Joseph Sak

I’d like to know when you plan on learning web standards, XHTML and CSS. It’s 2008, and there’s no excuse for a module that costs money–PHP-based CMS’ have a wealth of free, high-quality modules–to have poor layout techniques ( tables and span tags everywhere ), amateur of CSS and crappy admin screens.

I’m calling on the DNN Core Team to encourage web standards and learning professional HTML and CSS, instead of half assed lazy HTML/CSS generated by IDEs for programmers who don’t care to learn. To the Core Team’s credit, they’re getting close with DNN 5.

I’m urging the operators of SnowCovered.com to give careful evaluation of submitted modules for: professionalism, web standards, UX design, simplicity and value. A lot of crappy vendors are ripping people off on your web site with terrible modules, outdated code, bloated features and lazy admin screens. Stop letting it happen.

The leaders in the DNN community need to step up and show people the way. Start by Getting Real (also mentioned on the DNN blog recently, a good sign) and learn what matters: making your web site easy for your customers to use–visitors and editors / administrators.

Hopefully, www.dnngallery.net can be a push in that direction, even if Cuong Dang has a strange affinity for Khoi Vinh ;-P

Hi. I’ve been writing for my company blog a lot more lately.

Thanks.

I’ve taken up an interest in microformats. In my opinion, any technology and language that can make machines understand our content more is very cool. I’ve always been fascinated by computers since I was a kid, always knew I wanted to work with them.

I’m absolutely amazed that we can accomplish intimate detail and precise understanding in computer languages, and share it all across the globe within seconds.

Man, I’ve been getting quite a bit of attention from the DNN Core Team the past couple days.

I just wanted to say I appreciate the feedback and I’m interested in the advancements and improvements being considered in upcoming versions of the platform. Thanks for putting up with my candor and overt angst in these past few bitch posts.

I’d be particularly interested in knowing about any plans to move forward with .Net 3.5 and its ability to allow designers to define all the HTML in the controls. I’d like to see DNN reach the point where all rendered HTML is controlled by the front-end engineer, and we can achieve W3C compliance and simpler control over themes and content generation.

Here’s another one of the myriad of reasons that I am displeased with DotNetNuke as a web development platform:

The “default.css” included with all installs of DNN has this (and more CSS for other stuff like it) in it:
H1
{
font-family: Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica;
font-size: 20px;
font-weight: normal;
color: #666644;
}

H2
{
font-family: Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica;
font-size: 20px;
...

(I think you get the point)

Excuse me, DotNetNuke core team, but isn’t stuff like this up to the Designers and Developers? Why are you including a default stylesheet with definitions for HTML elements that would be used by Web developers? I can’t tell you how many times default.css has left me absolutely baffled about the smallest details not being quite right according to our design specs because it has these random “defaults” in it. It’s not up to DNN Core team to define my font families, sizes, and colors. And seriously, stop using pixel font sizing.

It’s becoming clearer to me almost on a daily basis, that DNN is not the right CMS for a professional Web shop to be using. They probably have this default.css for people who don’t make skins or know anything about Web development. And if you remove default.css, it completely hoses all the Admin pages and Control Panel. It takes way too much time and effort to figure out what’s removable and what’s not, and you always end up surprised when some random element isn’t positioned or styled correctly later on down the road.

It’s time for us to move on to a CMS that gives the developer full control over the theme, and not put a bunch of defaults in it that you can’t get rid of. 

Even second graders can get this right, yet somehow the distinction between the words “lose” and “loose” is completely lost on Internet users.

Here it is, the concrete definition as understood when I was seven fucking years old:

“lose” means to have lost.

“loose” is when you sleep with the head cheerleader.

Got it?

So tired of seeing this bullshit on every forum and message board and yahoo answers page I come across.

I really could go on and on about this, but just a few notes.

1. Forced Registration to Download their Software
When you go to DNN’s web site and sister sites, like the new DNN Events site, the first thing you have to do before you can download anything is register an account. Now, it’s not all bad because it’s free and I guess they just want to track popularity (ever heard of Google Analytics?), but the registration process takes too fucking long. I registered an account to download the new Events Module beta about 10 minutes ago and still haven’t received my “verify your account” email. Sorry, DNN team, I’ve now lost all interest in your beta.

Don’t drop your iPhone on cement!

It still works, I can answer calls, go online, touch the screen anywhere, but I might also get shards of glass in my hand. Oops.

Well now I have a legitimate excuse to buy a 3G iPhone this summer. (besides the fact that it’s going to be awesome)

Apple’s Time Machine proves its worth yet again. I deleted my MySQL root user today (I know, total amateur hour) and I was scrambling to figure out how to get it back.

I googled and searched everywhere and couldn’t find a single solution. I couldn’t just reinstall MAMP because I had a client’s database on there that I couldn’t afford to lose.

Then it hit me… TIME MACHINE! I could just restore to yesterday at 4:30 (my last known working copy) and everything would be all set.

In 2 clicks and 3 minutes, I was back in business!

When trying to send a folder to a buddy who uses the PC AIM client, I got this msg from iChat in the chat window:

Your buddy cannot receive transfers of directories (folders). You could create and send a zip archive of the directory before sharing, or share each file in the directory individually.

This is very nice! Simple easy explanation for what went wrong and how to resolve it. Now go all the way and give a prompt to create and send the zip file for me!

“Would you like us to zip this folder and send it now?” [Yes] [No]