Over the last several months I have caught the Twitter bug.  More generally, I have increased my usage of many different social networking sites like Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, TripIt, Lumberjocks and FriendFeed.  Each of these sites provides me opportunities to meet and interact with different groups of people.  Some of my friends span all these networks and some don’t.

One thing that distinguishes Twitter from many of these other Social Networking sites, is that Twitter has a very rich set of desktop clients available.  For me this makes all the difference in the world and is what most dramatically impacted my Twitter usage.  I have used a number of different clients, including Witty and Twhirl, but for me, TweetDeck is the one to beat for serious Twitterers.

I am not the only one who thinks so, Dave Rohrer loves TweetDeck.  As does Michelle Greer and Melissa Chang who all had great reviews of TweetDeck.

DotNetNuke 4.9.1 and DotNetNuke 5.0 included a new feature called the DotNetNuke Dashboard which is available from the Host menu.  The Dashboard provides access to numerous stats and settings from a single location which simplifies finding the information which is often needed when troubleshooting problems.

In addition to displaying critical data, the Dashboard allows the host user to export the data so that it can be easily provided to tech support if desired.  Having offered SLA support for the past year, DotNetNuke Corp staff often had to do much of this data collection using manual processes.  In speaking with many module vendors, we found that they were experiencing the same support issues.  The dashboard should greatly simplify this process.

Christmas Eve was very busy for the DotNetNuke Team as we did a double release of both DotNetNuke 4.9.1 and 5.0.0.  This was my first time handling a double release and it was a lot more work than I anticipated.  Not only did we do a double release, but we also changed where we are hosting our downloads.  That is a story for another blog post.  Unlike 4.9.1, DNN 5 was a massive change that involved hundreds of bug fixes, changes and enhancements.  A large number of the bug fixes and a few of the changes...

The DotNetNuke 4.9.1 package was released on  Christmas eve.  This is an special date in the history of DotNetNuke as the original release was also on Christmas eve.  4.9.1 is a minor stabilization release, although we did add a few small enhancements including the new dashboard which I will cover in depth in a separate blog.  Below is a list of the major items included in 4.9.1.  As always you can see a complete list with all the details of each fix/change in the ChangeLog.

This is my second attempt at working on a new style of bowl. During last month’s NCWT Annual Auction, I picked up a nice cherry burl. What I really liked about this piece of wood was that the bark was completely intact and that the edges were nice and clean. This gave me a great idea for a natural edged bowl. Rather than having a small band of the bark exposed, I chose to really highlight the bark and the moss that you can still see on the final piece.

DotNetNuke 3.0 added a lot of new capabilities.  One of the little documented features was the ability to control how DotNetNuke is installed.  Over the last 4 years the installation capabilities have been expanded.  One of the features which was added was the ability to control the Host Settings during the installation process.