So it’s 2009 now, almost 5 days in already. I’m going to compile a quick list of website statistics for ChrisHammond.com. Read the full post for more info

So I made some more changes to ChrisHammond.com today. I updated the URL structure of the site to use the URL Master module from https://www.iFinity.com.au. So far it’s working great. The urls should be shorter and cleaner now, hopefully more SEO friendly as well. Take a look around, if you see anything wrong let me know.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!!

I don't know why it has taken me this long, but I've finally taken down all the google ads from my personal website at www.chrishammond.com. I had the page all littered up with ads for the past few years. I just ran a report on my google adsense account and it looks like I started running ads on ChrisHammond.com somewhere around 8/23/2004. Since that time I've had 373k page impressions, 2,565 clicks, with earnings near $466. That averages to about 309 impressions a day, 2 clicks per day, a click through rate of .69% and $1.25 CPM. Not a bad overall number, but for 4 years, making $116 a year on ads I don't think it is worth the clutter on the site anymore.

So for now, ChrisHammond.com is Google Adsense free. That doesn't mean I won't have other ads running on the site, I will most likely setup some sort of banner system between all of my websites (102 total domains on my godaddy account now), to cross promote all the various things I work on throughout the year.

What do you think? Are google adsense ads a waste with the numbers generated above?

I made a few changes to the site this evening, a few things I've had planned for a while. Now, all my blog posts from www.project240z.com, www.corvettez06.org and https://weblogs.asp.net/christoc will all aggregate here, so you can pull in my RSS feed from www.chrishammond.com and get whatever blog posts I make on those sites as well. The links should take you directly to the blog posts on those sites.

If you see any problems with this please let me know, I'm excited to get this flexibility built into the site and have another project to be announced later this week that will use this feature as well!

So I made some minor adjustments to the site tonight. I made the header at the top 62% smaller, taking up less area on the page. I also changed some of the photos around. My good buddy Chad Hobson got pulled from the headers for now. He might make an appearance again in the future.

So I'm finally getting around to doing a write-up about my conversion from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke. The conversion wasn't for the faint of heart, though it has been a great learning experience, which I hope will be beneficial to anyone else considering moving away from CommunityServer or other platforms and onto the DotNetNuke platform. I chose to move from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke 4.8.0 running the Engage: Publish module, available from www.engagemodules.com. My reasons for choosing the Publish module are detailed below. Overall the process has taken me rougly 3 weeks, though not all of that time was spent doing things productive :). I hope to cover some of the details on this conversion, and the thoughts going into the process, as well as thoughts after the process. Before I do that though I will give you a little background on my experience with both systems first.

The mother of all blog posts is coming, hopefully later tonight, stay tuned!

A description of this website and the software that powers the site for CHris Hammond

This is it! The first post for ChrisHammond.com now running on DotNetNuke!

It is nearly 3pm CST on Wednesday January 23rd, 2008. Almost 2.5 years since I initially setup a .Text blog for this website I am finally ready to convert the site to run on DotNetNuke. I'll post more about "why" I am converting to DotNetNuke, and how I am doing so. Only a few of you will even get to read this via CommunityServer as the conversion will be taking place in just a few minutes. One thing to note if you are subscribed to the site via RSS/ATOM you might have to change your URLs. The new URL will be available shortly. For now, this is it, the final blog post via CommunityServer for the domain name...

I upgraded my site to CommunityServer 2.1 this afternoon. It was time for a change and hopefully 2.1 will filter the comment spam I've been getting a bit better.I'll be making more changes to it shortly, adding another picture to the header like I had...

We're back from California. Picks and more info up later this...

I've been doing some testing on a recent DNN module and noticed some issues that I think a 301 Redirect will handle. Doing some quick googling I came up with the following topics to setup 301 redirects in asp.net. https://www.wwwcoder.com/main/parentid/263/site/2668/68/default.aspx https://scottwater.com/blog/archive/2004/04/14/PermanentRedirects.aspx I'll be building this into the module tomorrow and will report back on the results in the next couple of weeks. Currently I've got a site with close 100 pages of content, but google is only seeing 6 of those pages. I'm thinking if I implement 301 redirects for a link tracker I'm using this may help. Time will...

I took the oil pan off the L28ET motor tonight to try to get inside and see what all I could find out about the motor. I've posted a few pictures over in the 240 photo gallery, check them out, let me know what you think of what you see. https://sccaforums.com/photos/christoc/category1053.aspx Here are some of the recently uploaded...

Well, I decided to check out Chad's website again. And, not to my surprise, he hasn't done anything with it! I am still a...

Community Server can be a pretty powerful tool if you take your time to setup a decent site for your users. Here are a few tweaks I've made to SCCAForums.com to make it a bit more user friendly. On the home page there are sections for active, unanswer, and my posts(if logged in). These controls don't provide much information to the user though, by default only a link and portion of the subject of a forum post. On SCCA Forums I've setup the controls to display the user who made the last post, link directly to the last post rather than the first post, and also display and link to the particular forum that the post was made in. To do this you need to add the following script to your default.aspx page. <script language="C#" runat="server">  int getPageNumber(int replies) {  int page = 1;  if (replies > 14)   {   page = 1 + replies /15;  }   return page; }</script> You also need to change the ItemTemplate section of the ThreadRepeater controls to look like the following <ItemTemplate>        <div class="CommonSidebarContentItem">    <strong><a href="<%# ForumUrls.Instance().PostPaged((int) DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "MostRecentPostID"), getPageNumber((int)DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "replies")))%>"><%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "Subject").ToString() %></a></strong>    - <%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "MostRecentPostAuthor") %>    (<a href="<%# ForumUrls.Instance().Forum( ((Thread) Container.DataItem).SectionID ) %>"><%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "Forum.Name") %></a>)        </div></ItemTemplate>     More tweaks to come....

I just went through and enabled HTTP Compression for the server that ChrisHammond.com, Solo2.org, and various other websites run on. Now, I can't tell if the difference is noticable, or if I just think it's noticable? hmmm Followed the instructions in this article for setting up HTTP Compression on IIS...

ChrisHammond.com has gotten a long over due software update! With the update there are quite a few changes with the skins. I'll be making more adjustments later this weekend, stay...

Just archiving a link for me to read...

XM Radio signed Oprah Winfrey to a 3 year deal worth 55 Million dollars. That's awesome, not that I will ever listen to Oprah, but that is a great move for XM Radio. Down with the Sirius and that dumbass Howard Stern! Long live XM...

As in my previous blog post I ordered 3 Bags of Crap from www.woot.com the other day. Today they showed up!   4 Panda Express Panda Bears 10 DVD+RW Discs and Cases 2 Packages of Fake Legos 1 Camo Gun that makes noise and lights up. 15 Feet of Air Packing Bags ...

Just a quick post to aid in a little bit of search indexing for...

I've been trying to track down a copy of Pow Wow '93 for the past few years, but have been unsuccessful in doing so. Pow Wow was the annual talent competition held at Maconaquah High School in Bunker Hill Indiana. I was in a band back in 93, my sophemore year, called The Flying Gimps. We performed in Pow Wow, playing Helmet's "Unsung". We ended up winning $100 from the competition. At one point I had a copy of Pow Wow for that year but it got recorded over by something a few years later. I've tried contacting the school, but the media teacher who ran the show for many years no longer works there and no one there has an archive of the old shows. A few weeks ago Derrickfound me on Myspace.com. Derrick and his brother Sean were in the band as well, Derrick actually wasn't going to play in the show but do to some unfortunate circumstances had to take Sean's place and fill in. I asked if he happened to have a copy and he gratiously offered to dupe me a copy and send it over! It should be here in the next few days! I'm hoping to digitize it and get it online, as well as get a copy for Lindsy as she also performed in a different part of the competition. More on Pow Wow...

I implemented a version of Google Maps with SCCAForums.com, which runs on the CommunityServer platform. If any businesses are interested in this coalition of two products please contact me for further information. I'm readily available for consulting work for...

I finally got SBC to cancel my 1 yr DSL commitment due to all the troubles I've had with my connection. Charter is coming out Thursday to hook us up on pipeline! The only helpful person I talked to at SBC was the guy who cancelled the commitment. Everyone else I spoke with today, from Jack in India, to some girl here in the states, wouldn't help me for anything. My DSL dropped around 11am this morning and never did come back up. Great work SBC, AT&T, whatever you want to be...