Software Blog

As I suggested in part 1 of this series, I recently discovered the wonderful world of jQuery, the "write less, do more javascript library". And sure enough, this is one tool that really lives up to its name! Not only can you do all sorts of neat (even useful!) javascript effects and events, but they are suprisingly easy to do! I had put learning this on the backburner a while back, but after publishing my Banner Rotator, I figured it was about time to bring that sucker front and center and start cooking!

The banner rotator script I ...

These days, a feature that city websites should never be without is the banner rotator, that is, an image up at the top of the site that cycles through various featured photos. The City of McAllen naturally was no exception, as you can see for yourself. The problem was that, being relatively inexperienced in Javascript, I've never made my own 'slideshow' type application before. Usually I will either download an existing script (or [[shudder]] a FLASH object...) and modify it to fit my needs.

In my search to find the perfect rotator, I went through dozens, including the Teleirk ...

 To wrap up this series of posts, I’m going to briefly show you how to extend the Rss Feed Classes to enable support for podcasts. This is the exact same process I took to create my own Dark Synthesis Podcast, which is publishing entries from the the Generic Content Module.

The Generic Content module doesn’t have native support for uploading or associating files. This isn’t such a big deal for me anyway, however, since my files are hosted on Boxstr. So I figured the best way to accomplish this was to store a LINK to the enclosure file as ...

As I mentioned in part one of this series, building an Rss feed for the Generic Content Module (or any module for that matter) requires three classes, RssChannelProvider, RssSettings, and RssView (plus the rss feed settings user control). We already covered the basic RssView, so now in this part we take a more detailed look at the changes required to the other two classes to implement the full Rss functionality.

RssSettings

The bulk of the rss setup is handled using this class, so most of our attention will be here. This is the class that facilitates the “setup” ...

After finally getting my music back online earlier this week, the next logical step was to get my Dark Synthesis Podcast back online. Unfortunately, Sitefinity (the CMS this site uses) does not have built in support for podcasts. In fact, the Generic Content Module (which I am using to publish my music, and eventually hopefully my videos) doesn’t even have support for general rss feeds! Fortunately to me, however, this wasn’t a setback; it was yet another opportunity to dive deeper into Sitefinity and learn to do something new!

In a recent forum on the Sitefinity forum, I discussed ...