Umbraco and Ghost/Cached/Deleted pages appearing in menu
Saturday, November 03, 2007 1:31:42 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I'm currently investigating a new Open Source ASP.Net CMS system called Umbraco. It looks very promising as it can be fully accessible and has full support for XHTML among many other interesting features. I met with a couple of the guys that are developing the system in Manchester a couple of weeks ago and they've got big plans so keep an eye on it.
Anyway yesterday while setting up the new The Site Doctor site on Umbraco I ran into an issue where by I had "broken" the menu. Basically I had deleted the template from the system which should have deleted all copies of the pages that use that template but instead a cache remained somewhere. I ran through a number of steps to re-create the cache but nothing worked.
If you run into the same issue as I did, follow these steps:
- Find out the ID of the page in question (easiest way is just to add the ID to the output of the menu XSLT)
- Search the database for the ID using the T-SQL I posted in "How to search every table and field in a SQL Server Database"
- Download and install a Unicode and UTF-8 search program such as Text Workbench and search for the ID (I only found it in /data/Umbraco.config)
- Reset the applications cache -the easiest way to do this is to simply re-upload the web.config file
That should sort it :)
Joost invites for all...
Thursday, May 03, 2007 3:46:11 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I found out this morning that my Joost account has been credited with 999 invites (I kid you not) so feeling all summery I thought others might want to join in the Joost fun and I’d share them around a little.
I’ve only got 999 Joost invites so it’ll have to be strictly on a first come –first served basis (as if I’m ever going to get rid of them all haha).
I don’t want anything in return but if this offer is too generous or you feel I’ve helped you in the past and you’re debted to me, why not click some of the Google Adverts –or even better, make a donation to our 96 mile canoe race (the Cheshire ring race) in aid of the Samantha Dickson Brain Tumour Trust, Multiple Sclerosis Society, CLIC Sargent and Mac Millan Nurses, I like to think of it of a “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back” arrangement.
Regardless of whether you want to donate to our worth cause or not, drop me an email (or leave me a comment) and I’ll send an invite over ASAP.
For more information on our 96 mile canoe race (the Cheshire ring race) in aid of charity go to www.paddlathon.co.uk or read my blog posts about the Cheshire ring race.
Some great software I use
Friday, February 09, 2007 4:44:44 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I was recently on the search for a new firewall after having so many people complain about it (and having a few issues myself). I asked a forum that was very happy to criticise ZoneAlarms what they recommended to use as people were quick to flame and not explain.
Sadly, despite making very clear I wasn't interested in flaming, the majority of the responses I got back were still flames about ZoneAlarms but there were a couple of nice people who responded with useful suggestions. I thought as there seems to be very little advice about suitable firewall replacements to ZoneAlarms I would post what I've got installed as well as a couple of other useful programs in the process.
Firstly let me explain why I feel the comment "If you've got a hardware firewall you don't need a software firewall" is a ridiculous statement. My reasoning dates back to Greek times -notably the Trojan war when seeking entrance to Troy, Odysseus had a large wooden horse (the sacred animal of Poseidon) made as a gift. As I'm sure everyone is aware, the horse was hollow and filled with a load of soldiers which popped out after the Trojans were done celebrating the end of the siege and let the rest of the army in through the front gates to slaughter all the drunk Trojans. Anyway, back to my point, yes you may have a hardware firewall that will stop nasty attackers getting in but what happens if you unwittingly invite one in? The likelihood is it'll invite a load more in after it which will end up crippling your computer. So for that reason I have a software firewall to monitor the traffic in and out on my machine.
The software
The first thing to note here is that all this software (at time of posting) is free -what can I say? I'm a cheapskate ;) The links are to the file download page so please let me know if they've broken since posting.
Deleting "Ghost" extensions from FireFox
Friday, November 24, 2006 4:18:23 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Since updating Firefox to v1.5 I had a number of extensions that I couldn’t remove from the list because they were greyed out, this was somewhat irritating as I had the later versions installed too and so I was getting duplicates (see below)
Today I decided to see if I could resolve this, it turns out removing these ghost/incompatible extensions is fairly simple:
- Close any instances of Firefox you have open
- Navigate to %Documents and Settings%\Username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*.default\
- Backup the file: “extensions.rdf”
- Open “extensions.rdf” in a text editor i.e. Notepad or TextPad
- Find the line that starts with: <RDF:Seq RDF:about="urn:mozilla:item:root">
Below is a list of the extensions you have installed, I can only talk about my case but the ones that were greyed out extensions in Firefox were the ones that had a resource value of a URL rather than “urn:mozilla:item:{Guid}”. My file looked like this:
Simply delete these lines from the file, save it and restart Firefox. All should be back as it should be now…
Setup.exe
Thursday, November 09, 2006 12:59:46 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I'm forever downloading application trials to see how other
developers write applications, partly out of curiosity but moreover to improve
applications we’re developing –seeing what we’ve left out, how we may be able
to do it better etc.
I keep a fairly clear desktop but today I booted up and
noticed a “setup.exe” file sitting there and I had no idea what it was, I knew
it must be something I downloaded to test so I ran it which probably wasn’t the
most logical thing to do but hey. Luckily it was something I’d downloaded but
it got me thinking, what if it was a malicious script that a virus had placed
there for me to click? I wonder how many people would be caught out by that…
Useful Visual Studio Plugin
Saturday, September 30, 2006 6:13:45 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
On surfing around the net the other day looking for a replacement to Visual Studio 2003’s clipboard monitor I stumbled across this excellent Clipboard manager plug-in for Visual Studio 2005. As his blog was offline at the time I wasn’t sure exactly how to use it but now I’ve had a play I’m not sure I’ll be able to do without it!
Check out the Clipboard Manager plug-in at
http://www.csharper.net/blog/clipboard_manager_upgraded_to_package.aspx
For those of you interested, the plug-in monitors the clipboard activity allowing you to resurrect previous clipboards and make them current and even locking items so you can use them at a later date. I’ve found it incredibly useful when testing sites as it allows me to keep common messages on the clip. Downside is you have to have Visual Studio open at the time so I’ll have to look into a standalone version.
Here are a few shots of it in “action”:
The items that have been added to the clipboard in the past show up in the list at the top and there's a small preview window below (which I think you can select parts out of). You can also remove all items from the history by clicking the icon in the top left.
To re-select an old item double click it and it's instantly the main item! The currently selected item is the one in black text with a green arrow next to it.
The context menu offers a number of extra options including the ability to lock and unlock an item, this means when you restart your computer the item is still in the history -great if you have common items such as test credit card numbers! If you want to remove a single item from the history, you can do that using the context menu too. I've not yet used the "Save to File" or "Search Online" items.
Update: There does seem to be some sort of glitch with it, I think my history has got corrupt at somepoint so when I clear all the unlocked items new items weren’t getting caught anymore. I've found two solutions: The first is to restart Visual Studio, the other is to unlock all items and clear the history completely. This seemed to sort it. I did also note that I had one blank item at the top of the list so I guess that's what was causing it.
Cisco VPN Software and Local Network conflicts
Friday, September 22, 2006 9:24:42 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
This is a post for anyone else having connectivity issues with their LAN while connected to a VPN of some sort. When setting up the Virtual Private Network (VPN) on our new server we encountered a number of issues of not being able to connect to the local network while the VPN was established. Initially it was merely an inconvenience and something that we could live with, but as time went on we needed to stay connected and access files from the local network, it grew more and more irritating.
After much searching on the internet for a solution with terms like “Cisco VPN Local Area Connection Issues”, “Cisco VPN LAN Issues”, “Cisco VPN LAN files” and various inflections of we didn’t find anything useful.
While trying to sort the issue, I noticed that the VPN was establishing itself on the subnet of 192.168.1.x, that in itself is not a problem but we were running our LAN under the same subnet. It was only then that we realised that we had a conflict as the VPN was overriding the local subnet so on trying to access 192.168.1.5 it would attempt to contact the remote server group (which didn’t exist).
If you’ve got the same issue, the fix is simple, all you need to do is change your local subnet to something else i.e. 3, this means when the VPN is connected it will connect over 1 and the LAN will remain unaffected –lovely!