The Mises Tech Update

Shorter URL's for your blog, profile

2008-07-02T19:20:00Z

If you weren't pleased with the longer blog URLs of the Mises Community, you now have an alternative URL: http://blogs.mises.org. For example http://blogs.mises.org/misestech

You can also link to your profile at http://people.mises.org. For example, http://people.mises.org/HeroicLife

Akismet Spam Rule for Community Server 2008

2008-04-28T15:43:00Z

This is an update of the Akismet plugin by Thomas Freudenberg found here.

Download

Visual Studio 2008 to 2005 downgrade utility

2008-02-28T21:46:00Z

Visual Studio 2008 allows you to target .Net Framework 2.0, so you don't have to migrate the solutions you developed in Visual Studio 2005 to a new framework version. The only problem is that it upgrades the solution and project files, making your solutions incompatible with Visual Studio 2005, which is a problem if you work on a team with Visual Studio 2005 users.

This utility allows you to downgrade your 2008 C# solutions and projects to 2005.

If you point it to a solution file, it will locate and downgrade the projects in that solution.
Changing a few lines in the code will switch it to VB.Net projects.
It only changes version numbers and build targets, so it will keep 2008 metadata, allowing the project to open in both versions.
I only wrote enough code to allow my solutions to compile in 2005, so no guarantee that it will work in all cases.

VisualStudioProjectDowngrade.zip

Posting videos from Youtube and Google in blogs, forums, comments

2008-01-22T00:22:00Z

I have installed a module to allow posting Videos from Soapbox, Youtube and Google video in blogs, forums and comments.

The syntax is: [ Youtube:xxxxx] [ Soapbox:xxxxx] [ Googlevideo:xxxxx] where xxxxx is the ID of the video.

Getting too much blog comment spam?

2008-01-09T21:17:00Z

You have several options to control the amount of spam comments.

Require that all or some posts be approved:

Select "Global Settings", then "Advanced Post Settings"

Under the "Comment Moderation" setting, you can require that all, or anonymous users be approved before their comments show up.

Prevent comments on old posts:

Most spam is posted in old posts, so you can set the "Comment Day Limits" to prohibit comments on your old posts.

Under "Advanced Post Settings", change the "Comment Day Limits" drop-down from "Always" to a number of days.

Adjust your spam scores:

You can raise the threshold the spam filter uses to decide whether a comment a spam. In your blogs dashboard, click on "Global Settings", "Spam, Ping and Cross-Posting."

Check "Use custom spam scores." Now you can adjust the default settings above 5 and 10 for moderating and deleting new comments. Be careful about the delete score because you won't know how many comments are being deleted.

Get FeedBurner for your Mises.com blog

2007-11-12T04:46:00Z

You can easily set up FeedBurner for your blog by going to your Dashboard then Syndication Settings. What is FeedBurner, you ask? FeedBurner is a Google company that lets you do all kinds of things with your blog's feed, including automatically formatting it for any kind of reader, adding all kinds of additional content, and collecting stats on both the feed readers and your blog's readers. See the FeedBurner site for more info. Here is an example of a feed from Mises.com.

Mises Tagging Overview

2007-10-09T15:42:00Z

The framework used to tag pages on Mises.org is a tagging library I developed to tag any kind of content on Mises.org. The tag library references GUID's assigned to all objects in the Mises.org databases. It tracks users by username or IP address as well as the date that each tag was added. It includes spam/badword filtering and has some simple tag rewriting to automatically correct misspelled words and incomplete names. For a simple tag example, see business cycle.

Update: Mises Tagging is now an open source project! See the project page for details.

Architecture overview:

Datbase layer:

The database schema gives a good indication of the data-access layer:

Stored procedures:

UI Layer:

The interface is organized into self-contained user controls.

TagCloud.ascx - a tag cloud for the given document
Example: http://www.mises.org/resources/3250 (Sroll down)
EditTags.ascx - an editable list of tagged documents and a user-specific tag cloud.
Example: http://www.mises.org/mymises/ (You'll have to register at Mises.com tag some documents first.)
TaggingStats.ascx - global tagging statistics
Example: http://www.mises.org/clouds.aspx#stats

Management:

DocumentTags.ascx - an editable list of tags for a particular document
Tags.aspx: delete tags, delete all tags by a particular user and search/replace tags

The MisesBot:

You might have noticed that 99% of all tags are entered by the MisesBot. The bot is an application that uses the meta tags collected by the MetaParser (detailed in a future post) as well as other available metadata to add tags to document.

Thanks to:

Cloud Control for ASP.Net - displays a list of hyperlinks in varying styles depending on a weight.
Toxi - the inspiration for the tag schema
Freetag, an Open Source Tagging / Folksonomy module for PHP/MySQL applications - the inspiration for the business logic layer
Community Server - Inspired the tag browser interface and provided the banned words list.

To do:

Did you notice the TagAuthority field in the tag schema? A future version of the MisesBot will automatically determine the "authoritative" document for each tag.
Automatically mark up content. If we know the authoritative document for a tag, we can automatically link to it when that tag appears in the document text.
Improving the "related tags" algorithm. I could use some help with this:

Here is the query to get related tags. The problem is that it currently ranks tags according to their total popularity, not their "related-ness."

CREATE
PROCEDURE [dbo].[TagGetRelatedTags]        
        @Tag VARCHAR(70)
AS
BEGIN   
        DECLARE
                @TagId int
                SET @TagId =
                        (SELECT TagId FROM Tag WHERE Tag = @Tag)
                        SELECT  TOP 30 Tag.Tag,
                                COUNT(TagMap.TagId) AS 'Count'
                        FROM    TagMap
                        INNER JOIN Tag
                        ON      TagMap.TagId    = Tag.TagId
                        WHERE   [TagMap].TagId <> @TagId
                            AND (TagMap.TagId  IN
                                (SELECT DISTINCT TagId
                                FROM    TagMap
                                WHERE (ObjectId IN
                                        (SELECT ObjectId FROM TagMap WHERE (TagId = @TagId)))
                                )
                                )
                        GROUP BY TagMap.TagId,
                                Tag.Tag
                        ORDER BY 'Count' DESC
                END

How I converted Mises.org to Web 2.0 (Part 1)

2007-10-02T01:39:00Z

During the period of late August - mid September 2007, I redesigned the architecture of Mises.org from the ground up from a largely-static "web 1.0" era site to a future-oriented database and user driven "web 2.0 enabled" site. In the next few posts, I will present a somewhat-technical overview of my changes and share the tools and applications which I created. I hope that this will help the users and contributors of Mises.org as well as anyone contemplating a similar conversion.

Part one: Overview

First, let's look at a high-level overview of my goals, some implementation challenges, and how I resolved them:

Building an online community

Goal: create an online community - including forums, blogs, and live chat

Challenge: Distinguish between approved and professional content and user-contributed content

Solution:

Create the community site on a new mises.com domain to complement the existing mises.org site.
By branding the two sites differently, we make it clear which site represents "official" content and which is created by users.
Community Server provides blogging and forums, phpFreeChat provides chat functionality.

Goal: create a user profile-management system to tie together the mises.org and mises.com sites.

Challenge: A single integrated authentication system is necessary to tie together the new content-management system behind mises.com with a variety of legacy application mises.org

Solution: Use the built in ASP.Net 2.0 authentication framework to share membership information between sites.

Separating content from presentation

Goal: Allow all content to be presented under any template. For example, a biography can be dynamically presented in the about, web resources, or publication section depending on context

Challenge: the site content existed in a variety of web applications and formats. For example, articles, e-Books, mp3s, store products, PDF's.

Solution: (Detailed in a future post.)

Migrate text content in static files to the database
Collect metadata from all binary files referenced in the database
Tag all content with the collected metadata.
Assign all content a unique identifier
Dynamically load content-specific controls based on the type of object requested. For example, video files render a video player, text files show in browser, external URL's redirect.

Sharing and personalizing content

Goal: Create a library of reusable controls which can be used across web applications to present views of various site data

Challenge: There are many different kinds of data - lists of links, books, resources, media, etc.

Solution: Create a standard set of "Sidebar" controls, and populate them with self-contained user controls which can be reused across all Mises domains.

Goal: Allow all content to be syndicated via RSS

Solution: Use RSS Toolkit to dynamically generate RSS/podcast feeds based on a variety of parameters. More here and here.

Goal: allow users to tag, save, and share all content on the site

Solution:

Tagging: Create a tagging framework which allows users to tag any content. Make tagged content available within the site as well as via RSS feeds. (Detailed here.)
Favorites: Any page can be saved to a list of personalized favorites or sent by email.
Social bookmarking: Standard metadata makes social bookmarking easy.

Goal: Enable users to customize the site's content and appearance

Solution:

Customizable homepage: convert user controls to web parts to allow users to select their preferred data view from a web part catalog. (Detailed in a future post.)
Themes: (See below)

Creating the "Web 2.0" look

Goal: Visualize documents from a variety of source and formats via tag clouds

Solution:

Aggregate tag clouds, as well as statistics on user-contributed tags can be viewed centrally.
As users tag documents, the site creates a "personal tag cloud" for each user
To do: Integrate subject-specific tag clouds into the site

Goal: Make navigation more simple and intuitive

Solution: Replace a drop-down menu with dozens of redundant selections with a main menu containing of a few categories and then provide detailed links in section-specific sidebars

Goal: Implement the "Web 2.0" look

Solution: New theme: gradients, large uniform fonts, simple color palette, standard feed icons, rounded content containers.

Goal: Allow customizable user themes.

Solution:

Mises.com runs Community Server, which has themes built in.
For Mises.org migrate all formatting to use the ASP.Net 2.0 Themes feature
(To do:) allow users to choose their own theme.

Mises.com Google Services

2007-09-26T17:03:00Z

Here are the new URL's for the Google services offered at Mises.com:

Get your mises.com Google accounts here.

2007-09-25T21:58:00Z

To encourage participation on the Mises.com website, we are giving away 150 @mises.com Google accounts to everyone who contributes to the Mises.com website. You get the standard 2GB @mises.com Gmail Inbox plus the entire suite of Google applications with customized Mises Institute content, including an exclusive start page, mises.com web page hosting, calendar, and docs. You also get a Google Talk account with exclusive access to other Mises.com members.

To get started, sign up at mises.com and contribute a forum post, blog post, or other content and then send me a message. Hurry while supplies last!

How to show the posts from your blog on your profile page

2007-09-24T02:19:00Z

This works whether or not your blog is hosted at Mises.com

Click on "Edit Profile"
Select the "About" tab.
In the "Recommended Reading" section, paste the RSS Feed from your blog
Click "Save"

ASP.Net: Adding feed auto-discovery & meta tags to the page header

2007-09-21T06:27:00Z

Every now and then, I will post code snippets which others might find useful. Here is one:

How to add an RSS auto-discovery meta tag to the page header:

 Private Sub AddRSSLink(ByVal title As String, ByVal URL As String)
        Dim link As New HtmlLink
        link.Attributes.Add("type", "application/rss+xml")
        link.Attributes.Add("rel", "alternate")
        link.Attributes.Add("title", title)
        link.Attributes.Add("href", URL)
        Page.Header.Controls.Add(link)
    End Sub

What about meta tags?

Dim hm As New HtmlMeta()
hm.Name = "Description" ' Or Keywords
hm.Content = "Description..."
Page.Header.Controls.Add(hm)

Why not just put this in the .aspx you ask? Check out the tags on this page for the answer.

Social bookmarking links

2007-09-21T06:05:00Z

Almost every page on the Mises.org website now includes links to Digg, redit, facebook, and other social bookmarking websites on the bottom of the page. Let me know if you'd like to see links to other linksharing sites.

If you come across a Mises.org page that you find interesting and want to share it with other people, simply click on one of these links.

Quick blog tutorial

2007-09-20T15:12:00Z

How to get a blog:

Send a request to vanguardist or HeroicLife.
Optional: Tell me if you want a custom blog URL (default is your username.)

How to find your blog:

Go to Mises.com.
Click on "Blogs."
Click on "Blogs on this Site".
You should see your blog with your username as the author.

How to add a post:

Go to your blog.
Click "Write a Blog Post"
Write your post.
Click "Publish"

How to change your blog's appearance:

Go to your blog.
Click on "My Blog Dashboard"
Select "Global Settings" in the menu on the left.
Select "Change How My Blog Looks".
Pick a theme, variation, or edit the colors of a particular variation.

How to add links (blogroll)

Go to your blog dashboard.
Click on "Manage Content"
Click "All Lists"
Click "Create New List"
Enter a name and check "Enabled"
Click "Add List Item" for each link

How to change your blog's Title or Description

Go to your blog dashboard.
Select "Global Settings"
Click on Title, Description, and News
Change the title and save!

How to change your blog's URL

You can customize the URL after http://www.mises.com/blogs/. Please contact me with your preferred URL.

How to change the post date

Edit your post.
Check "Advanced Options"
Select "Options"
Now you can change the "Post Date"

Any questions?

Just ask me.

10 Future Web Trends

2007-09-08T23:02:00Z

If you’re interested in the motivations behind the long-term development of mises.org, check out the post “10 future web trends.” It presents 10 technologies that will be popular in the “next 10 or so” years on the web. My goal is to implement all of them on mises.org within “1 or so” years. Why? Why not?