Grid design has been a growing trend in web design and were pioneered by Khoi Vinh, a Creative Director of NYTimes, and a talented web designer Mark Boulton from the UK in recent years. The Grid System is another great resource to help you get started in designing site using grids. The creator demonstrated the concept and implementation very well by putting together the site using... grid.

Well, it's a great resource, give it a look!

I implemented dnnGallery using the similar approach. But I think it's time to go back and a take a look at the pixel perfect in designing using grid for the site.

It was my first time to attend the conference in Vegas this year and it was a great experience. I had the opportunity to meet with many core team members in person and talked about how DotNetNuke project has gained some momentum in recent years.

Seeing many new faces at the conference that have never worked with DotNetNuke before and looked into getting deployed for their corporate use made me happy that the project has great support from both the community and our customers.

The conference had variety of sessions to accommodate different level of DotNetNuke proficiency. I enjoyed sitting in the session that Tom Kraak (Seablick Consulting) to learn about SEO in DotNetNuke framework. Tom also did a great job with Ryan Morgan from Arrow Nuke Consulting to deliver the advanced skinning session.

Thanks everyone who came to my sessions at OpenForce in las Vegas this year. I hope you all learned a lot from all the sessions you attended at the conference. If you have any questions or suggestions specifically about my sessions, feel free to let drop a line here.

I know Tracy Wittenkeller did a great job on his two sessions about building DotNetNuke web site and designing HTML skins which are very helpful to beginners. It’s great to see so many DotNetNuke newbie at such event.

You can view and download the presentations I posted at SlideShare. Feel free to grab a copy and ask any questions you may have.

Landed to Vegas safe and sound yesterday. The team went to get some drinks at the Border Grill at TheHOTEL and met with many DotNetNuke professionals around the country. I was pretty excited to meet with those guys in person since we can only communicate online when they all reside in so many different places. We all had a good time!

After having a few drinks, we went to the exhibit hall to get some update about the booth graphic and got our hands dirty to set it up.

Chris decided to set up a time lapse video so we can see how progresses.

Vanda and I went out to do some Halloween costume shopping last night and I found this conical straw hat or non la. It's pretty interesting that I haven't seen it in a long time and now it ended up in a pile of "foreign costume" for American Halloween fantasy.

This hat I found was indicated that you could dress up as a Chinese person of some sort. But what struck me is the hat itself is well-known for Vietnamese farmer in Southern Vietnam (I think) for years. People use it in their daily life for grocery shopping or working in the agricultural environment.

I read this one somewhere but don’t remember exactly who wrote it:

The thing about stereotypes is that they're true, but the thing about stereotypes is that they're not true

Being a Vietnamese (or Asian or whatever you wanna call a black hair and squint-eyed dude), I often ran into some funny stuff when people making snap judgments that made me think they might be serious about it if I don’t correct them.

Here’s what I’ve encountered about what they think:

I wish I had Tivo to record the episode of Family Guy on Sunday last week. I did some search on Google to find if there’s anybody out there posting the footage of Family Guy when Stewie and Brian traveled back in time during World War II (the Nazi invasion) but found no luck.

Anyway, the plot is that after Stewie stole the uniforms, he put them on and he looked down with a comment “Huh, that’s weird.” when he saw the McCane-Palin pin on his shirt. Apparently, this footage kinda upset a lot of McCane-Palin supporters but Fox’s representative quoted “this show is an equal opportunity offender.” so it’s kinda SOL for them.

I’m a big fan of Family Guy and Seth MacFarlane. I think during this presidential election period, this footage is a great depict of whom he supports while creating some controversy to gain (or maybe recruit) more viewers to the show. And I enjoyed watching it!

Last week at the national Direct Marketing Association (DMA) event in Las Vegas, the DMA announced the launch of a new web site, www.DMAChoice.org, to help consumers managing incoming mails at their homes. Our board member, Jim Ruszala—Director of Marketing at Maritz, represented the DMA of St. Louis Area to attend the event.

Receiving too much irrelevant mail that you wish not to? The site was launched with the purpose of helping individuals or household to opt-out of their everyday mails that clog your mailbox. Or just plain doing your part to help a greener society by telling companies to stop sending you mails.

I bet many of you already know about Twitter. For whatever reason, many people call it micro-blogging. I think it’s just another new terminology in this social media buzzing world. I call it a utility that allows people to legally stalk you (with or without permission).

Anyway, that’s not the point for this blog post. I heard about this thing when it’s first introduced but never bothered to get into it. But recently, it has become the fad that many people use it to spread the news. From big corporations to presidential candidates, you can virtually find any company or celebrity there and see what other people are talking about them. I signed up for it with the interest to see what all the fuzz is about. It’s kinda cool and I enjoy using it thus far.

Apple has done an outstanding job of redesigning and re-engineering their MacBook line recently. CEO Steve Job announced a new line of improved products yesterday during a conference in San Francisco.

According to Tim Cook, Chief Operating Officer, they have done a great job so far in selling products the past three quarters. It is surprising that their revenues in the first three quarters are already equal to the entire fiscal year of 2007 during this economic downturn.

Steve claimed that MacBook is the best selling Apple computer ever. He introduced all the great new improvements and technologies Apple uses on this line of products. One thing that might raise some concerns to the consumers is the change in their pricing strategy to the MacBook product.

For those of you who have never heard of SlideShare before, it's a social networking site for sharing your presentations (or knowledge if you will). It's a very nice tool to help speading your presentations to the mass audiences.

I posted mine today just in case anybody missed the conference in Tulsa last week can see it.

Thanks to all who came to my session in Tulsa. I hope you enjoyed the presentation and learned a bit about DotNetNuke skinning and its engine.

It might be too much information in an hour and a half, but I couldn’t consolidate the topics to make the entire presentation valuable to everybody. Anyway, here’s the presentation, feel free to download and leave feedback and comments to let me know what you think.

My good friend, Ian Robinson, is presenting his session about “What’s new with DotNetNuke 5.0?”. I guess we’ll be heading out soon when he’s done.

After reading Joe’s blog about the new pane preview in DotNetNuke 5.0, I was excited and couldn’t wait for the next release. However, after viewing it couple times and putting some thoughts on it and relate to my clients’ workflow, turned out that this new feature doesn’t add any value to the framework but rather makes it less user-friendly.

Here’s why.

It’s true that “A picture is worth a thousand words”. DotNetNuke pane preview works fine the way it is, why should we change it? I fully agree if the change is for the better, but in this case the pane preview hurts the user experience a bit.

Adobe announced the release of Creative Suite 4 today with multiple collections including Design, Web, Production Premium and Master Collection.

According to the corporate web site, there are major enhancements focusing on workflow virtually across almost all applications.

So far, there isn’t much exciting features from a web design perspective that I have seen in this new release. Unless Adobe can prove the upgrade worth the price tag they are asking for. If not, then I’ll be ready for the waiting game.

For those of you who took my classes at Engage, I have an update for you.

Prior to DotNetNuke 4.9, all skins created must contain the single most important token—ContentPane. I usually spend a good amount of time explaining how important this token is and make sure everybody understand before moving on.

Today, working on a project for my client, I made this very simple mistake by not including the ContentPane token in the skin file. Everything worked great from installation to managing content on a page and I didn’t notice there is something missing.

For all DotNetNuke versions prior to 4.9, the system immediately throws an error that it could not locate ContentPane. However, this new version never gives any hints about it.

As a member of the board of directors with the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) - St. Louis, our board has been working closely with the first ever collaborative educational symposium with the American Marketing Association (AMA) to develop a jam-packed educational experience on the subject of Internet Marketing.

This half-day event will focus on interactive customer contact strategies, including:

Search Engine Optimization and Marketing
Pay Per Click Marketing
Permission-Based Email
Social Marketing Media

Join us on Oct 3rd at the Ritz Carlton in Clayton.

A long-awaited DotNetNuke 4.9 released last week has made the community excited. I personally upgraded my web site right at the minute DotNetNuke announced on their homepage the new version is available.

A few notable changes in 4.9 have been fairly documented this time after seeing the community’s frustration of the lack of such friendly documentation/release process when new versions introduced. Thanks to Joe Brinkman’s great documentation efforts, we all now can get the major highlights of updates.

As you can see beside the new default skin, a skin object called “TEXT” also introduced to allow text localization within skins. When Shaun Walker first blogged about it, I was excited to see the improved skinning process and a few enhancements, but let’s take a closer look to see what are the benefits this new skin object give us.

Vanda is finally done with school. This is exciting for both of us because we both can move on with life now. I decided to take her on a mini vacation in California (she’s from LA originally) and visit family.

When browsing the Internet to find a deal on airplane tickets for both us, I landed on Expedia.com, a site that many are familiar with when booking travel packages online. Anyway, I found the tickets and then started the checkout process but then encountered some frustrations in filling out their forms.

Here is the screenshot. (Screenshots available at full post)

From the above screenshot, there is no assistance in telling me, as a web user, that there are required fields I must provide before proceeding to the next screen. So I skipped the “Home Phone” field, then it started yelling with red box.

It seems a bit obvious to offer some advices in designing a great web site after I posted the principles of DotNetNuke design. But since I ran into many questions asked by friends and clients repeatedly and also saw people made mistakes in the community, I decided to put together this short list in no particular order. Hope it helps in your next projects. 

1. Design your site for users, not machines.
2. Navigation is key to better user experience.
3. Leave the creative work to the pros.
4. Build a web site, not creating panes.
5. White space is your friend.
6. No detail is too small.

Being curious about the new browser that claimed to support Web Standards, I looked at IE8 (still in Beta) today and found a few things that they have learned from others.

From the official web page at their site, Microsoft team listed the top features and at a glance, you can see how much of the improvements they have learned from other rivals such as Safari and Firefox. Here is the list.

SmartSreen Filter (Firefox Style)

A new security feature is introduced on IE8 to help protect your PC against malicious site that might place harmful files on your system. This is one of the features we’ve seen in the new Firefox 3 just released a few months ago.

Search Suggestions (Firefox Style)

The dropdown list suggested the keywords or phrases that you’re searching for as your type. This is a cool add-on but then again, a real replicate version that we’ve all seen in Firefox 2.

I was excited a few months back when I got an e-mail from Joe Brinkman about being selected as a speaker for OpenForce ’08. But the good news doesn’t end there. Last week, I was informed that I’d be presenting with the creator of the DotNetNuke project, Shaun Walker, after the conference in Vegas on November 14th.

It’s official that we, Shaun Walker, Joe Brinkman, my very good friend—Chris Hammond, and I are joining together to present the best practices in DotNetNuke 5.0 this November in Vegas. In recent announcement from DotNetNuke, Engage Software, an Official DotNetNuke Training Provider, and DotNetNuke Corporation has partnered to offer the community with the best practices in one of the major releases of DotNetNuke. At this Post-Conference Workshop, not only you will have a chance to learn the best practices in DotNetNuke 5.0, but you also learn from the project creator himself. So go ahead and check on the Post-Conference Workshop option when you register for OpenForce to get the inside scoops from the team.

It is official that I joined the DotNetNuke Gallery team led by Néstor Sánchez. Compare to the last time I looked at the module was more than a year ago. Wow, if you haven’t seen it recently, you should definitely check it out.

Currently, the module is still in 4.3.0 Beta. But tremendous improvement and bug fixes have been implemented. You can view a live demo here and get a general idea for your next projects.

My main responsibility for the Gallery module will be helping with the UI design and usability in general. Keep an eye on the project; I’ll be updating some cool UI elements and templates if you wish to use this module for your production. Also, I’ll make sure that I’ll be picky about the workflow to make everybody’s job in managing this module easier.

Last year, the entire gang at Engage Software took off two days at work and headed South to Tulsa to attend the annual Tulsa TechFest event. We all had a good time learning from many industry experts and met like-minded people around the country. I learned a few things and so did many of my colleagues.

This year, Engage Software came back with the entire track of DotNetNuke. If you’re a DotNetNuke fan, be sure to come out to meet and learn a few more things or just plain exchanging ideas to help improving the community.

If you’re new to DotNetNuke and would like to learn more about it, this is a great opportunity to attend a free conference (or paying $2 per day to donate to charity). Our training courses at Engage often starts at $599 per day so this is a great bargain.

For those of you don’t know who MinhPhuong is, let me just tell you a little bit. MinhPhuong is my oldest sister's name and also the name of a logistics business which she owns for a little over 13 years. The company has some big name clients such as Samsung, Pepsi Co., Canon, NEC Tokin, DuPont and so on.

MinhPhuong Co. employs about 300 employees to date and my sister has no involvement in the hiring process unless it’s a management position.

Samsung has been one of MinhPhuong’s great clients over the years. Last week, Samsung has a shipment (243 TVs) that needs to be exported to South Africa and asked MinhPhuong to help transport the shipment to Cat Lai Port (in southern Vietnam). Unfortunately, the driver took off with the shipment valued a little over US$160,000 and sold each TV in several markets around the city for a less than US$200.00.

Vanda and I went to the Festival of Nations over the weekend with some friends. It was my first time to attend this type of activity that has been going on in St. Louis for a while. What a cool experience that you got to see more than 30 countries got together for a great event.

The main purpose of the festival is to “bring Americans of all backgrounds together - native and naturalized citizens alike - to share the ties with our past and take pride in the richness of diverse cultures in our community”. You can find great foods that you’ve never tasted before. There are various cuisines from many cultures or countries that I have never heard of before. But it was a great experience to try new things.

Besides all the cuisines you can taste with reasonable price, there are many arts and crafts selling at the event. There music, dancing, singing from such rich and diverse cultures at one place, it’s definitely an event not to miss if you’re living in St. Louis.