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Telligenti

Serving up fresh ideas every day, Telligent style

Dan Hounshell

February 2008 - Posts

  • Graffiti CMS 1.0

    In case you haven't heard Graffiti 1.0 was released Monday. You can find more information on Rob Howard's blog, in the press release and at the Graffiti site.

    I've written about Graffiti a bit here and I think it is an awesome platform. Without making any code changes at all I've been able to implement a blog, an ecommerce site (more info in the form of how-to and examples coming soon) and something new I've been working on the last couple of nights that I'm not ready to share yet. Graffiti is flexible and extremely easy to use.

    Everyone I have talked to who has tried it completely agrees. I have a couple of friends who were considering creating their own mini-CMS system tailored to a specific kind of site they were building, but have decided to go with Graffiti instead because it just works. Actually, I've heard a similar story from a couple of different friends now. Another developer friend finally got around to publishing a site that he'd been thinking about building for a while because Graffiti made it so easy that he couldn't think of a reason to procrastinate any longer.

    If you have not tried Graffiti yet, go download the free* Express Edition to experience Graffiti for yourself.

    (* = free for non-commercial use only and some other limitations/requirements)
     

  • System.NullReferenceException when starting Community Server News Gateway Windows Service

    Yesterday a colleague wrote, "It's hard to believe you had 27 blog posts in one month a year ago." I think that his disbelief was triggered by my lack of regular posts recently compared to my abundance of posts then. Last night I took a look back through some of those posts from this time last year to see what the heck I was doing that would give me enough material to post nearly once per day. One of the things I was working on was the WhatIWantMost project, but the other was that I had only months before joined the Telligent team and I was getting my first strong dose of Community Server. I had used CS for blogs long before that time so I was familiar with that side of the product, but I had only implemented CS forums once before that - and even then it was vanilla. Because I was new I had a lot of information that I could relay to other beginners.

    Over the course of the past year I have gained more experience working with Community Server and have grown more comfortable with it. When an issue does come up it's usually not "new" to me so I don't feel that it's worth blogging about. Yesterday I ran into something that I would have normally cast aside in the same manner, but I realize now that it is worth sharing.

    I installed the Community Server News Gateway add-on to a new server and it seemed to be a successful installation. I updated the configuration files and dropped everything into place (I was copying from a known good installation on an existing server). I ran the console application and everything worked fine. However, when I tried to start the service it would immediately stop and show a generic message. In the Application Event Log I found something similar to this:

    System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
        at CommunityServer.NntpServer.Service.Program.OnStart(String[] args)
        at System.ServiceProcess.ServiceBase.ServiceQueuedMainCallback(Object state)

     

    Since the console app worked fine I assumed that there was nothing wrong with my configuration or with the program itself. I thought that there must be something wrong with the setup of the service. After searching through the CommunityServer.org forums I found a similar issue with a different service that had something to do with the registry key being stored in the wrong place.

    The News Gateway service was expecting to find its registry entry at:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Telligent Systems, Inc.\Community Server News Gateway
    but mine had been installed at:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Telligent Systems, Inc.\Community Server News Gateway

    The new web server that I was installing to was a 64-bit OS and I had chosen the default path that was presented to me when running the service's installer so it was installed to the "Program Files (x86)" folder. I assume that is why it was put in the "Wow6432Node" rather than directly in the "SOFTWARE" node. Seems that the service could not find its registry entry which was why it was throwing the NullReferenceException.

    The quick fix for me was to manually create a copy of the node (along with its keys and entries) directly in the "SOFTWARE" node. After that the service fired right up and ran properly.

    Hopefully someone will find this information useful when happening upon this post while searching for the described exception. I'll try to remember to keep posting bits like this as I encounter them.

  • Taking Requests?

    Bear with me a bit while I talk you through my stream of consciousness: 

    Following American Chopper, American Hot Rod, Monster Garage, the various Tattoo shows, and on and on, I've long thought that "American Webmaster" would make for interesting television. Come on, who wouldn't like that show!?! Nerds shows are hot right now: Chuck, Beauty and the Geek, Mythbusters, etc. Combine nerds with the "watch them while they create" format and I think it would be great. Of course I'm a bit biased and my wife says it's a stupid idea. But I think she's wrong. Look at all the techie videocasts and podcasts that are available and being watched and heard my millions (okay maybe not millions, but you get my drift). Revision3 has successfully recreated TechTV on the web by bringing in all the talent and making new shows. BTW, Kevin Rose, if you want to do "American Webmaster" or something named a bit differently to avoid copyright infringement, give me a shout. Same goes to you Discovery and TLC. Finally, I'd be remiss to talk about videocasts and not mention Telligent's own excellent series, TelliCast. Check it out!

    I was watching a MythBusters show tonight where they were taking on viewer suggested myths. It was a really fun show and I think that much of the fun was just because they were myths suggested by the fans.

    I've been playing around and prototyping a lot of quick little fun sites recently (RandomTweets.com, TFFRatio.com, etc) all based on crazy ideas that I've come up with (or that I "borrowed" from someone else).

    Next came the magical melding of all three of the above ideas into one. There has to be lots of people out on the internets who have some good ideas for little sites, or Facebook apps, or widgets, or small utilities but do not have the resources (know how, experience, etc) to build those things. How about a show where we take viewer requests and prototype those things to see it they're feasible and how they turn out? Sounds kind of like a MythBusters, American Chopper, and nerdy Web Dev mix, huh? Okay, doing a TV show is a bit out of my league (barring a call from Discovery/TLC). So how about just a video cast? Again a bit out of my sphere of experience (barring a call from Revision3). Maybe just a podcast then? Well, I've never done one of those either.

    Hmm. Well I do know that I could take requests and build stuff. And I know a lot of people who can build stuff, too. There are a lot of .NET developers on my Twitter list who might be interested in getting involved in something like this (especially for fame and glory!). And I know some people who do podcasts or are interested in doing podcasts who could probably generate some good "after the fact" interviews with the requester and contributor(s) as well as review the end result.

    It's all just a bunch of jumbled ideas at this point.

  • xkcd - Helping

    I've been following the xkcd webcomic for quite a while now. The comics are usually pretty funny and tech related to boot.

    However, today's comic was quite a bit different. The title of the comic is "Helping" and the title tag set on the image (that IE users will see as a tool tip when mousing over it) is "Oh, look, the 'make everything better' button was here behind the bookshelf all along."

    It is... well... striking. I really am at a loss for words to describe it. When I first saw it I think I sat there looking at it for 10 minutes or so and then I jumped into the forums on the site to see if anyone had any better explanation than I did. Nobody did.

    Helping

    The one question that I did expect to find was there in several places, "I wonder what's wrong with her" and "I hope she's okay". I think that we techie guys have a tendency to try to fix things, whether that be our computer hardware, our home theater system, our OS desktop, or our significant other. My wife has accused me more than once of trying to solve a problem for her when all she really wanted was for me to listen.

    If the purpose of art is to make you think, reflect, feel; this piece has definitely accomplished it's mission. Well done, sir. I commend you. 

    I'm slightly sobered by this somber reminder that we can't always fix everything. Especially on this day before Valentine's day.

  • What is TFF Ratio?

    You may have read something about "TFF Ratio" by now on Twitter or in our Live Messenger status messages. If you have not been playing along I'll let you in on the joke.

    TFF Ratio = Twitter Folloer-Friend Ratio. It all started with this post by fellow Telligenti, Dave Donaldson. When I first read it I took it as a personal challenge. I immediately acquired the domain name TFFRatio.com, and setup this parody on the home page, and then added an anonymous comment to Dave's post. It didn't take too long for him to figure out who the culprit was, but along the way he accused some others before finding out it was my doing. We got a pretty good laugh out of it.

    The next night I went about actually making the site work and I put a little prototype in place. Sometime over the weekend I cleaned it up a bit. Now there is a real working TFFRatio.com that you can use to check your Twitter Follower-Friend Ratio (and the ratio for your friends as well) to see how Twitter-Popular you are.

    I'm not sure what comes next, but I'm thinking of adding a web service so people can proudly display their TFF Ratio in other places. It would be pretty cool to build things like Graffiti Widgets and Community Server add-ons that show your TFF Ratio.

    BTW, Dave said that if I didn't add multiple links to his site and the original post and add all the trademark, copyright, and patent information that he would sue the living daylights out of me. He's also demanding that I give him 50% of any profits I make from the site. I'll show him - I won't make any profits!! ha ha ha ... wait... oh well, it's ad free for now.

    Help me show Dave D that we won't stand for his bullying tactics. If you like the site, Digg it, review it on StumbleUpon, etc.

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