Yes this post is completely useless, some how I have been nominated to be an Umbraco MVP for 2010 which is just amazing.  But I’m pretty certain which of the great candidates will get the MVP’s (And deservedly so in my opinion) I thought I would game the system as much as possible, and I have put this post up as it should appear with my name on the our.umbraco.org home page in the blog listings asking people to vote for me.

Yes that's right, this post is nothing more than… Urm… Spam… on my own blog! That's how much I want an MVP, not many people can say they spammed their own blog to become an Umbraco MVP – Now that's dedication :P

>> VOTE LEE MESSENGER <<

http://our.umbraco.org/member/3188

This post isn’t really a blog post as such, I thought as I watch all the LINQ videos and read various websites I would document useful bits of information that I can reference millions of times over the next 2 years few months. 

I am going to be adding to this page more and more over the coming weeks too, to save having lots of different  More...

If you use Dreamweaver CS2 or CS3 and code in ASP.NET you’ll know about an annoying problem it has (I’m not sure if they have fixed it for CS4) – Dreamweaver doesn’t know what a Master page is and tus treats it like plain text, meaning when you open it up you get no intelli-sense or ASP.NET support!   This is really easy to fix with a quick edit of an XML file in the install directory of Dreamweaver More...

“Not again” I hear you shout… And yes, yet ‘another’ Twitter package for Umbraco has been created. But, this one has a bit of a twist – I have used the current Twitter packages, but although I found them great the one I used was temperamental with showing latest tweets (Although the more I look into it I wonder if its one of the settings).

Also I wanted to make something VERY simple, no API, simple settings and all done with ASP.NET – NO XSLT! No real reason, just because I can… hehehe.  So here it is, I created this SimpleTweets a really simple package that displays your latest Twitter posts in a user control and spits out the results in an unordered list.  More...

A long time ago I used to be into doing lots of affiliate stuff, building sites then driving traffic to them and making bits of money here and there – I remembered recently that I still had an active account on the eBay Affiliate Network (https://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com) and thought it would be cool to make a little eBay Affiliate Feed project for Umbraco so everyone else can easily make money from their sites.

I thought I would try my hand at a screen cast… Never again!  But here it is anyway, or you can spare yourself the pain of listening to me droning on and read below the video. More...

This is something very obvious to most, but as I watch a lot of screen casts / tutorials I would always see people typing in their browser things like umbraco.local or devsite.local to get up their local development copy of Umbraco – And I always wondered how they did it as I always used the built in Visual Studio server to develop on, not to mention if I was using IIS locally I could only install one version of Umbraco as I was accessing it using localhost?? More...

I had the most frustrating problem recently when I was trying to extend Tim's locator package – I wanted to build up a dynamic XPath select statement based on QueryString values, for example if one value was present then select nodes based on the value but if another QueryString value was present select nodes based on the value of that.

So I tried what I thought was very simple..  I create a variable called $thesearch and build up the XPath statement within the variable like so

And then just use the variable in my select statement

Yep simple… BUT… Nooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!  God damn XSLT…. Grrrrrrrr More...

On one of my current projects we needed to create a custom article feature which revolved around using the TAGS DataType which ships with Umbraco, in this little blog post I’ll show you how to use the TAGS DataType to create your own mini article system and give you some useful XSLT snippets to save you the time I had to take to get it working. More...

I recently had a need to show a value from a Drop Down DataType I had created in my Umbraco UI – The backend users were using the drop down to create content, but I needed people to be able to use the values in the front end to also submit content via my HTML pages.

In this tutorial I’ll show how to recreate the dropdown list DataType in the front end – To get the DataType values you need to use a method from the umbraco.library() called GetPreValues() where you need to pass in the ID of the DataType More...