Blog and News from Keylinx.com

kXBlog
Author: Tobias (Keylinx) Created: Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:38:17 GMT
A blog experience of Keylinx.com

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:19:45 GMT

Hi there,

There is really busy days now. I will soon leave for a new location, which can make me a little unavailable from time to time. So if you don't get answers right away, bare with me, I am probably moving around looking for a hot spot where I can check my emails and PM :).

Now over to something else. As some of you have noticed, there is no longer information about the kXGallery on this site. The reason is that we want to give you a glimse at the v2.0 instead of the old version. The new version will hopefully hit the shelves in the middle of september and will contain a lot of improvements and new features.

 

The major change is that there will be availability to arrange your images and other content in albums. That means that for each module instance you will be able to arrange a tree structure of content. Other new features is that you can let the users comment and rate your pictures.

 

Some new improvements are that you will now be able to use a different CSS for each instance of kXGallery. You will be able to inject existing modules as well as other cool features, like reading the meta data from jpg files to name the pictures right. All this to help you bulk insert and save some boring job.

 

Enough rambling now. There is still some summer left, so go out and have fun in the sun. Buy a beer or an ice cream :)

Cheers!

/Tobias

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Fri, 08 Aug 2008 04:40:12 GMT

Yes! Another release from us within the same week. There is a lot of interest in this module right now, so we decided to let everybody have a chance to buy it. For the moment you can only buy it at snowcovered, but it will be released on DNN Market Place shortly, and of course here as well when we get our web shop up and running.

Meanwhile, if you register at our site, you can download a 10 days evaluation version of the kXScroll. So please do so!

/Tobias - Keylinx.com

 

 

 

 

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:29:29 GMT

Finally, there is a new version of our png fix module. This time I think we have put together the best javascripts for fixing opacity problems in IE5.5 and IE6 for you. Head over to snowcovered to pick it up. New features for this version are:

  • Added new javascript for fixing both img and css pngs
  • Added ability to choose which script that shall be generated
  • Added ability to delay the execution of the javascripts in case the page is loading slow and the images are not loaded before the javascript gets executed

Good luck with your skins out there. Be sure though that you read what you can and can't do with png fixes.

/Tobias

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:29:08 GMT

Well, we recently put out the kXScroll on our site here to see if it met the standards and to see if we could track down some more issues before releasing it. We found a couple of more issues, often related to having different kind of scroll instances on the same page. All of them is corrected now, and we also came across the Cambrian Beta 6 (DNN 5) to test our modules on the next version of DotNetNuke. There has been a lot of changes to the .dnn file in Cambrian, but it works ok with the old .dnn format as well. One thing, we had to change extension on our license file, since it otherwise warns about that file.

All these things together makes this one of the best scroll modules (if not the best?) in the DotNetNuke eco system today. We realised that there is so much more going on in this version than v1.4 which makes us realise that we have to call this as a major upgrade instead. So there will never be a v1.5 released. The new version will be kXScroll v2.0 and nothing else. Be sure that you pick this one up when this is released (we're talking days now).

/Tobias

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:42:26 GMT

As you can see on the kXScroll demo page, we are now trying the kXScroll v1.5. So far we have not encountered any problems and we are very excited about this new version since it contains so much new cool features. How about automatic scrolling on vertical and horizontal scrolls. We also decided to put in a google map drag and drop scrolling feature on the grid mode. If you use it on master item mode, then you can produce a very cool effect. On top of that we also introduce two new scroll modes. Those are used for news tickers. They can be paused by hovering over and you can of course set which speed you wish them to scroll. Look out for the release!

 

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:18:15 GMT

Welcome to the new version of Keylinx.com. We have been working a lot with the new design and new content as well as new features. The site is not quite finished yet, so wait and see, there is still much more information to come. We have also moved to a new location. The site is now hosted by 3Essentials.com in U.S, so hopefully that will improve the stability and speed of the site.

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Mon, 26 May 2008 02:21:29 GMT

Yes, I know that having a blog should force you to write something in it once in a while. Here, lately (the last couple of months) have been crazy with work. I am currently working on new versions for the module products that a lot of people in the DNN community come to love. Meanwhile I am doing some custom DNN development for a couple of customers and above that, I am a dotnet consultant on a regular 9 to 5 job :).

Well I took some time last week to upgrade this site to 4.8.2. It seems like there is a 4.8.3 coming up soon because of a security exploit. Hopefully this will be out for us non PowerDNN customer as well ;). As we all support a great community and have customers and suppliers living on this platform, it is very important that we all work together when there are issues around the platform which can cause disasters. In this case I hope they straigthen up the communication in the future.

Two releases are scheduled within this summer. The kXScroll will at last have its automatic scrolling feature. Sorry, I should have put that in a couple of months ago, but time were running short as I mentioned above. The kXGallery will also be released with some new features, the main thing is that you can have several albums in one module.

 

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:14:35 GMT

So the goal is to have this site running 4.8 of DotNetNuke within a week or two. The first attempt I did was to do the upgrade in one step 4.5 -> 4.8 (yes I am lazy ). That did not work for some reason. So I quickly restored my backup and went back to upgrading one version at a time. Actually it should work to do the one step upgrade, however doing it this way may teach me one or two thing about upgrading DNN on the way.

There is some problems that can be easily solved if you know what you are doing, this is how I should have done it, but for some reason did not.

  1.  Do a backup of your DNN folder on the web site. You will definitly be needing that. God knows what files that may be misplaced on the way.
  2. When you're at it, do a backup of your database as well. You never know what happens to it, when the evil sql-scripts of the DNN upgrade starts to shred your little tables filled with lovely data for your site.
  3. Ok that was trivial, then start up winzip or some other extractor tool of your choice. Use the upgrade version from DotNetNuke download area and point it to extract in your DNN folder on the web server. Say 'yes to all' for every file it wants to replace.
  4. Now go to the DNN folder, rename release.config to web.config
  5. Open up the web.config and your old web.config in the backup folder (from step 1).
  6. In my case there were three important things to copy from the old web.config
    i) The section. If not then you will not be able to run the upgrade, instead DNN will assume that you are doing a clean install and send you to the InstallWizard. 
    ii) The key "SiteSqlServer" from the section. If not then some modules won't work. For instance in my case, I noticed that Blog module and Users Online module stopped working.
    iii) Finally the section filed under the section in the config file is good to copy. If you don't do it. The user login function will not work, since password hashing is based upon the keys provided here.
  7. Browse in to your DNN installation using your web browser (I was using http://localhost/dnn at that time, but using the normal url will hopefully work too). The DNN starts to execute the upgrade scripts. Once done, your portal is now using 4.6.2. Enjoy!

Well that was it for this time. Hope this short step-by-step list will help you out.

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Sun, 03 Feb 2008 02:03:25 GMT

I checked the database for this site today. As you can see there is not very much special things on this site. There is a couple of pages with information and a blog. When checking the size for it, I was stunned. The database file was over 600MB large!!!

So what will cause the database to grow that much? I started up my SQL Server Manager tool, and started to browse around the tables. The first thing I checked was the log tables and particulary EventLog table. There it was, over 74,000 rows with a lot of data in each row. It seems like the problem here is that the Event Log Viewer is logging everything by default, and it stores a lot of data. Clearing the log made the database shrunk to approx 10MB instead!

There is some valuable tips for this one:

1) On each installation, go to menu Admin->Event Viewer.

2)Go through all settings, see if you really need to log that much rows in your database.

3)Use the email feature, that will alert you when a serious error has occured. Although it seems that there is a bug in the DNN Core that spams the Event Log.

Hopefully this one is fixed in a newer version. As mentioned earlier, this is an installation that runs an old version.

 

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Sat, 02 Feb 2008 18:22:41 GMT

Yes, since there's been a busy autumn with releasing and maintaining our modules, there have been little time for maintaining the site. I believe however that one shall always run the latest version of DNN. For one reason, we must ensure that our modules works on the latest version. But also for security and stability on our site. Shortly we will try to move our location to a web host in United States. That is because our customer base is located there, and we want to ensure that they have quick response time to our site.

This forces me to have better understanding and control over the site. The database must not oversize, for one reason that it will be expensive to buy additional database space. The latest version must be used because we must keep up with the version that the hosting company uses.

Well I am no pro, doing this things and I will surely encounter some bumps on the road here. I thought I will keep you updated on the progress and give you some advice on what problem I have solved to get going.

Cheers!

kXBlog

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