For the last year and half I have increasingly turned to one module as my goto solution when building out new capabilities.  For me the Reports Module is proving itself to be the Swiss Army knife of the DotNetNuke module world.  With some of the features coming up in future releases of the Reports module this will become even more evident to anyone who takes the time to learn how to use the module.

So why do I feel so strongly about the reports module? It is mainly because of the architecture that Andrew Nurse put in place to allow you to create custom data sources and custom visualizers.  This architecture makes it easy to get data from almost anywhere and then to have complete control over how it is displayed. 

For most people the built in DotNetNuke Data Source, and XSLT Visualizer can handle most of your needs.  You can query any data in DotNetNuke and then use XSLT to display that data.  If you have not used XSLT before, you are missing out on a very powerful tool.  Whether it is displaying a blogroll, the MarketPlace Monitor or even building an entire eCommerce site, XSLT gives you a lot of capability to take XML data and transform it into as simple or complex a page as you can imagine.

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During the month of February I joined the FitFeb program in an effort to improve my overall fitness.  My goal was to get down to 200 lbs by the end of the month.  I fell short of my goal, but still made good progress.  Overall, I ended the month at 210 lbs – down 9 lbs over the course of the month.  That is a significant accomplishment given that I had significant travel time during the month which makes it difficult to stay on track.  This also means that since New Years day I have lost 17 lbs, which works out to about 2 lbs a week.  That is not a bad result, and is on track with weight loss goals recommended by many physicians and nutrionists.

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Now that the FitFeb challenge has wrapped up, I thought I would record some of my reflections on this past month.