Antonio Chagoury

Upcoming Blog Features Part 3: Comments, Gravatars, and more!

antonio@inspectorit.com — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 03:53:00 GMT

Identification Icons

Identification icons are quickly becoming a popular way for bloggers to encourage responsible use of blog comments. A variety of solutions are available, all of which aim to provide useful benefits to the blog reader.

Identification icons allow blog readers to personalize their posts just like a forum avatar. The additional personalization may encourage responsible posting as well as increased commenting and discussion. Identification icons prevent users from impersonating one another, leading to more responsible posting. They also may prevent flaming, since a user tied to an identification icon will have to take additional steps to obfuscate their identity.

Version 3.4.1 of the Blog module supports all popular identification options available today:

Gravatar
Identicon
Wavicon
MonsterID

Gravatar, or Globally Recognized Avatar, provides an easy service that allows users to upload an image avatar that follows them from site to site. This simple solution ties the image to an email address, providing a very easy way for blog software to retrieve the image.

Identicons, Wavicons, and MonsterIDs are automatically generated images that can be used in place of a Gravatar in the event that the user does not want to create one. These images are generated by a hash of the user's email address (or IP address, in the event that the user chooses not to enter an email address).

One feature that may be unique to DotNetNuke is the ability for the user to instantly preview their image in the comments section before submitting their comments. As soon as the user enters their email address and tabs out of the email field, their Gravatar (or other icon) will automatically display in a preview area. As far as we know, this preview capability doesn't exist in any other blogging platform.

Other Comments Changes

We've included a few other improvements to the comments area as well:

Users can now enter a website address with their comment. This feature can be enabled or disabled by the blog owner
Blog owner can show or suppress unique comment titles
Blog owner's comments have a unique CSS tag, enabling them to stand out from other comments

Many thanks to Rip Rowan and Don Worthley for this great new feature.

Upcoming Blog Features Part 2: SEO Improvements

antonio@inspectorit.com — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 12:05:00 GMT

Blog Friendly URLs
An established best practice for SEO is for keywords relating to the content of a web page to appear in the page's URL (what is often called a "Human Friendly" URL). Among several established blog platforms this is put into practice by taking the title of the blog entry (which is often a semantically strong indicator of what the page is about) and putting it into the entry's URL. Version 03.04.01 introduces this functionality and it is activated via the "Module Options" screen.

After enabling this option you will no longer see references to “Default.aspx” in the URL, instead you will see an aspx reference made up on the blog entry’s title. Below is an example for a blog entry entitled 'Title of my blog entry':

Version 03.04.00 and earlier:
http://www.your domain.com/dnn/blog/tabid/825/EntryID/1865/Default.aspx
Version 03.04.01:
http://www.your domain.com/dnn/blog/tabid/825/EntryID/1865/Title-of-my-blog-entry.aspx

Removal of duplicate content issue (i.e. having exactly same content at two or more different URLs):
Another well established SEO best practice is to avoid having the same content reachable via two distinct URLs. This was a problem in version 03.03.00 (and earlier) , here they are:

A "Friendly URL" for the blog entry, found in the page listing blog entries.
A "Permalink" version, linked at the bottom of a blog entry in version 03.03.00 and earlier

With version 03.04.00 the "Permalink" was removed from the bottom of the blog entries - hence addressing part of this issue, however, the issue was not fully resolved since both versions of the URL continued to appear in the RSS feed generated by the module (the friendly URL would appear between the tag in the RSS feed, while the tag contained the Permalink version of the URL). Some well-established web-based RSS readers (including Newsgator & Google Reader) use the URL when providing a link to a blog entry, hence those subscribing to a DNN blog’s RSS feed would be directed to content using the Permalink version of the link. In version 03.04.00 the tag contains the new Human-Friendly version of the URL.

Updating the “Regenerate all permalinks” function:
To reinforce the value of the two SEO improvements above the "regenerate all permalinks" function (found at the bottom of the "Module Options" screen) has been updated so that you can regenerate the "Permalinks" for all its blog entries for the given instance of the blog module.
You will need to execute this "regeneration" individually for each instance of the blog module in your DNN portal(s) if you want all blog permalinks in a portal to be recalculated.

Unique Page Titles:
One of the most important “identifications” used by search engines when determining the importance of a page (and the scope of its content) is the text contained the tag of your page (found in the header section of an HTML page). It is therefore vital that an individual blog entry has a unique title tag appearing in the HTML header. The option to have a unique title tag for a blog entry can now be switched on in the "Module Options" screen. The title tag that will be generated for a blog entry will have the following format: <blockquote dir="ltr" style="margin-right: 0px"> <title>[X] - [Y]

Where:

[X] is the title of the page on which the DNN module has been installed

[Y] is the title given to the blog entry.

Insertion of the rel="nofollow" attribute on hyperlinks added in blog comments:
The element rel="nofollow" will now be systemically added to all website links provided in the comment field (and also to all websites entered in the new "Your website" field that is provided for those leaving a comment, more on thisnew feature in subsequent entry). Adding of the rel="nofollow" attribute to a hyperlink indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines). This is an established SEO best practice for blogs by deterring link spammers from maliciously flooding comment fields with unwanted links to websites (in an effort to “bleed” authority from your site in the eyes of search engines).

Future SQL Plans:
One of the most glaring omissions for the blog module, in terms of SEO, is the ability of the module to automatically generate a unique description meta tag for each blog entry. The plan is to address this in a future version.

Many thanks to Eoghan O'Neill for his insight, expertise, and relentless dedication to testing and re-testing and for keeping us developers on our toes to make sure all these enhancements were carried out to spec.

Upcoming Blog Features Part 1: Social Bookmarks

antonio@inspectorit.com — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:01:00 GMT

Hello Everyone,

We've been a little silent lately, but I assure you, a LOT has been going on.

First of all, we have been "recruiting" like crazy, and we have put together an awesome team that I am proud to be part of, more on this on another blog entry.

We have also been busy wrapping up development of the next version of the Blog module (3.4.1). I know I have said this before, but I mean it this time when I say that this will be last version of the current Blog module. We will be re-writing the entire thing from scratch as soon as this is released, but meanwhile we wanted to get some of the most pressing features included with this release.

This blog entry is the first one of a series of entries that I will be posting to talk about the new stuff that you will find in 3.4.1.

We finally added social bookmarks! To enable social bookmarks on your blogs, simply go to the "Module Options" screen and enable the social bookmarks. Once you have done this you will not the social bookmarks appear at the bottom of your blog entries (as show in the screen capture below).

There currently is no control over "which" bookmarks to display. We have left this admin feature out of this release but will be included in the new and improved version of the blog module.

The supported bookmarks sites are as follows:

Del.icio.us

Facebook (Share function)

Digg

Google

Live

Newsvine

StumbleUpon

Technorati

Yahoo

DotNetKick (For the geeks amongst us)

As usual, please let me know your thoughts and make sure to enter your suggestions for improving this feature at http://support.dotnetnuke.com

New Blog Team Member: Welcome Don Worthley!

antonio@inspectorit.com — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:55:00 GMT

It gives me great pleasure to welcome Don Worthley to the Blog Team.

Don is an experienced .net developer and a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT). He has been very active in the community forums and diligently answering your questions and helping out wherever and whenever possible.

Don is a great addition to the team, and I am personally glad to have him on board to help shape the future of the Blog module.
Please join me in giving him a warm welcome.

P.S: There is room for more, so if you are interested in being part of this team please let me know.