Spambusting with Umbraco and Akismet

When I started this blog, I really didn't think I would need any comment spam prevention. I have also never liked the idea of having to moderate/approve comments manually (smells like work).

However, after about three days on the interwebs, I decided otherwise. Bring on Akismet from Automattic. From their website, "Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again."

Sounds good to me, let's get started!

Continue Reading
ramblings about c#, umbraco, nunchucks, me
 

Easy File Protection in Umbraco

File protection is a common requirement when building Umbraco applications (or any ASP.NET app for that matter). In fact Dirk De Grave is currently working on a project called Protected Media that could eventually provide this functionality in a package.

While building NCEExam.com, I used a different approach to solve this problem. While I am not sure this is the best way to accomplish file protection, it is very flexible and requires no configuration in IIS.

Continue Reading

Umbraco Powered

I recently finished a couple of projects that are powered by Umbraco and I thought I would share some details.

The first project is NCEExam.com, an online study and testing system for the National Counselor Exam. This is version 3 of the system and is the first version to run on Umbraco (V4). There were a lot of unique challenges in this project such as securing FLV videos and downloadable content, as well as a custom shopping cart and e-commerce interface.

Continue Reading

Nunchuck Skills: Hack Your Head

There are times when I need to use a particular script or style sheet temporarily and only on a portion of the site. This is especially true with a blog.

For example, if you use SyntaxHighlighter, you could use up to 21 brush scripts, plus the core script and theme style sheet. That makes for a lot of references in the head tag.  That is why I almost always add the following inside the <head> tag in my top lever master page between the style sheet and script references.

Continue Reading

Taming Tag URLs with UrlRewrite

After installing the Blog for Umbraco 4 package by Tim Geyssens, I noticed that the links generated in the tags menu were simply using query parameters instead of friendly URLs. I would prefer them to look like this: /blog/tag/tagname.aspx.

The good news is that Umbraco already uses UrlRewritingNet.UrlRewrite to create friendly URLs, so everything we need to get this working is already in place. After brushing up a bit on regular expressions I came up with the following two step solution.

Continue Reading

Hi, I'm Ricky. You Found Me!

Well, after several years of putting it off, I finally have a blog up and running. My plan is to concentrate on the wonderful language that is C# (and other .NET stuff from time to time) and the last CMS you will ever need, Umbraco.

If you are a .NET developer and you have never heard of Umbraco, you really should check it out. In fact, this entire site is built on Umbraco and a modified version of the Blog for Umbraco 4 package by Tim Geyssens.

Continue Reading

About Me

I am a Founder and Managing Partner of Trio Technologies and Trio Merchant Services in Abilene, Texas. I have a beautiful wife and two incredible sons.

Popular

Blogroll

Bookmarks