A week ago I got a little tired of dealing with the Core menus offered with DotNetNuke.  I decided I needed something better.  I am a web standards guy and I really wanted something that would spit out unordered lists of my menus, so I could style them however I wanted with CSS.

I looked around and there were two possibilities that I could find and that were recommended.  HouseMenu by House of Nuke and CSS NavMenu by Snapsis.

I checked out House of Nuke first mainly because I had heard of it in the DNN community more than Snapsis.   After cruising their website for a few minutes, and I realized that if I was using DNN 5.01, I might have an issue with HouseMenu.  The reason I say this is that there is a forum post that has been unanswered from three months ago in regards to whether or not anyone has gotten HouseMenu to work with DNN 5.

I am not saying anything bad about House of Nuke.  They have done some great things from what I have heard.  It just looks like they are a bit behind in updates.

My next step was to check out Snapsis.  I cruised their site and they had a lot of examples and demos.  This was great to run against Firebug so I see what was really happening behind the scenes.  This provided me with the ability to see what markup was going to be used and let me figure out what my limitations might be with CSS styling. (if any)

After about an hour of research I decided to buy.

Today I was very glad I bought the CSS NavMenu.  It is very simple to use and allows for some great options.  I can even choose (via different properties to the Snapsis:NavMenu control in the skin) what exact parts I want to display on my menu.   This was great for the menu I was doing today. 

My customer wanted me to create a vertical list menu that only displayed the children of a certain top level menu item. (Services)  By adding the IncludeTabs property and then the ShowType=”ChildrenOnly” property I could do exactly that.

<Snapsis:NavMenu id="SellNav" Level="1-1" CacheTabs="False"
                            NavType="Tabs"
                            IncludeTabs="Services" ShowType="ChildrenOnly" runat="server" />

Then all I had to do was style the list and viola, it was done.

So all in all I have been very impressed with Snapsis and their menus.  Some day I will do some tutorials on this site for those who want to do some more complicated menus.

Okay some days I think the folks at Telligent give us too many choices.  Last week I tried to make it so the user’s full name would display instead of their username.  Were this mattered were in the blogs my customers were in charge of.  I got a request that they didn’t like the username showing up.

I thought that this would be no sweat, and I adjusted it in the Blog Administration, and called it good.  Well today I got to looking and it still was NOT right.  I double checked the work I had done last week and it was still set the way I had left it.  I was a bit confused.

I ended up finding out that you also need to set this per user.  As an admin you can lookup the customers/users account and change it under the “Site Options” tab.  You can also have your user do it in the same area where he or she changes account information.

I hope that helps.  I know it was frustrating and not very intuitive for me.

I just finished moving CornerPixel’s main website to ReliableSite.Net’s hosting.  Originally I had www.cornerpixel.net hosted on IXWeb Hosting.  The draw to IXWeb hosting was the unlimited disk space and unlimited SQL 2005 databases.  IXWeb hosting was good for a little while, and I was some what happy with their services and technical support.

Soon however things got slooooowwwwww.  I found that all that space was too good to be true.  Everyone else was jumping on the bandwagon and doing things like FTP was horribly painful.  My site being mainly just static content seemed to perform okay.  I also had several DotNetNuke sites on IXWeb hosting and they loaded fairly okay.  I was also having issues trying to install new DotNetNuke sites because the SQL server was so overloaded that the process would time out and fail.

So having said all that, I have moved www.cornerpixel.net to ReliableSite.Net.  The site is zippy and so far the support has been good. 

My next step is to move the blog.  I think I will use this opportunity to change from Das Blog to WordPress.

~Michael Silva - MikePixel

My last post was going over issues I had setting up NLB clustered servers within an ESX or VMware environment. 

I thought I had it all figured out and then I had another issue.  Whenever I would restart one of the NLB servers, the other server and the host would be unreachable.  I had a –t ping up to all three IP’s to troubleshoot the issue.

I did some research and found that VMware recommends to use Multicast, and that if you used Unicast, there were a couple steps to follow.   (Wouldn’t you know I was using Unicast.  We are using Unicast because the network guys didn’t want to add ARP entries to our switches at the moment.)

Being that the vSwitch sends out RARP broadcasts to the switch, you need to set the “Notify Switches” to be NO.

Below are the steps.

Within your VI Client

• click on the Host name in the left column.
• click on Network under “Hardware” column.
• click on Properties on the right (next to remove)

This window will pop up.

Next …

• click on VM Network as shown above
• click “Edit” button

This window will pop up.

Next ….

• click on the NIC Teaming tab
• make sure the “Notify Switches dropdown is set to No
• click OK
• click close on the vSwitch properties window

Now you should have NO issues. 

Remember however that it is not recommended to use Unicast with ESX NLB clusters.  Unless you run into some reason not to, I would recommend using Multicast.

I hope this helps,

Michael Silva - MikePixel