Now that was a smooth transition. Within minutes BloggingAbout.NET was upgraded from version 2007.1 to Community Server 2008. We've gotten a brand new license from the great folks over at Telligent, the folks behind Community Server.
For logged in users, the frontpage will show recent activity of blogs, posts, threads and friends you're linked to or were active in. Not logged in users will see a welcome message and latest activities. That page is quite empty with no recent activity, I'm looking into it why this is. Also not all posts for every blog comes up in the blogs overview when you're not logged in.
If you see any other problems or have questions, don't hesitate to contact us.
Thanks,Dennis van der Stelt
TAGS
When you've installed Community Server on Windows 2008 and especially are running under IIS7, you'll probably get some problems with at least your tags. Community Server will throw a 404 "Page not found" error on tags with spaces. If that's the case, open up your web.config and paste the following code at the bottom, but within the "configuration" tags.
<system.webServer>
<security>
<requestFiltering allowDoubleEscaping="true" />
</security>
</system.webServer>
Now IIS7 might still throw an error because the configuration won't allow you to overrule the default setting. In this knowledge base article you'll find more information.
Find the following file %windir%\System32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config and open it in Notepad under Administrator permissions. Find the key 'requestFiltering' and set overrideModeDefault to "Allow" instead of "Deny".
AVATARS
When your avatars aren't showing, it might be because you're running in "Classic .NET AppPool" mode and not in "Integrated Pipeline". Change it and it should work.
If you're looking at this, you're looking at BloggingAbout.NET on a brand new 19" server that's dedicated to BloggingAbout.NET. We were hosted on a server with about 100 or 200 other sites and we were pulling so much traffic and resources that our sponsor has decided to give us a brand new 19" in their own rack. Here are some pictures.
Although this won't be the only site on this server, all will be personal sites and will probably not pull as much traffic as this one. With uncompressed traffic we were pulling over 2.5 Gigabytes a day. On this new server we should be running much faster and hopefully never go down, although that's all up to me now, with some support from our sponsor of course. Thanks to Tellus for providing this!
The first site I tested this with is my brand new personal site http://dennisvanderstelt.nl/ running on GraffitiCMS. Although it's in Dutch, it's probably worth taking a look.
I was looking for CopySourceAsHtml for Visual Studio 2008, but for some reason it's not on the 'official' page so I had to search for it. There are multiple versions, but on Guy Burstein's blog there's more information and the only RTM version I could find.
I always search on Jan Schreuder his weblog for the following piece of css to include:
border-top: windowtext 1pt solid;
border-top-color: #CCCCCC;
padding-top: 1pt;
border-left: windowtext 1pt solid;
border-left-color: #CCCCCC;
padding-left: 1pt;
border-right: windowtext 1pt solid;
border-right-color: #CCCCCC;
padding-right: 1pt;
border-bottom: windowtext 1pt solid;
border-bottom-color: #CCCCCC;
padding-bottom: 1pt;
width: 100%;
overflow: auto;
background-color: #F5F5F5;
Can't live without CopySourceAsHtml now, can we?!
BloggingAbout.NET is doing great in visitors, bloggers and traffic. Unfortunately a bit too good for what we can provide. We're running into increasing hosting costs as we currently pull dozens of Gigabytes of data and our database is also growing larger and is reaching almost 200GB. Therefore the BloggingAbout.NET team has made some decisions on how to move forward in the future.
The first wave of change will be adds on every page, including in the RSS feed.
The next wave will be to charge of a small fee to all who currently have a weblog at BloggingAbout.NET.We've provided excellent support and a great change for everyone to grow so we think our community is definitely worth it. We're still deciding on how much we'll charge, but it'll be around $10 per month or a slightly larger yearly fee. If you want you can comment and tell us what your preferences are, both as weblogger and as visitor.
Thanks in advance for the understanding,BloggingAbout.NET team
Update : It's April 2nd now... Hope you got it, because April fools! ;-)
Update 2 : What is cool is that BloggingAbout.NET is currently on a server with a load of other websites. Soon we'll have a dedicated 19" machine! And no, no payment required from anyone! ;-)