I recently came accross the JQuery lightbox by Will Strohl which is a plugin for DotNetNuke (DNN) and thought it looked great. Especially as it was open source!!!

However I had trouble getting it to work, even after ensuring  my DotNetNuke install was up to date and everything; the buttons for next, previous and close were not visible in IE, they worked fine in Firefox

After mutch digging around I figured out that the problem was in fact due to the paths to the images that were specified in the /* IE */ section of the jquery.fancybox-1.3.1.css CSS file. I read somewhere that you should use a full url with http://yourdomains.com  and eveything but, that would be a problem with DNN running multiple portals! So here is what you do:

Open jquery.fancybox-1.3.1.css and replace the src references in the bit at the bottom of the CSS file in the section /* IE */ changing the instances of for example:

src=’fancybox/fancy_close.png’

to

src=’./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_close.png’ 

Below is the CSS for the entire section /* IE */ copy and paste it over the existing.

/* IE */

#fancybox-loading.fancybox-ie div { background: transparent; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_loading.png', sizingMethod='scale'); }
.fancybox-ie #fancybox-close  { background: transparent; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_close.png', sizingMethod='scale'); }

.fancybox-ie #fancybox-title-over { background: transparent; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_title_over.png', sizingMethod='scale'); zoom: 1; }
.fancybox-ie #fancybox-title-left { background: transparent; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_title_left.png', sizingMethod='scale'); }
.fancybox-ie #fancybox-title-main { background: transparent; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_title_main.png', sizingMethod='scale'); }
.fancybox-ie #fancybox-title-right { background: transparent; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_title_right.png', sizingMethod='scale'); }

.fancybox-ie #fancybox-left-ico  { background: transparent; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_nav_left.png', sizingMethod='scale'); }
.fancybox-ie #fancybox-right-ico { background: transparent; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_nav_right.png', sizingMethod='scale'); }

.fancybox-ie .fancy-bg { background: transparent !important; }

.fancybox-ie #fancy-bg-n { filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_shadow_n.png', sizingMethod='scale'); }
.fancybox-ie #fancy-bg-ne { filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_shadow_ne.png', sizingMethod='scale'); }
.fancybox-ie #fancy-bg-e { filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_shadow_e.png', sizingMethod='scale'); }
.fancybox-ie #fancy-bg-se { filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_shadow_se.png', sizingMethod='scale'); }
.fancybox-ie #fancy-bg-s { filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_shadow_s.png', sizingMethod='scale'); }
.fancybox-ie #fancy-bg-sw { filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_shadow_sw.png', sizingMethod='scale'); }
.fancybox-ie #fancy-bg-w { filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_shadow_w.png', sizingMethod='scale'); }
.fancybox-ie #fancy-bg-nw { filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='./DesktopModules/WillStrohl.LightboxGallery/js/fancybox/fancy_shadow_nw.png', sizingMethod='scale'); }

The only other issue was changing the page doctype encoding to XHTML which is done by adding an XML file into your portals skin folder called something like: default.doctype.xml

The code I put into mine was the following:

<SkinDocType>

            <![CDATA[<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd</a>">]]>

</SkinDocType>

I love this module, now that it works.  If you haven’t got it you can download it from http://wnslightbox.codeplex.com/

Enjoy!

Initially the website lost no ranking at all with Google as google still delivered results for the old website. Then Google started displaying some results for the new site after a few days, then after a week the new site ‘Slipped’ in the rankings by a page on some of the most competitive keyword search terms. After a few more days Google seemed to get to grips with the new site and it moved back up to the first page again, this time 1 position down from the old site. This may not be due so much to the 301 redirects and move as to Google introducing new site speed factors into their website ranking calculations.

With the advent of site speed in Google website ranking calculations we have started to trim the code behind all of our sites, one notable area is the inclusion of Google Adsense. Google Adsense is very slow to load and often doubles (or worse) the download time for a website. I and others have asked Google if they take into account their own Google Adsense scripts when they calculate a web sites speed – they could be shooting themselves in the foot financially with this new website ranking factor.

In summary the domain name move using 301 redirects caused a small dip in traffic for a couple of weeks on www.brittany-property-direct.com but is now back where it was before the domain name change/move took place. Adsense has been taken off the home page in an attempt to improve page load speed while we look at other areas to improve performance.

Will post as soon as we get a response from Google about Adsense and site speed calculations. I have not included all of the things we did in the domain name move, Google itself offers some advice on this, if you want help please post a message below.

Both sites share a common backend property admin facility which allows the estate agents to add and edit properties that then appear on both sites. Where the client used to spend many hours adding properties to their websites using Yahoo sitebuilder they can now update simultaneously both English and French property websites in minutes.

Sites written in ASP using a MySQL database, dynamic thumbnail generation and JQuery gallery effects for property images.

Last night I took the plunge and installed The latest Windows 7 Ultimate onto a new partition and used the excellent ‘Windows Easy Transfer’ program to move all my mail accounts, personal folders, files, network shares and settings over to the newly installed OS. It was great though I still had to install all the usual apps like Office 2007, Visual Studio 2008, FTP clients etc. etc. etc.

I had been using Windows XP Professional for years and avoided Vista like the plague – The good news is that Windows 7 rocks! There are so many useful and intuitive features that save time and improve the pleasure of working in Windows 7 – the only thing that I miss from XP (though I’m sure I’ll find some shortcut some time soon) is the ability to right click and open Explorer instead of File Manger – no big deal.

To date I have experienced a couple of crashes in Windows 7 RC1 in Internet Explorer – though this was down to plug-ins – so far touch wood, with the Full version installed, plenty of IE plug-ins and a fully loaded development environment with services like MSSQL Server 2008 running, my PC is very fast and rock solid.

Still got to install PUTTY and a few other apps for managing remote servers but I LOVE WINDOWS 7. Sad!

Anybody still running Windows 7 RC1 should switch to a full operating system as the RC1 will start shutting down every 2 hours from March 2010 – and it will not save your open files before doing so!

Brittany Internet has recently expanded it’s server range from Windows 2008 servers to include Linux servers. Never content to rest on it’s laurels Brittany Internet took the step to add Linux servers to it’s data center to broaden the range of hosting  packages available to fulfil the requirements of it’s ever growing client base.

Brittany Internet now offers reseller hosting in France and the UK on both Windows 2008 and Linux platforms.

Visit their website for more information: www.brittany-internet.com

This should be ideal for English speaking residents in France that want a bilingual hosting partner to provide Linux website hosting services.

For more information on their Linux web hosting in France Click Here or for detail on the PHP scripts they have available like Joomla, PrestaShop etc. Click Here

This is a full version which is unlimited until June 2010 wherby it will then shut down every 2 hours.

Going to try out Windows 7 RC as I’ve resisted the move to Vista due to it’s crappyness and have been using a mix of XP and Linux.

Don’t know if this will be available generally or just to Microsoft Partners etc.

Will let you know how it goes!

Have fun

The machine is now setup for hosting .NET and PHP websites for development work.

It’s taken 2 days just to install and configure the machine with all the develppment software, tools and database systems.

What Joy

As of today they’ve given up on my email servers IP address and we’re back down to normal traffic.

It did give me the opportunity to refresh some of my SPAM filtering configuration and have tightened things even further.