With Christmas fast approaching, I have been busy in my woodshop working on gifts.  Unlike last year, I have stayed away from any wood that might cause an allergic reaction.  This year I have been working on a number of smaller gifts for family and friends.  Fortunately none of them read blogs so I am pretty safe posting pictures ahead of time.

My wife really loves seeing the different styles of pens I have created, and my skills are rapidly improving.  Unlike my previous pens, I have switched completely to using CA glue as my finish of choice.  Using CA glue for a finish takes a lot of practice to get it right, and different woods can have varying reactions to the glue.  While the Bocote pen in the first picture was very easy to work with, the Curly Maple pen and pencil set were extremely finicky.

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By now most of you have probably heard the news that DotNetNuke Corporation has raised a round of capital from Sierra Ventures and August Capital.  This marks another major milestone in the history of DotNetNuke.  Nik Kalyani , one of my co-founders in DotNetNuke Corp., has a great blog post describing some of his journey to reach this milestone.  Like Nik, I have a similar story I would like to relate about how we reached this point in our company and our project’s history.

My experience with DotNetNuke goes back to February 2003, a little over a month after it was first released.  Over the next 6 months after it’s release I became increasingly involved with the DotNetNuke project.  By the summer of 2003 I had been invited to participate on the DotNetNuke core team which marked one of the first major milestones in the growth of the project.  Over the following year the project made rapid progress and we went through a core team re-organization which included the creation of a Board of Directors.

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In my previous post on the DNNMenu and SEO, I discussed testing user-agent strings and creating custom browser detection files.  As part of my testing I created a simple web-app that allows you to validate your browser capabilities.  By navigating to the test site, you can see exactly which features are enabled for your specific browser.  To alter how ASP.Net reports the capabilities for a specific user agent, create a custom .browser file and add it to the App_Browsers folder in your website.  See MSDN for a complete discussion of the browser definition file format.

The below sample shows the capabilities I have configured for the Yahoo! Slurp web crawler.  This is not a definitive list of capabilities, but rather some custom values that I needed for my testing.  Feel free to alter this file as needed to more fully emulate the features supported by the Slurp engine.

<browsers>

    <browser id="Slurp" parentID="Mozilla">

        <identification>

            <userAgent match="Slurp" />

        </identification>

        <capabilities>

            <capability name="browser" value="Yahoo!Slurp" />

            <capability name="crawler" value="true" />

            <capability name="cookies" value="false" />

            <capability name="css1" value="true" />

            <capability name="css2" value="true" />

            <capability name="javascript" value="false" />

            <capability name="tables" value="true" />

            <capability name="w3cdomversion" value="1.0" />

            <capability name="xml" value="true" />

            <capability name="tagwriter" value="System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter" />

        </capabilities>

    </browser>

</browsers>

The screen below shows a short list of capabilities detected for Firefox 3.

  Download the BrowserCaps web application

During the OpenForce Conference, I heard from several designers that the DNNMenu had problems with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) because it rendered menu items that used JavaScript for navigation.  While I assured them that this was not the case and that the menu rendered a down-level version for search bots, I thought I would perform further testing and document the exact behavior.  In the process, I found that while the DNNMenu performed as expected, ASP.Net did not.

To observe the behavior of the menu, I used Firefox 3 with the User Agent Switcher plug-in.  This plug-in allows you to simulate any user agent string you wish.  For testing purposes you can find a complete list of user agent strings at useragentstring.com.

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