a little color and easily identify the referring links with icons instead. That was easy enough, since his module simply does a find and replace on valid HTML code.

In his example he uses:

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=[URL_ENCODED]&tags=[TAGS_ENCODED]&title=[TITLE_ENCODED]" mce_href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=[URL_ENCODED]&tags=[TAGS_ENCODED]&title=[TITLE_ENCODED]">Del.icio.us</a> |

I changed that with the following

1) Change the <a> tag slightly to ensure that the link opens in a new window with target="_blank"

2) Remove the text and add an <img> tag instead:

3) Added some remarks in between links in order to easily find them in the future so the full code is:

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=[URL_ENCODED]&tags=[TAGS_ENCODED]&title=[TITLE_ENCODED]" mce_href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=[URL_ENCODED]&tags=[TAGS_ENCODED]&title=[TITLE_ENCODED]" target="_blank">

Community Server 2007.1 Web Farm Configuration

david — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 11:52:00 GMT

If you host CS 2007 in a web farm, you might have noticed an annoying occurence where credentials seem to be lost after login. So you log into control panel, do a screen refresh or two, and get prompted for your credentials again.

It's almost as if it lost...session.

The solve is to setup a machinekey that can be negotiated to preserve state as your requests get bounced around.

Step 1:
Create a unique machine key. You can do so here:

http://www.aspnetresources.com/tools/keycreator.aspx
The output will look something like:
<machineKey validationKey="long string here" decryptionKey="blah" validation="SHA1" />

Step 2:
Paste the output into your web.cong file, somewhere in the <system.web> area

Change the Number of Recent Posts on the CS Home Page

david — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 01:15:00 GMT

Community Server 2007.1 provides the default capability to show the most “recent posts” on the home page view. It deems “recent”, by default as the last 10 days and will pull the Top 5 articles. But what if you wanted to display more (or less) than 5? And what if the 10 day window wasn’t to your liking?

What strikes me as odd, is that for an application that provides for so much scalability with an ASP master page layout, table based controls, and an administrative interface where you maintain parameters that control the entire business logic and layout of the application…why would they tuck away such a seemingly important nugget in some hard-coded C# in the master page itself??

Things that make you go hmm.

OK, so to change these defaults go to the home.aspx page in your theme directory like

~\[theme]\common\home.aspx

You’ll notice a block of code towards the top:

If you want to change the default number of days to 200, change the line:

query.StartDate = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-10);

query.StartDate = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-200);

If you’d like to display 10 articles instead of 5, change the line:

query.PageSize = 5;

query.PageSize = 10;

Add digg, del.ico.us & other referrers to CS 2007

david — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 04:23:00 GMT

This is a tasty little snack that allows you to easily add referrer tags to your Community Server posts. Download the code, add to your site's /bin folder and follow the rest of the simple directions found here:

http://sharepointsearch.com/cs/blogs/site_admin/archive/2007/09/15/adding-refer-digg-technorati-links-to-community-server-blogs.aspx

You can see it in action at the bottom of this post!