Will Strohl's Blog

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been on the top of most minds in the website design and development for many years now, so I won’t bore you with details about what it is and why it’s important.  At this point, that should be obvious.  However, maintaining your SEO is a never-ending challenge.  This is never more apparent than when you switch platforms on the web, no matter how big or small that platform may be.  I have recently run into such a challenge.

Some of you may be already running your DotNetNuke user group meetings.  If that is the case, let this be a refresher or a guide.  For the rest of us, this is meant as a reference to help you plan out your first meeting, or the ongoing logistics of future meetings.  If you’re doing the right things, holding the meeting should be the least amount of work for a user group leader every month.  It should begin to run itself…

Yesterday I wrote a blog that introduced you to 4 new user groups that are having their first meetings very soon.  At the end of the blog there was also a question, “Do you want to start your own user group?”  As a result, I got a very good question that is very common.  “What’s the best way to find out if there is any interest for a user group in our area?”

User groups in general are great.  They do for the average person what few other venues and mediums can…  They connect people in meaningful ways.  Sure, you can log onto your favorite social network and find people with similar interests, but you have to build a relationship first.  That takes time.  At a user group, everyone is there for the same reason.  They all want to learn more about the overall topic.  Once you share a slice of pizza or a drink with your fellow user group members, you have quite possibly built a meaningful relationship for life.

It’s always kind of difficult to tell what modules will become popular when you create them.  For the most part, I really don’t care because usually the modules I release to you and the rest of the DotNetNuke community are those that I built specifically for a specific need I had anyway.  However, Content Slider module was meant to fulfill a need.  There was a gap in the Forge.  As a result, this module has had over 3,500 downloads in about 6 months.  THANK YOU for enjoying this module so much!

Today, I finally dedicated some time to give the Content Injection Module for DotNetNuke some much needed love.  Fortunately, there aren’t too many reported issues or requested features, so the update went quickly and smoothly.

It’s that time again…  This is one of my more popular modules, so I need to make sure it gets some attention from time to time.  There was plenty to do too.  Thankfully, all of the scoped updates for this release were fairly easy to implement, requiring minimal time.  Don’t tell anyone I said that though…  It was really, really hard work!  Hahaha!

The next version of the Media Module for DotNetNuke is once again here!  In previous releases, ground-breaking features like oEmbed were added.  In future releases, expect to see mobile rendering and HTML5 to be in the mix.  Today, there were a handful of things that needed to be taken care of before taking this module to the next level.

First, I would like to thank everyone for the feedback and support since the original release of this module.  It’s been quite interesting.  This module has many things planned for it, but I did want to make sure it lived in the wild for a bit to fix any issues that have been found before I begin adding more features.  As it turns out, there were two significant fixes that were required.

Many of you are not even aware that the Open Graph Protocol even exists.  However, it has been the backbone of inter-connected websites ever since social sharing of content and web pages has existed.  This is the standard that Facebook, Google+, and others have adopted to properly connect, share, and display content from site to site when a visitor decides to share it.  Of course, like any other standard, every site varies on how well they adopt this particular standard.