Most of you reading this article are probably saying, “Ya we know DOCTYPE is the first thing you add.”   I mean man it is on the top of the page.

Well anyway just a couple days ago, I had a friend of whom I generally trust his markup skills come to me with a center align issue in IE7.

I took about 5 minutes and combed through the site via Firebug and the Developer Toolbar (kind of like Firebug for IE)  I couldn’t  see any good reason that his main container div should not be centered.

The CSS and markup was right and the parent container element looked like it wasn’t causing any interference.  I have to admit for a minute I was stumped.

Well my last step was to pull out the source markup and check for unclosed div elements.  (I was getting desperate).  In doing this I saw he had no DOCTYPE!  This was making IE7 run in quirks mode.  When my friend added the DOCTYPE his page magically worked the way it was supposed to.

So that you guys and gals don’t make the same mistake, I included below what I should have done in this situation.  (I use the excuse that my friend normally wouldn’t make this mistake, and that’s why I didn’t follow the below steps.)

Okay I should have looked at the markup first and made sure there was a DOCTYPE.  Secondly I should have run the site through validation.

There ya have it.  A small post on the importance of a DOCTYPE.  I hope it has helped.  I also have a couple links below to good DOCTYPE information.

• A List Apart article on DOCTYPEs
• An article on Quirks mode
• One more article on Quirks mode with some links of it’s own.

I don’t know about you all, but in my Internet Explorer 8, I seem to get dead tabs a fair amount.  I will open up a new tab and type in a URL and it will tell me that it is connecting for; umm, well just about forever.  I have found that if I close that tab and open another it is still dead.  The only way around this is to open up another tab and hope that it would work.  If it didn’t I would have to just open another tab, keeping the old dead ones up.

I also noticed that it was hit and miss, and I could not figure out a pattern.

I was at a point where I was only using Chrome and Firefox on my PC because of this.  I wanted very badly to give IE8 a fair try, but I couldn’t get past this one VERY irritating issue.

Finally I got wise and “Google'd” (maybe I should have “Binged”) the issue and I found an article about it.  The answer is as follows.

It looks like the issue is related to the Loosely-Coupled feature in IE8.  In order to fix this, you will need to brave the registry.  Below are the instructions.

• Go to Start, type “regedit” in the search box, right click the regedit program, and choose Run as Administrator.
• You may be prompted to continue.
• In the registry editor click the arrow to expand a selection.
• Expand, HKEY_CURRENT_USER,
• then Software
• then Microsoft
• then Internet Explorer
• now select Main.
• Check for an option on the right list named “TabProcGrowth”,
• If it’s there double click on the item and set it to either “0” or “1”  (see below for details).
• If it’s not there, then you will need to create it
• Right click on the Main folder (in the left list) and selecting New, DWORD (32-bit) Value.
• “New Value #” should be created on the right.  You should be able to rename it now to “TabProcGrowth”
• Then double click on “TabProcGrowth” (the one you just created) and set to “0” or “1” as desired (see below).
• Restart Internet Explorer for this to take effect.

Below is a short explanation to what the choices 0 or 1 do.

Setting this to “0” will cause Internet Explorer to crash entirely if a tab crashes.
Setting this to “1” will allow Internet Explorer tabs to crash and recover without completely closing Internet Explorer.  (I recommend choosing 1)

There is also another good article on IE8 that has to do with this registry setting.

After I did that, my IE8 is actually working as I want it. 

I hope this helps those out there who really want to give IE8 a good fair try.

JUNK!!!  WORTHLESS!!!

This may seem harsh, but I will explain why those are the first two words that come to mind for me.

I have had IX Web Hosting for about a year and a half now, and have seen many a thing I do not like about this hosting provider.  When I first signed up for IX Web Hosting, I was excited and drawn to the fact that they could offer unlimited disk space and unlimited MSSQL 2005 databases.  I thought, “Woo Hoo way to go!”

Well, I was dumb for signing up for the hype.  At first everything was pretty good.  Then as the time past, I found I couldn’t do a simple DotNetNuke 4.9 install because the MSSQL server was timing out.  I looked on the SQL server (via SQL Management Studio) and found hundreds of databases.  They were overloading the SQL server.  (I guess I should have expected this will unlimited space right.  Oh well I live and learn)

Soon after that I started to notice that all my websites were running very slow.  (Once again, what should I expect from unlimited space right?)

Lastly, what is going to make me move my sites off IX Web Hosting is the fact that the server my websites are on crashed a couple days ago and it took them over 35 HOURS (no that’s not minutes, that’s HOURS) to come back up.

I chatted with their support a whole lot in those 35+ hours and never once did I get the same answer.  I got everything from maintenance, to what I believe was the truth when they said the server died and was being reconstructed and that files were being brought back over to the new replacement server.  I also was told many times that I should wait a couple hours and all would be good.  Finally the last time I chatted with support they said they couldn’t give me an ETA.

All in all, unless you are looking to find hosting for a website that isn’t important, do NOT use IXWebHosting!  I promise if you do, you will be disappointed.

~Michael Silva  (MikePixel)

Today I was working on implementing search on a customers website I am doing in the DotNetNuke CMS.  At first I thought this would be automatic and mostly set up.  I instead found that I needed to adjust some thing, so I have put together a small blog entry to help other out who may be having similar issue setting up their blogs.

I have below the three biggest keys to search success on your DotNetNuke site and in your DNN skins.

First, Skinning to include Search

The first thing to do is to include the Register TagPrefix at the top of your .ascx skin file as shown below.

<%@ Register TagPrefix="dnn" TagName="SEARCH" Src="~/Admin/Skins/Search.ascx" %>

Second, Add the control to your skin.

Figure out where you want the search bar to be and place the following code inside your html markup.

<dnn:SEARCH runat="server" id="dnnSEARCH"  CssClass="dnn_search" UseDropDownList="true" Submit="<img src=&quot;images/search.png&quot; border=&quot;0&quot; alt=&quot;Search&quot; /&gt;" />

Attributes explained

• CssClass  (is used in the CSS style sheet to style your search box)
• UseDropDownList  (used if you want a dropdown web/site pick menu within the search box)
• If you don’t want a drop down menu just don’t include this attribute
• Submit  (is used to replace the words submit with an image)
• ShowWeb (false or true)(used to hide web from search options)(default true)
• ShowSite (false or true)(used to hide or show site from search options)(default true)

Third, Make sure the Search Results module is on the Search Results page.

This seems like a no brainer and it is usually set up for you.  If you are not getting any search results, go to your admin menu and select pages.  Once on your pages list go to the Search Results page and make sure to add the Search Result module just like you would any module to the content area you want the search results to display in.

That is about it.  It is not overly hard to add search to your skins in DotNetNuke.