I've used quite a few image replacement techniques in web design in the past to create better typography for the web. But recently I've ran into a technique improved by Scott Kellum that proved to be effective as well as enhancing the performance of the site.

If you're a web designer, you've probably heard of Fahrner Image Replacement technique. It's essentially using CSS text-indent property and set it to a very larger negative number such as -9999px so the text isn't visible to users.

This year DayOfDNN is hosted in Charlotte, NC on June 2. Although the timing of the event isn't perfect for me since I've been on an extended vacation and now trying to catch up with things. But I've never been to Charlotte before so I'm looking forward to visiting.

I'm speaking this year on the responsive design topic. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it is a technique to create websites and web apps targeting various devices based on their resolution.

I look forward to meeting with old friends and making ones at this event. It'll be a great one! Just in case you're going, below is the description of my talk. See if you can make it and I'd love to chat more about it if you are interested in learning how.

If you're running an online business I assume you have already designed your fan pages on Facebook. If you haven't I don't think it's too late to jump into the bandwagon and join everyone out there. Many companies like Intel or Nokia have their own design on this social network and it creates quite a nice experience for users instead of staring at the old blue default color of Facebook.

For those of you who are very tedious about front-end performance of websites, you’re probably already  familiar with a few techniques to minimize loading resources from the core DotNetNuke framework such as CSS and Javascripts. As long as those files are just for presentation and can be addressed in skin.css or skin.js, this approach helps tremendously with site performance and creates a much better experience for site visitors.

I consider myself to be pretty detail-oriented when it comes to designing and building websites. I spend quite a bit of time on the very small details until I’m happy with it. Sometimes it’s a good thing; sometimes it’s bad because the ROI might not be worth it.

Over the years I have been a strong web standards advocate and implemented most of my projects using its foundations. Since I joined DotNetNuke Corp. in mid-March, I was lucky to be part of the transformation of the administrative user interface (UI) to a modern standard. This effort brings many benefits to the platform for both business and end-users.

If you are not familiar with many benefits web standards have to offer, I suggest reading a few helpful posts by the folks at Web Standards Project and the Mozzila Wiki before continue reading this post to understand why DotNetNuke has gone through a major overhaul of UI changes.

The DotNetNuke Design Challenge announced a few weeks ago and the submissions are all in. I know many of you are as excited as I am to see what our community has produced this year. My first impression is that every year we can see our community grows from creative aspect to technical implementation. You’ll agree with me when you see the published submissions here.

The next step is pretty simple: voting!

We’re now open for public voting for the ‘Community Favorite’. You can vote once a day and be automatically entered into a daily drawing to win prizes. But before you jump off and start reviewing designs and voting for your favorite, make sure you read the notes below.

The skin contest last year was a great opportunity for many people to show off their skills while ‘giving back’ to the community with their free skins and design.

Since the technology landscape is always changing, the User Experience team thinks it’s time to challenge our community once again in the DotNetNuke Design Challenge so everyone can get involved by building something cool (if you haven’t already).

As you might know, DotNetNuke skinning involves more than just writing semantic markup and packaging files; we want to show the world the powerful skinning engine with freedom to creativity. We are proud to bring you the third contest this year!There are fewer categories this year and more awesome prizes!

We’re proud to announce this year keynote speaker at Day of DotNetNuke Chicago event is Nik Kalyani. If you haven’t been around the community much, Nik Kalyani is one of the co-founders of DotNetNuke Corp. He’s a real talented individual who wears many hats within DotNetNuke.

Nik has been an integral part of the ecosystem. With his creative and the passion for innovation within community, he has led many DotNetNuke engagements. The most recent community engagement is DNN mobile Hackathon in St. Louis which received tremendous support from people not just from St. Louis but across the country.

I just want to make quick update to everyone who has been following the Day of DotNetNuke Chicago event coming up in October. We’re now have published our list of awesome speakers and wonderful sessions. Check out the site and learn more about those respected community and core team members.

There are plenty of sessions that are aiming to help you get up to speed or learning the best practices when walking away from the event. Whatever your background might be, we have broad list of topics that should help satisfying your thirst of DotNetNuke knowledge. Day Of DotNetNuke Chicago topics include design, mobile development, content administration, ecosystem, and development.

The date of the event is fast approaching and I hope you all have your schedule straightened out to attend the Day of DotNetNuke Chicago conference coming up. If not, go ahead and get your hotel booked using our list of hotels with speacial rates on our site.

We’ve been getting great submissions from speakers across the country and even from the neighrboring countries. This event is going to be an awesome one with great content, respected speakers, and wonderful networking opportunities!

I apologize for not being able to publish the details about speakers and sessions just yet, along with my day job and other approaching deadlines I’m working hard on it. Realizing there isn’t excuse for it (plus there are too many speakers and sessions to review), I’ll be able to get together with the team and publish the details early next week on our site.

I’m pleased to announce the call for speakers for the second Day of DotNetNuke event in North America.

This year we will gather in the Chicagoland area for this free event serving those who are interested in learning about this world’s largest open source .NET web content management system and development framework.

Our focus in organizing the upcoming Chicago event is to provide high quality educational content for the community and to provide opportunities for in-person networking and socializing. Of course, great speakers and quality content are key ingredients to a successful conference.

It is unfortunate that the long-awaited Day Of DotNetNuke event in Florida got cancelled today. Will Strohl, creator of the event, officially published a note about the news for this year earlier today. However, don’t get too bummed out just yet because you can still have a chance to attend this awesome Day Of DotNetNuke in the Midwest area.

As Chris Hammond posted a few weeks back in regards to the annual St. Louis Day of .NET event, I’d like to keep everyone who has an interest in attending it posted.

Our of the 50 speakers from across the country presenting on various platforms, we have 6 speakers in DotNetNuke community got invited to present at the event (and more are coming), those include Joe Brinkman, Chris Hammond, Ian Robinson, Mitchel Sellers, Shaun Mehaffie and myself. You can see a full list of speakers on their site here:http://www.stlouisdayofdotnet.com/Speakers.aspx

 

So many times when you sit down and start a new DotNetNuke skinning project, the first thing to do is to define your own CSS properties and values to override some of the default selectors from the default.css file in core DNN framework. I even created a little CSS template file I use on start of every skinning project I’m involved in.

The Experience team has been taking notes from conversations within the community for a while. It’s not we didn’t realize the CSS file needs improvement, but it’s how it should be implemented and corrected so it would help us to from making continuous changes for a while before newer approaches and techniques are introduced (CSS3).

Years ago when DNN was first created, those CSS selectors were there to help non-web designers to have something visually working right away after installing DNN. Over time, we learned newer techniques that help speed up sites performance, better organization of selectors to increase productivity when we collaborate with others and so on.

...

This is a call for speakers for the St. Louis Day of .NET for both DotNetNuke and non-DotNetNuke related topics.

As many of you may know, the St. Louis Day Of .NET last year was a huge success for the St. Louis area. The event attracted close to 500 attendees from local to the neighbor States. DotNetNuke had an entire track with many attendees from new comers to experts. Thanks to the effort put out by many of our community members who didn’t mind taking the time to come to town and presented. Among those are Mitchel Sellers, Shawn Mehaffie, and a few of us in St. Louis including myself, Ian Robinson, Chris Hammond, Scott Allender, and Patrick Renner.

The DotNetNuke track itself covered topics from portal administration, design and skinning to module development...

 We had a productive meeting within our Experience team on Thursday Apr 22, 2010 and here are some notes:

Jenni shared the “Recommended Improvements to the DNN Installer User Experience” document with the team and has received feedback from Cuong Dang and Timo Breumelhol.

A few items the team is currently working:

Last week we had an interesting meeting with everybody and discussed the future of our team and how we can help making things happen here on the DotNetNuke platform. One of the challenges we are currently facing is that we have a good amount of core team members and volunteers who can do the work and roll out some cool enhancements but we don’t quite have any influence on the DotNetNuke CE releases.

For example, we can completely revamp the installation wizard and make it a lot more user friendly than it currently is. But it isn’t easy for us to just include that in the DotNetNuke CE release without going through the proper release schedule determined by framework leaders and engineering team since we don’t know what they are currently working on. And to get on their schedule and request a meeting to talk about things with them isn't quite an easy thing to do.

It has been almost one month since we have announced accepting submissions for the second official DotNetNuke Skinning Contest. Thanks to all who took the time to write us with feedback and motivation to keep this event moving forward. I didn’t get a chance to write about what motivation we have for the contest the past few weeks after the launch since my schedule and time didn’t permit. I wanted to just express my thoughts here about the contest and hope you will join me in this event.

Why another skin contest, you might ask. Well, the answer is simple. The skin contest is for you, all of the active community members.

It seems that many DotNetNuke beginners have been reading the old skinning documentation, therefore, they’ve gotten the not-so-up-to-date information about navigation in DotNetNuke. Knowing that there are many people including myself have been talking about this topic in the forum in a while, but I wanted to put out this blog post so you can find it a bit easier since there are threads created in the forum every few minutes or so and it makes it harder to find.

As you may have read from Scott’s blog post or in last month e-mail newsletter, I was welcomed to the team and really excited to contribute my time to make things happen within the framework. Although I’ve just joined the team, there are so many exciting projects I’m involved with and they will be announced at OpenForce Las Vegas in the coming month.