What We Can Build

The first thing we’ll want to provide for is the ability to grow the site to an indefinite size, and one key element to supporting this is a nested navbar menu.  Coding these without breaking something used  to be a major project, but JQuery and (to a lesser extent CSS3) have simplified things tremendously.  For a basic tutorial with starter code, check out Dan Wellman’s How to Create a Drop-down Nav Menu with HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery.   You can find several more tutorials and lots of good ideas for how one might implement drop downs in 1stWebDesigner’s 38 jQuery And CSS Drop Down Multi Level Menu Solutions.  Time sink warning:  it’s hard to pick a favorite among the articles he highlights.

Of course we’ll also want rounded corners and CSS3 gradients.  Is it the most universally compatible solution that will work on every browser?  Of course not, but it should degrade well, and one of our goals in the article series will be to excercies our flabby CSS muscles a bit.  A starting point for these is Schillmania’s CSS 3 and The Future: Image-free Rounded Corners, Drop Shadows and Gradients.  Finally, we may have to throw in a little pure CSS eye candy, such as those you can find in Christina Warren’s 7 Awesome CSS3 Techniques You Can Start Using Right Now.  I want bubble quotes, so my monthly non-spam comment will look really, really cool.

What We Need at the Keyboard

Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’ve developed a real taste for Earl Gray Tea.  My life as a geek is complete if I can say that the first thing we’ll need at the keyboard is “Tea, Earl Gray, Hot”.  One other item that I’m sure will prove equally nice to have around as time goes by is SmashingMagazine’s the Cascading Style Sheets Cheat Sheet.   Another useful starting point if you’re a beginning student (or like me, a half-baked intermediate student) of CSS is their introduction, Mastering CSS Coding, Getting Started.

It’s a discouraging, really.  Wanting to write an article series on an Internet that includes SmashingMagazine.com is like trying to be a playwright when you live accross the street from William Shakespeare.  Might as well just hyperlink to Othello and call it a day.  But perhaps you’ll find it useful.

I’m not sure why yet.  I thnk I might be selling something someday, but I’m not sure what.  This is probably how people should sell on social media, rather gently.  There’s a company near here that I added to my friends on Twitter, because they asked an interesting question or two about the area, and their first response was to send me a private message with “How can we help you with your [company business related] needs?”

Well, you can’t, really, I was just saying hello.

On the other end of the spectrum, I noticed that Jay Thompson has thousands of followers.  That guy is everywhere.  And he doesn’t sell, but if I had a referral I’d give it to him, because I know who he is.  He’s very nice.

On the non-business side of the spectrum we have Purva Brown.  Purva just enjoys Facebook and talks about what she likes to talk about, and has a good time.  I admire that.

Even though I’m trying hard to feel my way around the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon, the core problem I have is threefold: 

• As often as not, I have nothing (or very little) to say.
• I have a really hard time just going out there and saying nothing, because people who update me on the kind of trivial details that I generally have in stock bore the daylights out of me, and I don’t want to inflict that on others.
• I don’t take a lot of pictures.  I don’t know why.  I have a nice camera.

I think to be really successful at social media, you have to be just confident enough in yourself to blab at the mouth a lot, yet not so egotistical that you feel the need to have something to say.

Take this post.

Please.

The problem I had in understanding social network marketing was that when I first encountered it, it was as a Realtor, and most of my colleagues were just setting up pages like “Podunk Real Estate” and asking me to be fans.  This struck me as rather self serving and not very interesting.

Andrew straightened me out the other day by telling me that he rarely goes on Google except to find information, but when a friend recommends something (on Twitter, for example), he often is very interested.  Oh, yeah, I get that!  That’s plain old vanilla referral marketing, only with a web site as a telephone.

Bear with me:  I’m old.

So anyway, I’m going to start fooling around more with integrating social network content into my sites.  That would be in between making drastic changes to my life, working, learning Spanish, and going to the gym.

Well, at least I’m not bored.

So this post serves to announce that intention to my legions of raving fans.  Oh, right.  As well, it’s a test post, since I’ve just set up TwitterFeeds to Twitter and the MyFace, aka Facebook.

Let’s see if I can read myself there by writing myself here.

this movie was quite appealing to me, and I began to think about how cool it would be to work for an employee owned software collective.

So that’s what I’m going to do.

How hard can it be?

Oh, right, it can be an arduous part time struggle to get the thing going while woikin’ for the man every night and day. But I never lost a minute of sleepin’, worrying ’bout the way things might have been.

Oh, sorry, that’s a different song, isn’t it?

Further Reading

Anyway, here are a couple of resources if this idea appeals to you as it does to me:

The guys actually have an employee owned software collective in the liberal Ben and Jerry’s Gay Marriage state of Vermont. A collective, no less. Let’s hope Papa Joe Stalin doesn’t come by and wipe them out.

Isn’t socialism exciting?

I enjoy it.

The more detail oriented among you may enjoy this (PDF Alert) article about What Is an Employee Cooperative?

There’s even a bit of a club we can join.  Kind of a Star Trek Economics Chamber of Commerce.

Let’s just hope I’m not the ensign in the red shirt.

Kaplah, comrades!

• Stop being so boring.
• Stop assuming folks will appreciate introspective jokes.
• Separate ParticleWave and ASPWorkbench further – all the ASP and certification stuff on ASPWorkbench, and all the company related Employee Owned Software stuff on ParticleWave.
• ASPWorkbench will also need a reasonable home page.  Readers, don’t go there until  I do.  Trust me.  It’s not even sophomoric. 
• Rework the ParticleWave navigation to reflect the new division of labor.
• Publish the draft ParticleWave Employee Owned Software Company charter.
• Be not afraid of losing your day job.  You need to say what you need to say.  This is your outside blog.  Be of good cheer.
• Write your open source-ialism article.
• .htaccess Forward ParticleWave’s ASP content to ASPWorkbench.
• Get permission from your client to write about him, then do, putting the Portfolio page back up.
• Stop being so boring.
• Don’t repeat yourself.

Your first word of caution:  fiction writers say that if you want to make a character interesting, present him with adversity.  Unfortunately, presenting characters with adversity in real life doesn’t make us any more interesting – it only makes us write tutorials.  Expect delays.

Your second word of caution:  If you’re not writing about ASP.NET or adding a blog to an ASP.NET web site, or if you don’t need to be on an ASP.NET platform for some other good reason, what the hell are you thinking?  BlogEngine.net has some cool features, but for the most part Wordpress works significantly better.  There, I came out and said it.

Godaddy’s Support for BlogEngine.NET

I wasn’t able to do what I tried in the first go around, which was to just download the BlogEngine.net 1.5 release candidate and push it up to the site.  Perhaps I was tired after a long day of work, and your mileage may vary, but what I ended up doing was installing BlogEngine.Net it from Godaddy’s application control panel.  From the Hosting management page, click on the “Your Applications Link” (shown at left), then select “Blog” from the left hand navbar and then BlogEngine.Net.  In my case I got a compatibility warning because I was running IIS 7.0 in Integrated Mode rather than Classic Mode (who knew), so I had to click on “Purchase Compatible” then “Select compatible hosted domain” to work through what was going wrong, then return to “Content / IIS Configuration” to get it squared away.  Once I did that it was pretty much smooth sailing, but at one point I either messed up the application, so I needed to make sure my blog directory (where blogengine.net was installed) was configured as an application:

Clicking the edit pencil button brings up this window, and you want to make sure Set Application Root is checked:

Importing Wordpress Posts to BlogEngine.Net

You’re first step for this part of your journey is to get the  BlogML export tool from the Codeplex BlogML downloads page.  You want the download that says “Wordpress BlogML Export”.  When you unzip this file, you’ll get a single export.php that works as a replacement for the default Wordpress export page.  Backup up export.php in your <wordpress folder>/wp-admin directory, install this file, and run the Wordpress export from the admin panel to create a BlogML export.

Now at this point you might want to give some thought to manually reviewing this file and removing duplicate posts, which could be a very tedious process.  The export file created by this tool is likely to have any number of versions of some of your posts, and when you import into BlogEngine.net, your blog is going to stutter like a Porky Pig cartoon.  When you run the BlogEngine.net import tool, there’s a handy checkbox “Remove Duplicate Posts” you can check.  It doesn’t do anything, but you can check it.

Maybe if you’re running BlogEngine.Net 1.5 this has been fixed and it does something.  That would be nice.

Another quirky aspect of this tool is that it doesn’t give you any sort of progress indicator letting you know what’s going on, so while it’s doing the import it pretty much looks like it’s gone to lunch.  I recommend pushing the two validate buttons before you start the import, that way you know everything’s set up correctly, then be prepared to wait several minutes while it does its thing.

When it finishes, your posts will be there, complete with Porky Pig stutters, but you’ll find your categories and tags weren’t imported.  Oh well, what did I tell you at the beginning?  Adversity won’t make you interesting, it will only make you write a tutorial.

Converting Your Wordpress Theme

Next your ready to convert your Wordpress theme.  You’re probably not going to like this part, but here’s how I did it.  Open up your favorite text editor and file difference tool, pick a target third party BlogEngine.net theme such as “Standard”, and code yourself a theme, there, fella.  Here’s how mine turned out, combining the ASPWorkbench / ParticleWave theme with the Standard theme.

So there you have it!  Delete your duplicate posts, re-enter your categories, and rock and roll.