In Valid Logic

Ok, maybe not tornados, but funnel clouds.  Today, on my way back from lunch with my fiancee, we’d noticed some peculiar funnel clouds forming.  As we good back, my roommate and one of my other friends were outside checking out the clouds that were forming.

Apparently, a short while earlier one of funnel clouds had actually touched down at this storage shed behind our apartment complex and tore it up fairly good, throwing debris and water around as it crossed the levee.

For some pictures, see http://www.qgyen.net/photos/category1053.aspx

I swear, I cannot catch a break.  On Thursday, I managed to tweak my neck a little, so that constantly nagging me all day.  Friday it was gone, but I also woke up with this head thing that hasn’t gone away.  I don’t think it is a cold, since it is only in mean head/nasal/sinuses, but it is annoying.  It is probably allergies, since my allergies always go nuts around the change of the seasons, and weather lately has been back and forth.  It’ll be nice and spring like for a few days, with plants/flowers blooming, then rainy for a few days and the molds come back.  The trees and flowers around my apartment have been blooming, so I know there is pollen in the air.  I can’t cope with spring and winter allergies at once.  Even today, I’ve only been up for an hour, but I’ve already lost count of the number of times I’ve had to blow my nose.  Will it ever stop?!?

As you may have heard from either Scott, Rob, or the Community Server message boards, Community Server v1.0 is out!  It is truly a great honor to have been able to work on it.  The team of people working on it are absolutely awesome and it is great to be able to bounce ideas back and forth off of them.  Definitely looking forward to continuing to come up with new ideas to add to it to make it even better.

Also, I’m glad to welcome Alex Lowe to the Telligent team.  He will be Project Manager on the www.asp.net website project, so if you have any ideas on what you’d like to see there, go and drop him a line.

It became apparent to me today just how dependent people can get on technology in a work environment, and how difficult it can be to function when you are without it.  Today, I was unable to connect to MSN Message from about 10am to 3:30pm PST.  In an environment where your coworkers and clients are spread throughout the country, and IM is how 90% of your interactions occur, this kind of downtime can be detrimental.

During those 5 hours, it was almost as though I was lost.  Couldn’t see if someone was online and ask them “did we fix this” or “any ideas on how to do that”?  This morning we had a meeting with a client and the first thing that came up was “has MSN Messanger been down for you?”

It gets interesting when business is conducted and dependent upon technology and services that are basically free.  You don’t pay for it, you don’t have any uptime guaruntee, and there is nobody you can call and *** at when it goes down.

I think over time, as business gets more dependent on things like instant messaging, you’ll start seeing commerial messaging services which guaruntee uptime and availability.

I thought I had more to write, but was writing this over the span of like an hour when doing other things.  Doh.

Yesterday, I was tangled up in what has to be my worst Windows install ever.  I’ve been wanting to put Windows 2003 on my desktop for a while, since I’ve been doing more with multiple websites lately, and it is a pain to have to start/stop them multiple times during the day.  I had found one solution that allowed multiple ones at the same time with a special extension, but its configuration seemed less pretty.

To make a long story short, it took me 8 hours just to get the system to boot the installation.  The installation went fine, the first boot sucked.  Since my PC has SATA and no floppy, I had to create a custom install CD with the drivers.  No problem, done it before plenty of times.  So did it, and then installed fine, but would just infinitely reboot when the “starting 2k3” screen came up.  After many reinstalls, repairs, reburned CDs, finally tracked it down to the fact that the installer wasn’t copying the INF file for the drive to the Windows\INF folder.  Copied it, yay.  Eight hours lost from one file.

Now tonight I am dog tired.  Mind you, I started the install last night at ~7:30pm.  Didn’t get it to boot until shortly after 3am.  Bed at 4:30am.  Up for work/go back to installing at 8:30am.  Yeah, I am going to bed early for once… damn, actually it isn’t, its 2am?  WTF!

Side note/question:  Is Visual Studio 2005 going to come on DVD by default?  I know beta1 did (though I got the CDs since I was downloading it from MSDN subscription)… but man do I hate installing Visual Studio 2003.  Six CDs and it takes so long.

Yesterday, Community Server 1.0 RC1 was released.  Check out www.communityserver.org for how to download it.  RC1 has been working pretty well, with only a few issues, so we are certainly getting closer to the final 1.0 release!  Check it out and be sure to stick around for the final 1.0 release.

Also, I wrote up an article on how to configure Community Server to work with a single blog/gallery configuration.  It uses the same steps I used to configure this site the way it is.

Updated: This method is vastly out of date.  It was only for Community Server v1.0.  Please see http://qgyen.net/archive/2006/07/14/Qgyen.ExtendedUrlMapping-for-CS-v2.1.aspx for the new method in CS v2.0 and v2.1.

Community Server was designed around the idea of multi-user community featuring forums, blogs, and photo galleries.  This is a great and easy setup for people running community sites, but there are still a lot of people who run their own personal site and want the same blog/gallery functionality.

The purpose of this article to show how to configure Community Server to run utilizing only a single blog and gallery.  This should also show easy it is to do simple customizations utilizing the Community Server framework.  Configuring a single blog/gallery can be done in only 7 simple steps and utilizing a customized SiteUrls.config file

Downloads

Download the following file: singlesite.zip

Instructions

1. Create the blog and gallery you want to be your primary blog/gallery.  Go to the Admin area, click on either Blogs or Galleries, and go to Manage Blogs/Manage Galleries.  Create a blog named something like “Blog” and Gallery named something like “Photos”.  After creating your blog/gallery, you will want to click on it and take note of the "Blog Name" field in Blogs and "Application Key" field in Galleries.  You will need this later.

2. Overwrite the SiteUrls.config file in your Community Server directory with the one included in the zip..
3. Open up the SiteUrls.config and configure the folder you want your blog/gallery to be accessible from.  Look under “locations” for the “weblogs” and “galleries” entries.  Change them to your wishes.  The default in the included file is /blog/ for your blog, and /photos/ for your gallery (/photos/ is the default in Community Server for a multi-user site as well)..
4. Rename the blogs and photos folder in your Community Server directory to match the settings in the SiteUrls.config.  If you are using the default settings included in the file, just rename the “blogs” folder to “blog”..
5. Copy the included sample_web.config to the /photos/ directory, name it web.config, and open it up.  Change the value for the “ApplicationKey” entry to match the Application Key setting for your photo gallery..
6. The blogs already has its own web.config, so copy the section from the sample or from the gallery file and paste it into the web.config in the blogs directory.  Change the value for the “ApplicationKey” entry to match the Application Key setting for you blog..
7. Open up the root level web.config and find the <httpHandlers> section.  Any entries with a path starting with "blogs/" or "photos/" should be changed to reflect the directories you used in step 4.  These are used for RSS feeds and the Metablog API support for the blogs.

Background

Customizing Community Server in this way is achieved by modifying its URL schema to remove the directory level from the URLs that normally specifies which blog/gallery to load.  If you compare the SiteUrls.config entry for “gallery_ViewGallery” from the default file and the included file, you will notice a few differences:

• The path attribute is missing a {0} parameter which was a directory.
• The pattern attribute is missing a ([\w\.-]+) section which was used in the regular expression to grab the Application Key.
• The vanity attribute is missing the “App=$1” section, which was used to pass the Application Key to the page that handles the rewritten URL.

This affectively changes Community Server’s URL rewriting to no longer specify which blog/gallery to load.  It will no longer look for the Application Key in the URL the user uses the access the site, and the Application Key will no longer be included in links generated by Community Server itself.

Since one is no longer specified using the URL, we still need to tell Community Server which one needs to be loaded.  This is where the web.config file comes in.  In the absence of a “App” setting in the query string, Community Server will fall back on reading the ApplicationKey from the AppSettings section of the web.config.  These files are placed in both the blog and photos directory in order to narrow their scope to just the blog and photos areas.