By benjaminhowarth on Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:43:10 GMT

As you may or may not be aware, I am a moderator on the Bytes Technology Forums, overseeing classic ASP forums but kicking around other areas like HTML/CSS, JavaScript/AJAX, SQL Server, Access, and .NET forums - basically a bit of a jack-of-all trades.

Recently the mod team has been discussing a desktop assistant for drafting and composing posts from a background app that sits dormant in your status bar until you decide you want to use it.

My online colleague insertAlias (aka Curtis) has just finished the first feature release which can be downloaded from the project repository on CodePlex.

I've installed it successfully on my Vista Business laptop and it seems pretty cool. I like the way it minimises to the taskbar, although it only comes pre-shipped with one template for the Bytes forum. I do like, however, the option of multiple forums...

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By benjaminhowarth on Sat, 27 Sep 2008 23:06:56 GMT

I'm about to set up a new website, powered by DotNetNuke (my favourite CMS at the moment, mainly because it's free), and I want to install a Counter-Strike game server onto the same machine. I also want a little module that will show visitors to my site how many people are logged onto the CS server and some basic stats. Sounds simple right? The problem is that when Counter-Strike server is installed, the database name is generated at random. So I can't create a connection string that points to a data source because I don't know the name of the database. However, I do know what the CS tables look like. In SQL Server, there's no way of obtaining all the table names in all the database just by running one query. So, I created a bit of code which:

Gets all the databases on the server; Queries the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.tables table, which holds the names of all the tables in the database; Return the name of the database which contains the CS tables (in this case, cs_server). The following piece of code does...

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By benjaminhowarth on Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:40:52 GMT

Hi guys,

Well, the portfolio page has changed a bit! I've added this really cool Javascript effect known as FancyZoom, and extended to work with Prototype and Scriptaculous. As an aside, DotNetNuke has native compatibility with two Javascript/AJAX frameworks - Project Atlas (or ASP.NET AJAX) and Prototype, but can't be made to work with any other frameworks like Mootools, jQuery and so on.

Funky little way of saving space on the page with a nice UI effect. Only downside is no AJAX, but DNN works with Atlas and Prototype has it's own AJAX library, so extending it won't pose too big a problem.

To make it search-engine optimised, I've done a couple of little CSS tricks. The first one is that the images themselves are background-images, not tags. The second one...

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By benjaminhowarth on Thu, 18 Sep 2008 02:15:42 GMT

 

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By benjaminhowarth on Tue, 16 Sep 2008 02:49:29 GMT

 

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By benjaminhowarth on Tue, 16 Sep 2008 02:34:08 GMT

 

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By benjaminhowarth on Sat, 13 Sep 2008 18:05:27 GMT

benjaminhowarth.com finally goes live!

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