1. Earn TRUST – how important are relationships to your business?
2. Merit CREDIBILITY – how do you prove expertise?
3. Demonstrate you CARE – do you care enough to share?
4. Invite FEEDBACK – are phone & email enough for your customers?
5. Grow your online PRESENCE – how do your customers find you online?
6. Make someone say “WOW” – is it valuable to be remarkable?
7. Support your COMMUNITY – we all want a business fan club right?

Sources for Blog Post Topics

13 Blog Post Topic Ideas for Your Business

1. Explain how a recent news event will affect your industry.
2. List essential resources related to your industry and summarize why.
3. List and debunk the most common myths in your industry.
4. Promptly deliver a report from an industry related event.
5. Compare something complex or misunderstood to something simple or commonly understood.
6. Deliver timely advice or news relevant to an upcoming holiday or event.
7. Share a list of changes you are considering for your business.
8. Make a list of valuable products or services that are complimentary to your business/industry.
9. Share a list of your favorite replies on Blog, Twitter and/or Facebook.
10. Share a list of your favorite photos or videos related to your business/industry.
11. Answer a list of the most commonly asked questions you receive.
12. Create simple step-by-step directions how to do something.
13. Invite someone interesting to write a post.

A Few Good Examples

• Drawing from a personal experience: The Why by eROI
• Challenge an industry myth: Online Privacy is an Illusion by Fast Wonder Blog
• Report on (or from) an industry event: CES 2010: Surprised in Vegas by Johnflurry Blog
• Step-by-step and how-to: Design a Print Ready Label in Adobe Illustrator at Tuts Plus

Recently, we had a request to have comments be moderated.  That means any comment posted would be initially marked as spam and wouldn’t post live to the site.  The blog owner then has to go into the comments area and manually approve each comment.  I’m not big on this, but for some people its important.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t come out of the box in Blog 4 Umbraco.  Luckily, its easy to do.

To add this functionality all you have to do is add a new class that derives from the SpamChecker class.

I created a new class called “AlwaysMarkSpamChecker.cs” under the “Spam” folder.

The class contained the following code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Web;
using Umlaut.Umb.Blog.Interfaces;
using Joel.Net;

namespace Umlaut.Umb.Blog.Spam
{
    public class AlwaysMarkSpamChecker : SpamChecker
    {

        public AlwaysMarkSpamChecker()
        {
            this.ProviderName = "AlwaysSpam";
        }

        public override Boolean Check(int nodeid,
            string UserAgent, string UserIp, string Author,
            string AuthorEmail, string AuthorUrl, string Content)
        {
            return true;
        }

        public override void MarkAsHam(int nodeid, string Author, string AuthorEmail, string AuthorUrl, string Content)
        {

        }

        public override void MarkAsSpam(int nodeid, string Author, string AuthorEmail, string AuthorUrl, string Content)
        {

        }

    }
}

Then I edited the /umbraco/plugins/blog4umbraco/SpamChecker.config file in my Umbraco installation to look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<SpamChecker assembly="/bin/Umlaut.Umb.Blog" type="Umlaut.Umb.Blog.Spam.AlwaysMarkSpamChecker">
</SpamChecker>

Now when I add a new blog comment it will always be marked as Spam in the Comments tab.

If you have any questions or any problems, let me know!

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Web;
using Umlaut.Umb.Blog.Interfaces;
using Joel.Net;

namespace Umlaut.Umb.Blog.Spam
{
    public class AlwaysMarkSpamChecker : SpamChecker
    {

        public AlwaysMarkSpamChecker()
        {
            this.ProviderName = "AlwaysSpam";
        }

        public override Boolean Check(int nodeid,
            string UserAgent, string UserIp, string Author,
            string AuthorEmail, string AuthorUrl, string Content)
        {
            return true;
        }

        public override void MarkAsHam(int nodeid, string Author, string AuthorEmail, string AuthorUrl, string Content)
        {

        }

        public override void MarkAsSpam(int nodeid, string Author, string AuthorEmail, string AuthorUrl, string Content)
        {

        }

    }
}

I recently blogged about how to select the blog to post to from the dashboard when there are multiple blogs in Umbraco.

Now we need to limit access through the Users permissions and allow some users to create blogs on all blogs and some to create only on specific blogs.

I had to modify the SetBlogRoot() code to check for the CurrentUser permission to see if they had Create permissions.

I also have a fix for a problem I was having with ghost blogs with no versions (recycle bin?) showing up in the list.

Go take a look at the code on Pastie here (didn’t format well this time embedded)

This works well in my limited testing. Please let me know if there are any issues and I’ll work them out. I’m trying to get these changes to a point where I can submit a patch back to the B4U package.

The only bummer after getting the blogs and site set up was that the new cool blogging dashboard page didn’t support multiple blogs. It would just blog to the first blog it found.

What I wanted was something like this:

Unfortunately, the current blog package just looks for the first blog it can find in the content tree and posts to it. So I downloaded the source code and started poking around to see if I could make blog selection happen.

The key control was the CreatePost.ascx control.

First, lets get a ComboBox to select the parent blog to post to…

In CreatePost.ascx add these lines at the top of the “blogpostCreator” panel:

Now to hook up the control we go to the code behind.

There is a method called SetBlogRoot() that controls where the blog is posted to. Its call OnInit() and on createPost_Click(). We can leverage the call in the init code to build the list of blogs in the new ComboBox / DropDownList we just added to the front-end.

To fill the DropDownList in SetBlogRoot() simply add the “text” column to the list of fields returned in the SQL at the top, create a while loop and fill the new control we created, and select the initial blog to show (the first one). Here’s the code:

One more edit to createPost_Click() and were done. Comment out the SetBlogRoot() function call and the line below to get the blog ID selected from the ComboBox / DropDownList.

Build and copy over the new DLL to the bin directory and the new CreatePost.ascx to the usercontrols directory and you’re ready to rock!

I’ll submit this as a patch soon with another modification to allow future and past published dates (watch for another blog in the coming weeks!)

Thanks, and any questions add to the comments below!

We have two skins based on the same style:

ProWorks Lozenge White

This is sort of a simple, base skin that would be great to add photos or color to.

It is based on the K2 Lite for Sandbox theme so it should work for WordPress too.

Download: ProWorks_Lozenge_White.zip

ProWorks Lozenge Flowers

This is a variation of the White theme with some added flair.  This may not work in Wordpress because it relies on the ASP.NET form tag to add an extra wrapper for the flowers.  We will work on it and get it working with Wordpress at some point.  It is also based on the K2 Lite for Sandbox theme.

Download: ProWorks_Lozenge_Flowers.zip

Thanks Umbraco Team!

Thanks to Niels Hartvig, Per Ploug Hansen, and Tim Geyssens for such a great Christmas Present!  The blog package is key and was improved immensely over the last month.  Thanks to all the Umbraco developers and community members for making the Umbraco community so great!

Here are our skins in action as part of the new Umbraco Skin Browser.  Cool!