While extending the Arthemia theme for a client (Community Hospital EMR, part of the EHR Group, Inc.) we ran into an issue around providing an appropriate abstract for posts which were really only a couple of lines of introduction and a YouTube link. Of course adding a video-thumbnail instantly gives the Featured abstract the instant context of being a video. However, we didn’t want to over-engineer the theme with logic to detect the presence of a YouTube object.

Our friend Google turned up a post by Bernie Zimmermann detailing how to extract a Dynamic YouTube Image Thumbnail.

We can amend the standard YouTube URL format, to deliver one of three image-thumbnails available for any YouTube video. When a video is uploaded to YouTube, three image thumbnails are automatically created, and the video author can elect one as they preferred thumbnail.

This top URL is the actual YouTube video

VIDEO URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNF_P281Uu4

IMAGE URL is http://img.youtube.com/vi/bNF_P281Uu4/2.jpg

This bottom URL is the thumbnail #2 for this video. Therefore we can play with the image URL to get the best image to place as a thumbnail for our article. These are images 1.jpg, 2.jpg (the best and most iconic for the video) and 3.jpg.

  

A little bit of additional digging reveals the default image used by the YouTube video window. This is image 0.jpg.

BlogEngine.NET, Featured BlogEngine.NET, Featured

While extending the Arthemia theme for a client (Community Hospital EMR, part of the EHR Group, Inc.) we ran into an issue around providing an appropriate abstract for posts which were really only a couple of lines of introduction and a YouTube link. Of course adding a video-thumbnail instantly gives the Featured abstract the instant context of being a video. However, we didn’t want to over-engineer the theme with logic to detect the presence of a YouTube object.

Our friend Google turned up a post by Bernie Zimmermann detailing how to extract a Dynamic YouTube Image Thumbnail.

We can amend the standard YouTube URL format, to deliver one of three image-thumbnails available for any YouTube video. When a video is uploaded to YouTube, three image thumbnails are automatically created, and the video author can elect one as they preferred thumbnail.

This top URL is the actual YouTube video

VIDEO URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNF_P281Uu4

IMAGE URL is http://img.youtube.com/vi/bNF_P281Uu4/2.jpg

This bottom URL is the thumbnail #2 for this video. Therefore we can play with the image URL to get the best image to place as a thumbnail for our article. These are images 1.jpg, 2.jpg (the best and most iconic for the video) and 3.jpg.

  

A little bit of additional digging reveals the default image used by the YouTube video window. This is image 0.jpg.

BlogEngine.NET, Featured BlogEngine.NET, Featured

This theme was released nearly a year ago, but we’ve only just got around to reviewing its Headline, Features & Categories for a new client community.

So, it may not be new, but it’s worth a few words!

Normally we think of Themes as simply how a website will look and feel – column layout, color schemes, font and style settings. Sometimes a theme provides a lot more than just style.

The Arthemia theme by OneSoft is an good example of where some additional features allow the blog owner to have Headline and Featured Items automatically placed and self-updating without any programming or HTML skills.

The following snapshot breaks down the blog into three parts:

Click the hyperlink below to read the whole of this post about the Arthemia theme.

More...

BlogEngine.NET, Headline BlogEngine.NET, Headline

This theme was released nearly a year ago, but we’ve only just got around to reviewing its Headline, Features & Categories for a new client community.

So, it may not be new, but it’s worth a few words!

Normally we think of Themes as simply how a website will look and feel – column layout, color schemes, font and style settings. Sometimes a theme provides a lot more than just style.

The Arthemia theme by OneSoft is an good example of where some additional features allow the blog owner to have Headline and Featured Items automatically placed and self-updating without any programming or HTML skills.

The following snapshot breaks down the blog into three parts:

Click the hyperlink below to read the whole of this post about the Arthemia theme.

More...

BlogEngine.NET, Headline BlogEngine.NET, Headline

The Paperclip Theme is one of the most adaptable blog themes around. A quick change in CSS allows you to replace the background image with one of your own photos or one you’ve found on the interweb – and have permission use.

We’re adding Paperclip to our Sueetie Theme Pack but want to check we can correctly attribute the original creator.

The “original” CommunityServer Paperclip Themes:

Who invented the Paperclip Theme?

Not such a simple search engine question, unless I’m into the history of the humble metal paperclip, or worse, that annoying paperclip assistant now turned off in Office XP Word! In researching the original creator, I may as well offer the links and resources I turned up.

Caio Proiete adapted his BlogEngine.NET Paperclip themes from Telligent and provides footer credit to telligent. Muhammed Mosa also adapted these themes for a wider version here.

James Shaw infers that the Paperclip was originally designed by ‘Creative’ and adapted by telligent. So that might be ‘Sounds Creative’ the telligent company offering design consultancy. James shows how to replace the paperclip image when using CommunityServer 2008.5.

Dan Hounsell refers back to James Shaw when discussing how to automate a rotating paperclip theme background. Must try that sometime. He also linked to a telligent.com stored paperclip PSD which probably broke during migration to telligent.com.

Robert McLaws at Interscape created a collection of standard and wide paperclip theme header images pulled from the Windows 7 beta images. With both image widths that’s 62 images in total.

Interscape also suggest that Telligent wouldn’t release the original images so they could create wider variations. Again suggesting Telligent as the creator. Robert provides his images “as-is” at no charge as these are offered for personal use.

Take a look at his excellent collection here.

 

Incidentally the Wordpress Paperclip theme is completely different.

 

 

 

CFaith Communities found or developed a Photoshop PSD for the paperclip theme. Excellent resource for future header customization.

BlogEngine.NET, Sueetie, Themes BlogEngine.NET, Sueetie, Themes

The Paperclip Theme is one of the most adaptable blog themes around. A quick change in CSS allows you to replace the background image with one of your own photos or one you’ve found on the interweb – and have permission use.

We’re adding Paperclip to our Sueetie Theme Pack but want to check we can correctly attribute the original creator.

The “original” CommunityServer Paperclip Themes:

Who invented the Paperclip Theme?

Not such a simple search engine question, unless I’m into the history of the humble metal paperclip, or worse, that annoying paperclip assistant now turned off in Office XP Word! In researching the original creator, I may as well offer the links and resources I turned up.

Caio Proiete adapted his BlogEngine.NET Paperclip themes from Telligent and provides footer credit to telligent. Muhammed Mosa also adapted these themes for a wider version here.

James Shaw infers that the Paperclip was originally designed by ‘Creative’ and adapted by telligent. So that might be ‘Sounds Creative’ the telligent company offering design consultancy. James shows how to replace the paperclip image when using CommunityServer 2008.5.

Dan Hounsell refers back to James Shaw when discussing how to automate a rotating paperclip theme background. Must try that sometime. He also linked to a telligent.com stored paperclip PSD which probably broke during migration to telligent.com.

Robert McLaws at Interscape created a collection of standard and wide paperclip theme header images pulled from the Windows 7 beta images. With both image widths that’s 62 images in total.

Interscape also suggest that Telligent wouldn’t release the original images so they could create wider variations. Again suggesting Telligent as the creator. Robert provides his images “as-is” at no charge as these are offered for personal use.

Take a look at his excellent collection here.

 

Incidentally the Wordpress Paperclip theme is completely different.

 

 

 

CFaith Communities found or developed a Photoshop PSD for the paperclip theme. Excellent resource for future header customization.

BlogEngine.NET, Sueetie, Themes BlogEngine.NET, Sueetie, Themes

 

There are many differences between IIS6 and IIS7, one of these is the introduction of Managed Pipeline Mode. This is a new way to run an application pool.

IIS uses the Internet Server Application Programming Interface. This is the interface which lets website components communicate with IIS. Because of the way that the ISAPI interface interacts with ASP.NET there are two ways for a component to run. There is one ‘pipeline’ for ISAPI components/extensions and another for managed application components.

Microsoft have never been happy with this situation. Yet since .Net was added on to IIS as a separate component it has been unavoidable. In IIS7 this is different, ASP.NET is now integrated with the core of IIS. This offers numerous benefits, the only down side is that some applications do not work out of the box, BlogEngine is one of these applications.

 

 

You may see a page like this if you attempt to visit a website that has not been setup to run in integrated mode.

 

There are two ways to deal with this error. The easiest is to simply set the application pool to run in ‘Classic Mode’. This is guaranteed to work for all .Net applications not just BlogEngine so you may find it useful in future.

Run BE.NET in IIS Classic Mode

 

To do this you should open IIS Manager and navigate to the ‘Application Pools’ node on the left. After you have found your website’s application pool you then need to double click it and select ‘Classic’.

 

 

 

 

 

This solution will work with BlogEngine but if you use it then you will be missing out on lots of the new features in IIS7.

 

Run BE.NET in IIS Pipeline Mode

A much better approach is to migrate the application to integrated pipeline mode. This can be done using the appcmd.exe tool.

Run the following command from the command line:

Start > Run > cmd

Execute this command: appcmd migrate config “sitename.com/”

(Replace sitename.com with your site name. You must include the trailing slash - doesn't work without it.)

You should then see something similar to this:

Successfully migrated section "system.web/httpModules".
Successfully migrated section "system.web/httpHandlers".

Your BlogEngine website is now fully IIS7 compatible and ready to go!

Joe Shearn
team Ambay Software

BlogEngine.NET BlogEngine.NET

 

There are many differences between IIS6 and IIS7, one of these is the introduction of Managed Pipeline Mode. This is a new way to run an application pool.

IIS uses the Internet Server Application Programming Interface. This is the interface which lets website components communicate with IIS. Because of the way that the ISAPI interface interacts with ASP.NET there are two ways for a component to run. There is one ‘pipeline’ for ISAPI components/extensions and another for managed application components.

Microsoft have never been happy with this situation. Yet since .Net was added on to IIS as a separate component it has been unavoidable. In IIS7 this is different, ASP.NET is now integrated with the core of IIS. This offers numerous benefits, the only down side is that some applications do not work out of the box, BlogEngine is one of these applications.

 

 

You may see a page like this if you attempt to visit a website that has not been setup to run in integrated mode.

 

There are two ways to deal with this error. The easiest is to simply set the application pool to run in ‘Classic Mode’. This is guaranteed to work for all .Net applications not just BlogEngine so you may find it useful in future.

Run BE.NET in IIS Classic Mode

 

To do this you should open IIS Manager and navigate to the ‘Application Pools’ node on the left. After you have found your website’s application pool you then need to double click it and select ‘Classic’.

 

 

 

 

 

This solution will work with BlogEngine but if you use it then you will be missing out on lots of the new features in IIS7.

 

Run BE.NET in IIS Pipeline Mode

A much better approach is to migrate the application to integrated pipeline mode. This can be done using the appcmd.exe tool.

Run the following command from the command line:

Start > Run > cmd

Execute this command: appcmd migrate config “sitename.com/”

(Replace sitename.com with your site name. You must include the trailing slash - doesn't work without it.)

You should then see something similar to this:

Successfully migrated section "system.web/httpModules".
Successfully migrated section "system.web/httpHandlers".

Your BlogEngine website is now fully IIS7 compatible and ready to go!

Joe Shearn
team Ambay Software

BlogEngine.NET BlogEngine.NET

Some years ago we used to sponsor my local team Leamington Rugby Football Club. I admit I may have talked about “marketing”, getting a message out to local businesses, “supporting the community” to my fellow Directors, but in reality this was an excuse for more Rugby and ‘mandatory’ attendance at Vice Presidents Luncheons.

Part of the Sponsorship deal was us buying a team’s playing shirts and adding a logo or company name. While the average weekly crowd is less than 50, it would get a spot in the local paper.

Back then we automatically included the “www” prefix for our website (formerly ConServ Business Solutions Ltd). We’re thinking about shirts for next season. WWW or not?

 

Familiarity

Address this question from a marketing angle and you can see countless examples where the www prefix is not used in advertisements. Any high street brand advertising on TV will include their site name – invariably without the www prefix.

A more telling example is where website names are the “product” name. such as moneysupermarket.com or Confused.com. Their business is directly web-oriented AND the customer “understands” the .com word association.

www was only ever meant as a synonym for “it’s a web site”. Technical sites (like us) are already adopting non-prefix web naming.

Canonical Links

Depends upon the search site, but some search engines had/have big issues managing architectural bugs where a site URL sometimes contained the www prefix, sometimes didn’t. Google Webmaster Tools go so far as to provide (Dashboard, Settings) Preferred domain settings to tell search engines how you want your pages indexed – no preference, with a www prefix or without.

This integrates directly with CommunityServer, BlogEngine.NET and other content management systems where your web-application can automatically enforce whichever policy you want in place. Of course you ensure that Google Webmaster Tools is set the same as your own www policy.

• CommunityServer (communityserver.config) uses wwwStatus=[Ignore | Require | Remove]
• BlogEngine.NET, Advanced Settings provides www subdomain policy [Remove | Enforce | Ignore]

 

One issue that we see occasionally is an incomplete website setup where a site identity doesn’t provide both prefixed and non-prefixed settings.

A correctly configured website will include Web Site Identification for www prefix and non-prefix as shown opposite. This example also shows that a second web-site identify will resolve to the site.

Even if the website application is prefix agnostic it should still successfully resolve either form of address, for example nytimes.com or www.nytimes.com.

Sub-domain or trailer

This blog is sited as a trailer (ambay.com/blog/) in the same way that a weblog /blog/ or country specific site /us/ would be addressed. As more sites adopt non-prefix site addressing we think there will be a stronger take-up of sub-domain naming over trailer site hierarchy, such as blog.ambay.com.

Search engines are more than capable of managing sub-domains and links between then, while there doesn’t seem to be any particular impact on SEO optimization.

We watch the big sites like Microsoft, Sun or Apple and news sites to check which way they think the wind is blowing. There really isn’t a consensus yet. Microsoft sub-domains are well known to developers using msdn.microsoft.com and technet.microsoft.com, whereas Apple use both such as store.apple.com/us and www.apple.com/itunes.

Microsoft Word or the kids

Maybe one of the arbiters of the drop-www debate will be when Microsoft Word automates URL links when it spots a valid trailing domain suffix (e.g. .com, .co.uk, .net). It automatically includes your hyperlink when typing a www prefix.

I personally look to my grandkids. They already ignore the suffix whether hitting google.com for some illustrative pictures or sneaking a (suspect) french translation for homework. They are our future after all.

Nick Harrington
team Ambay Software

BlogEngine.NET BlogEngine.NET

Some years ago we used to sponsor my local team Leamington Rugby Football Club. I admit I may have talked about “marketing”, getting a message out to local businesses, “supporting the community” to my fellow Directors, but in reality this was an excuse for more Rugby and ‘mandatory’ attendance at Vice Presidents Luncheons.

Part of the Sponsorship deal was us buying a team’s playing shirts and adding a logo or company name. While the average weekly crowd is less than 50, it would get a spot in the local paper.

Back then we automatically included the “www” prefix for our website (formerly ConServ Business Solutions Ltd). We’re thinking about shirts for next season. WWW or not?

 

Familiarity

Address this question from a marketing angle and you can see countless examples where the www prefix is not used in advertisements. Any high street brand advertising on TV will include their site name – invariably without the www prefix.

A more telling example is where website names are the “product” name. such as moneysupermarket.com or Confused.com. Their business is directly web-oriented AND the customer “understands” the .com word association.

www was only ever meant as a synonym for “it’s a web site”. Technical sites (like us) are already adopting non-prefix web naming.

Canonical Links

Depends upon the search site, but some search engines had/have big issues managing architectural bugs where a site URL sometimes contained the www prefix, sometimes didn’t. Google Webmaster Tools go so far as to provide (Dashboard, Settings) Preferred domain settings to tell search engines how you want your pages indexed – no preference, with a www prefix or without.

This integrates directly with CommunityServer, BlogEngine.NET and other content management systems where your web-application can automatically enforce whichever policy you want in place. Of course you ensure that Google Webmaster Tools is set the same as your own www policy.

• CommunityServer (communityserver.config) uses wwwStatus=[Ignore | Require | Remove]
• BlogEngine.NET, Advanced Settings provides www subdomain policy [Remove | Enforce | Ignore]

 

One issue that we see occasionally is an incomplete website setup where a site identity doesn’t provide both prefixed and non-prefixed settings.

A correctly configured website will include Web Site Identification for www prefix and non-prefix as shown opposite. This example also shows that a second web-site identify will resolve to the site.

Even if the website application is prefix agnostic it should still successfully resolve either form of address, for example nytimes.com or www.nytimes.com.

Sub-domain or trailer

This blog is sited as a trailer (ambay.com/blog/) in the same way that a weblog /blog/ or country specific site /us/ would be addressed. As more sites adopt non-prefix site addressing we think there will be a stronger take-up of sub-domain naming over trailer site hierarchy, such as blog.ambay.com.

Search engines are more than capable of managing sub-domains and links between then, while there doesn’t seem to be any particular impact on SEO optimization.

We watch the big sites like Microsoft, Sun or Apple and news sites to check which way they think the wind is blowing. There really isn’t a consensus yet. Microsoft sub-domains are well known to developers using msdn.microsoft.com and technet.microsoft.com, whereas Apple use both such as store.apple.com/us and www.apple.com/itunes.

Microsoft Word or the kids

Maybe one of the arbiters of the drop-www debate will be when Microsoft Word automates URL links when it spots a valid trailing domain suffix (e.g. .com, .co.uk, .net). It automatically includes your hyperlink when typing a www prefix.

I personally look to my grandkids. They already ignore the suffix whether hitting google.com for some illustrative pictures or sneaking a (suspect) french translation for homework. They are our future after all.

Nick Harrington
team Ambay Software

BlogEngine.NET BlogEngine.NET