SunBlogNuke - DotNetNuke Blog Module

When it comes to Blogging, traffic is the main factor and it can be gained by many strategies. Meanwhile, traffic depends on number of factors however "Social Bookmarking" is the most important and common factor. So you can get a lots of traffic by joining popular Social Bookmarking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg & new cool Google+. The Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke supports the social bookmark feature from the beginning, with which your readers easily share your blog post on the famous social bookmark services around the world. Today we would like to show you how to active it and implemented customized "ShareThis" bookmark widget in DNN blog.

As you know, there are lots of 3rd party services integrated with SunBlogNuke, such as Active Social module & Gravatar. Here we will cover another awesome external service - Posterous, with which you can easily build cross-post - only write your post in the Posterous and then autopost it to your SunBlogNuke source with one click.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo announced support for a new 'Canonical Link Element' in the header of your website page that will help clean-up duplicate url's that have been indexed by search engines. This issue is so specially serious in DotNetNuke that there are duplicated contents returned for different urls. And we ever supplied a handy solution for our blogging module – SunBlogNuke in the tutorial - SEO Best Practices for DNN Blog Posts.

Today we released the new SEO extension - the alternative way to build the canonical link for your dnn blog post to avoid duplicate Urls. To apply the blog extension, it is so easy and just follow up the simple steps below:

1) Download it from the extensions directory.
2) Unzip it and upload the extension file Canonical.cs' into the folder $ROOT/bin/Blog_Extensions. If not exist please create it at first.
3) Open up the web.config and make sure that the blog extension element there. If not exist, add the directory 'Blog_Extensions' in the element [codeSubDirectories] and it looks like as follow:

<codeSubDirectories>
  <add directoryName="HTML" />
  <add directoryName="Blog_Extensions" />
</codeSubDirectories>

That is all. It should work like a charm - when visiting the post detail, it will automatically add the canonical meta tags to your blog post.

BTW, you may be interested in the similar guidelines about other awesome blog extensions:

Integrated Social Graph into DNN Blog

Post Comment to Journal of Active Social

Hope it helps. Blog your way and enjoy life. :)

As you know, the dnn blogging module SunBlogNuke supported Disqus out of the box but wasn't able to export the existing comments to Disqus. And our clients ever requested to move their existing blog comments over to Disqus, too. Fortunately, the v4.7 began to totally support export blog data with blogml format,  so you can use any 3rd party tools to convert the comments to WXR. Then you can import the WXR file under the Generic option in Disqus.

Just search term 'blogml to wxr' in Google you should get lots of similar converters. Here we recommend this simple converter, which works well with our exported file. The tool is a Windows console application that takes two parameters, the BlogML import file and the WXR output, i.e.:

BlogMLtoDisqus.exe C:\BlogML.xml C:\ForDisqus.wxr.

To export comments of SunBlogNuke to Disqus, please follow up the simple steps below:

1. Login in your blog dashboard of SunBlogNuke with host/admin account.
2. Go to 'Import/Export Panel' and click 'export' button to download the full BlogML export from your dnn blog.
3. Provide that you have placed the console tool & the export file in the folder d:\. Go to the folder and execute it in the command window like that:
   
   BlogMLtoDisqus.exe d:\BlogML.xml d:\ForDisqus.wxr
   
   Note that you’ll need to install .NET 4.0 as well if you don’t already have it. If you can’t convert it successfully, you can send us the exported blogml file and we will help you deal with it.
4. If there is no error throwing, now you should get the converted WXR file. Next just feel free to import it under the Generic option in Disqus.

If you have more questions about  this topic or blogging,  Please feel free to post a comment below.  I’ll be happy to help.

As more and more clients requested the tutorial how to set up multiple blogs or blogging with multiple authors in the same blog, here we list what the raised requirements are and how to work around them in the Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke. Hope it helps. 1) Multiple blogs Question: "I was wondering if we can add this instance of module in 2 different pages in the same portal. The two modules should have different blogs, which means module1 on page1 shouldn't show blog contents of module2 on page 2 and vice-versa. Would that be possible?" Solution: Yes, you can build multiple blog instances in different pages with different contents. Just add it and assign them in the edit blog panel with specific tab (page). Please refer to the tutorial in detail - Setting up Multiple Blogs. 2) Multiple authors Question: "We would like to use the blog module in a team environment where anyone on the team could post an entry to the same blog. The individual user should be credited as the aut ...

The ultimate dnn blog module – SunBlogNuke introduced the advanced feature that you are able to execute common commands in the shortcut way. With the handy feature, it is so easy to complete some common tasks without dashboard,  such as comment approval & regenerate permlinks. Just note that login your dnn website with right permission firstly, like admin account or blog owner. Please go through this tutorial for details.

One of the questions my clients most often ask is: “How do I make sure my dnn blog is SEO friendly and still interesting for my readers?”. Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines. Its features and functions guide a search engine through the posts, pages, and categories to help the search engine crawl your site and gather the information it needs to include your site within its database.  Below are some tips and tricks with the built-in features of SunBlogNuke , that will help you catch search engines’ attention and optimize your blog posts.

jQuery sliders have been spotted to be commonly used in lots of website to display the images/contents in different impressive ways. Since apart from showing large amount of core site content in a limited space on a website, any jQuery slider also has a great capability to engage the viewers and trigger their interest towards what is being shown to them. In the DNN platform,  it’s also a very popular functional widget and there are lots of slider modules for sale in the snowcovered.com. In my opinion, those modules have the vital disadvantage that they are built with static contents and independent with any content publishing tool. In the end you have to modify them one by one if you want to make it look more dynamic. Now we would like to share the alternative useful tool with building neat, elegant and versatile site components with dynamic effects. Yes, that is the Content Slider Widget(CSW) for Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke.

With the help of jQuery & CSW, you will be able to create any super content sliders with your dnn blog posts. So if you’ve been wondering how jQuery content sliders are accomplished and want to try implementing some of them on your DotNetNuke website, here this tutorial will help you with that.  Today we just showcase the amazing slide thumb on how to make viewing images or other site content more comforting and intuitive. Take a look at how the slide thumbs actions – demo link. Then let’s go ahead.

As we promised ever, we are trying to build an enhanced and ultimate publishing tool on the DotNetNuke(DNN) platform with a focus on simplicity, ease of extendibility, web standards and usability. We hope that you can build what you would like to with more flexibility and extendibility and the WordPress-level blogging engine is our target until now. Today I would like share you how to add Facebook like button into your dnn website with Ultimate Blog Module – SunBlogNuke plus integrate with Facebook OpenGraph meta .

Actually the vote/digg feature, which allows registered users to vote for your blog posts, was supported from Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke v4.0 but it is not active in default. It requires some customizations to integrate with. Today we would like to share you how to apply the awesome feature into your dnn blog.  Firstly we will introduce the basic sample with built-in feature, then extend to supply the advanced usage with developing a new vote widget and customized  styles.