We "Upendo" to Write for You!

If you’re in the developer community, and especially if you’re using or near any Azure conversations, you’ll continuously hear someone suggest Let’s Encrypt when it comes to securing your domain name.  You know, that thing you do to allow your website to use the HTTPS protocol to get that lock in front of it in the web browser.  I’ve tended to use NameCheap.com these days.  They’re cheap like their name suggests, and they’re super easier to use.  However, things just got even easier.

I’m not yet out of Europe.  I’m sitting in my hotel room in Paris, enjoying the sounds of the city, just blocks away from the Eiffel Tower.  I spent about an hour last night after midnight, exploring the city.  I can’t help but reflect on what DNN has done for my life.  It’s quite literally changed it, for the better, time and time again.  As a minor and superficial example, over 15 years ago when I started with it, I never thought it would lead me to Switzerland or France, much less riding a scooter around the Eiffel Tower after midnight.  I’ve come a long way over the years, and so has our community.  We’ve all grown, and this conference marked an important new milestone in our mutual journey. 

With all of the security breaches that have been happening over the years, I’ve always been skeptical of using a password manager.  Do you remember the (completely preventable) breaches at places like Target, Home Depot, and the massive one at Equifax?  Security is always a balancing act.  You’re constantly trying to walk that fine line between convenience and protection.  This high-wire act, unfortunately, leads many people into truly insecure password practices.  The most common taboos include writing it down somewhere, using the same one everywhere, and using passwords that increment by a single digit.  Historically, many data breaches have one or more of these as the root cause. 

Over the years, I’ve followed, learned, and tried many different ways to build extensions in DNN.  Of course, the primary extension I’ve built has always been a module.  If you’re new to DNN, a module is simply an app that you can install for visitors to interact with on your website.  After working on DNN solutions since 2003, I’ve settled on a very specific development pattern that we implemented here at Upendo Ventures.  Using our development pattern was time-consuming to get started with a new project, but it had too many benefits to avoid.  We’ve found and publicly released this development pattern to all of you.  Now you can use our development pattern too, but without any of the effort that we used to put into it

If you've been around DNN for a while, you may vaguely remember a monthly show that existed where myself and Joe Brinkman spoke about the various interesting news items of the month, and we also interviewed various folks in the DNN community. Well, it's back! That's right. This is the first of many DNN Hangout shows for you to enjoy.

Our team has been working hard at delivering the next great release of Hotcakes Commerce.  This time, we primarily focused on some updates that both our support clients and the community really wanted.  We’re very happy to announce that version 03.02.01 is ready for you and it brings with it some very popular updates.

The Awareness DNN Ecosystem Advisory Group held its September meeting yesterday. We had new members and some exciting updates, including DNN Open Friday, interesting blog posts, and updates on the upcoming community dashboard. Our group continues to do a great job of creating and spreading DNN-based content around the world. We are about to turn a couple important corners. Exciting!

The Awareness DNN Ecosystem Advisory Group has a lofty but long overdue goal of updating the DNNSoftware.com website.  Some of the things we're trying to address include: making DNN Platform more obvious, increasing the usability of the website, and updating the messaging found throughout the website.  We have some rockstar members that are putting in some excellent work towards this goal.

The Awareness DNN Ecosystem Advisory Group held its August meeting yesterday.  We had new members and some exciting updates, including new DNN extensions, interesting blog posts, and a DNNSoftware.com website proposal.  Our group continues to do a great job of creating and spreading DNN-based content around the world.  This is especially exciting since many people have been having their vacations recently.

One of the number one things I speak about with clients is brand, or branding.  In fact, when embarking on any project, internal or external, it’s probably the very first thing that we discuss.  This is especially true with small businesses and businesses who need to employ local and social media marketing strategies.  You need to first know what your brand is, how to speak about your brand (with as few words as possible), and how people should perceive your brand.  Most importantly, what will people say about your brand when you’re not looking?