Will Strohl's Blog

As you may or may not have realized, we at Upendo Ventures put up a content bounty last month. We challenged the community to do two things... First, create new content to help promote content related to DNN and DNN Summit. Second, we wanted all of you to spread the word to the rest of the community to help generate the content, but also simply to just spread the good word that is DNN. Here are the results of that bounty.

DNN Summit is right around the corner, and this year it's going to be a hybrid event. Those of us who are willing and able, will be meeting up in Las Vegas, but the majority of the event will happen online again. I wanted to let you know what we - Upendo Ventures - are doing for you this time...

Google Analytics is often taken-for-granted in too many ways. When the average company thinks about Google Analytics, they simply ensure their Google Analytics code is in place and they keep track of what I refer to as vanity metrics. Copy. Paste. Done, right? Vanity metrics are quite deceiving, to be honest, and you’re only scratching the surface with what you could (and probably should) be doing with Google Analytics. In this article, we’re going to discuss how to dive deeper into your Google Analytics integration to grow your business.

If you didn’t already know, CMS is an acronym for “content management system.”  A CMS is used by many developers, consultancies, and companies to build their website.  It’s an incredibly common thing to do, as any flavor of CMS you choose will always save you effort and money, compared to building a website from nothing.  This is especially true if you look at the lifetime investment of your website.  Using a CMS framework or solution of some kind just seems to make sense.  After all, this is what I’ve built my own career upon since 2001.  However, then, CMS was known as a portal or portal framework.  That’s a long time ago, so it’s not a bad idea to take stock of things every now and thing to see if what you’re doing is the correct thing.  To this end, I asked myself, “How is CMS doing right now, and does it make sense to still be doing CMS-related work in the future?”

In this episode, we have the pleasure to speak with another veteran of the DNN community, Mandeep Singh.  Mandeep is the CEO and founder of Mandeeps, one of the most successful and seasoned vendors in the DNN ecosystem.  Like some of our previous guests, Mandeep has been using DNN since the beginning – and it shows.  He and his team have been extremely successful in building up a large following of customers due to their focus on usability and support.  As you’ll soon find out, they are raising the bar with the latest Live Forms release.

It’s been several years since I last updated the skin on my site.  Thanks to Ralph Williams, the site is looking really good again and it’s responsive.  If you need a new design for your site, I highly recommend him.  However, the process to get to this blog post was quite tumultuous – chock full of hours troubleshooting and continuous frustration spread over the past week.  Simply put, my site “appeared” to be loading okay whenever I came to it, but I rarely browsed my own site.  The process of rolling out my new design had revealed to me that this couldn’t be further from the truth. 

There has been a program offered by Telerik for some time now, where they will sponsor speakers to give presentations to user groups and code camps.  This was partially an effort to further ensure the quality and existence of user groups since they saw a decline in user group activity in 2008.  The list was never very long, but until now, I didn’t realize how short the list really is.  Telerik announced their Insiders Program today.

This will be a quick post.  I just wanted to let all of my readers know about a tool that Rob Chartier found today.  It’s called jQueryPad.  This is an editor built specifically for jQuery developers to use to build out any jQuery code that they want.  Although I have two specific features on my personal wish list, this tool is outstanding!