JP Hellemons Building E-commerce web applications

My blog was offline a few days ago. The IIS application pool stopped. To investigate if it had something to do with my BlogEngine installation, I wanted to install Elmah. That was an easy one. Here is how I did it in just a few steps: - download your current BlogEngine installation from the remote webserver - Open it with Visual Studio (open website) - Run it with Visual Studio to make sure that there are no build errors - Right click on the solution: - Select manage NuGet Packages - Search for Elmah - Hit install - Edit the web.config, add <authorization> <allow roles="Administrators"/> <deny users="*"/> </authorization> Just below <location path="elmah.axd" inheritInChildApplications="false"> <system.web> And change <elmah> <security allowRemoteAccess="false"/> </elmah> the allow remote access to true. - Save and upload the new web.config, and upload and overwrite the files from the bin folder. Only logged in administrators now have access to yourdomain.com/elmah.axd Good luck!

BlogEngine recently released version 2.6 (May the 14th). My blog was running 2.5 from 27th of July 2011. So it was time to update. The 2.6 new feature list has several great things on it, but a lot of features are for the administration dashboard. I use Windows Live Writer to prepare and publish posts. So I only use the dashboard to manage comments and sometimes settings. So the main reason for me to upgrade, is for all the minor bug fixes and improvements and the JavaScript and cascading style sheet minification and bundling which is available from Asp.Net 4 and above. Scott Guthrie has written about Bundling and Minification Support in November 2011. There is a good upgrade guide available online which I used, but since the upgrade path might differ from user to user, I have decided to blog mine: First of all: know your blogs storage method, mine is XML. I know because I have not configured any database in a web.config file. So here are my steps: 1. Backup current BlogEngine 2.5 installation by FTP it to a local folder 2. Download BlogEngine 2.6 (web install) 3. I have compared web.config of 2.5 to 2.6 with Beyond Compare I installed the trial version of #beyondCompare and really like it! thanks@ScooterSoftware for making my new fav #diff-tool — JP Hellemons (@JPHellemons) April 25, 2012 4. Delete everything from FTP web root, except `googleverification.html`, my nibbler html (to claim my website ownership) and robot.txt and dotnettechy.html except app_data 5. upload everything from 2.6 except app_data content 6. upload themes/jphellemons folder 7. upload widgets - buy me a beer, cumulus, syndication, tagcanvas, twitterfeed twitterfeed missed some .cs files in app_code 8. upload pictures and custom favicon blogengine.ico, android market button, 9. upload socialbe folder and I tested it… but it didn’t work. Seems to have lost everything, admin login didn't work. requesting password. no e-mail received. 10. downloaded logger.txt from app_data folder, spotted that SMTP does not work out of the box on this webhost. So I had to modify the web.config so that asp.net can send mails with the web.config settings. I used this blogpost as reference: http://dotnetblogengine.net/post/The-Next-Chapter-of-BlogEngineNET-Version-26.aspx And I tried to open my upgraded blog again and noticed that twitterfeed widget had some .cs classes that required a manual upload in the App_Code folder. So now I am running version 2.6 of BlogEngine.Net Good luck upgrading!

Google Penguin affected my visitors. More detail in this blogpost with Google Analytics screenshots as prove [More]

The BlogEngine team has released BlogEngine 2.5 last 27th of June. I postponed it for a while but you have to keep your Online Software up to date! So I decided to give it a try. The migration from 1.x to 2.0 was almost painless, so moving to 2.5 should work out fine too. My installation as no database, but stores stuff in the App_Data folder. I followed this guide:  http://blogengine.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Upgrading%20to%20BlogEngine.NET%202.5 my 8 easy steps: (maybe you only need 4) More...

As a big fan of beer (and coffee) and BlogEngine.net, I decided to combine these two things and write a simple widget. You probably know the ‘buy me a beer’ feature from Wordpress but there is none for BlogEngine.net. My version is very simple and have almost no features but it saves you a couple of minutes making your own ‘buy me a beer’-link. The image is stored in the ‘pics’ directory and is borrowed from a website I can’t remember. The archive can be downloaded here » bmab-widget.zip (9.81 kb) and suggestions are always welcome!    

I just recently installed DasBlog, the wel known .net open source blog engine. to get it up and running i had to manually edit some *.config files and disable tracing and the trustlevel should not exist in the web.config file, because i have a shared hosting environment. I really liked dasblog a lot, but i wanted to try out blogengine.net because i heared a lot about it. So I installed it today and guess what... you don't have to edit any config files. The only thing I had to do was to make sure that the app_data dir was writable. the rest is all configured through the webapplication itself! adding a theme was really easy, just decompress the theme and move the folder by ftp to the themes dir and select it in the dropdown. that's all. DasBlog has more theme's packed by default, but BlogEngine made it really easy to add new theme's. More...