Snowscape

As stated in my previous blog post, I no longer wanted to run a web and mail server on my home computer. My web site is driven by mojoPortal. The mojoPortal web site lists a couple of web hosting providers that are mojoPortal friendly, but they favor Arvixe, so I went with them. It was easy to sign up, and they have a 60 day money back guarantee if you aren't satisfied. I've never used a web hosting provider and had no idea what to expect. I floundered for a while, and I have to say their... read more

For many years I've run a web server and a mail server on separate virtual machines. It's been a slightly interesting hobby, but I'm over it. SmarterMail from SmarterTools was a great product and it worked very well for us and was free to boot. I wish the company well. To fight spam I used Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy (ASSP) on the front end. It worked well, but the best feature that turned away lots of spam also delayed e-mail, and sometimes (rarely) blocked it, unless I put the sender on the... read more

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE I tried installing the latest version of mojoPortal on my web server. The web server was a virtual machine running Windows XP, Apache web server, and mojoPortal. When I upgraded mojoPortal to the latest version, 2.3.5.1, it didn't work because the mod_aspdotnet Apache module appeared to be loading the .NET 2.0 runtime instead of the 3.5 runtime. I searched for a... read more

I finally upgraded mojoPortal from 2.2.1.8 to 2.2.6.8. I put it off because I thought it would be annoying. It was very simple.

My image gallery client needs to retrieve four things from the server. Initially it needs to obtain the list of folders containing images (I put a few images in each folder to organize them). When the user selects a folder it needs to retrieve the list of thumbnails for images in the folder. It then needs to retrieve reduced resolution images for display. It also must support the download of original resolution images that triggers the “Save as...” dialog box. I still have dial-up... read more

I've been eager to write a Silverlight application, but until now I didn't have an idea of what to create. Due to the wonder of digital cameras, we have a large number of images. I wrote a program that organizes new pictures into folders based on the date they were taken and another program to then generate static HTML pages with thumbnails and reduced size images. The main page contains an index of all the folders containing images. Clicking on one of these opens a new window with thumbnails ... read more

I don’t see why a desktop application should work significantly differently than a “web application”. A desktop application is typically larger and requires an installation operation that makes it more permanent, but even that is an unnecessary convention. Unfortunately the current differences between web applications and desktop applications are huge, and of course the tools used to create them are completely different as well. There are strengths in both areas that should... read more

For a long time now I’ve come to realize that existing GUIs are really very bad. Dropdowns illustrate this perfectly. You have to click the little triangle to open the little dropdown window. Then you typically have to click and/or drag the scroll bar in the dropdown to get to your selection, and then you have to click the desired item. The Mac is certainly better in general, but I think improvements in both Mac and Windows UI has been very slow. People get excited about very small... read more

For many years now I've hated programming web applications. When I first started learning Java Server Pages and then later ASP.NET, they gave me great hope that they could be used to create powerful web applications without too much tedium. Both failed miserably, but I've come to realize that fault really lies in the limitations of the HTTP protocol and the HTML standard. There are some beautiful web applications out there, but they take a lot of effort to write and maintain compared to any... read more

I've been meaning to install an ASP.NET web portal for many years and just never got around to it. A friend mentioned he was using DotNetNuke for his web site and it got me thinking about it again. I tried to get DotNetNuke running on Windows Vista, but gave up after a couple of hours. I played around with Rainbow many years ago and while looking at comparisons/reviews of web portals, I saw a mention of mojoPortal. It looks simple and efficient and since it works on Vista, I'm going with it.... read more