Well it was great to have a chance to talk an audience of computer enthusiasts with an amazing age bracket!! From teenagers to seniors - the diversity was very interesting to see and the topics and questions covered - well - I learnt a couple of things as well.

When I had my talk I did forget that I wasn't on a network like in my office, and while the 'new' laptop was happy, the fact the DNN site couldn't find 192.168.100.4 wasn't.   And I was plugged into a network cable that kept on coming up with that familiar 'work offline' screen - so I was a bit taken aback with that.

However, being the company of 'pc' experts, they moved on to the next speaker, helped me sort out the 'network' setting and I was able to start my presentation using 'localhost' rather than IP.   I tried to change in the DB but what I didn't realise is sometimes we need to wait a couple of moments or restart IIS (web.config changes don't always work).

The laptop was connected to an on wall presenter, so it gave those who sat up the back a very clear view of what was going on and I had already an installed version of DNN.  But I learnt another lesson... I should have thought of the same thing when I was cooking for guests.. NEVER try something new on your visitors unless you are prepared for embarrassment.   And.. of course that's what happened.  There ar bugs in the DNN RC3 release and I found them while presenting. DANG won't do that again.

I had been a bit rushed prior to the night - my laptop had never been setup for IIS, didn't have the .NET 2 framework or SQL on there and it took me ages to get working so when I finally got it working and running  I didn't bother to test out what I was talking about.

What I did was build a small website using some existing information, but couldn't add an image - it came up with an error when trying to browse for one, so I had one with text only.

I used the Links, Announcements and Text/HTML modules, created a single page and discussed and showed how DNN uses copy, new, reference and gave examples of how they worked.

After that, I uploaded a couple of skins (second mistake -I should have had them already installed) and then showed how the DNN interface can look different and be controlled at site level and page level.  I didn't get a chance to show off the containers, but I had them set through pages so each one had a different look.

What I was pleased about was the response and felt good that although I'm not a developer, I can still talk and show to a wider audience how DNN can be used.  I had a funky CD we'd created - well I had 20 of them, and there was a queue of people afterwards to wanted one and wanted to talk to me about DNN... all 20 of them went and considering there were just over 100 people there - I would call the response excellent and I was very happy they were quite forgiving about the fact it had little glitches.  I did point out in the beginning that it was not the final release and I was testing it.

I used to test DNN alot - but now they have the benefactors who pay money to test the buillds - I guess it's not needed any more, so it's good not to have to do that.

I also touched on the licensing model being BSD - so you can take it, change it, and not have to put back to the community - giving companies who want to further develop DNN the ability to do so with confidence. 

To give DNN more credibility I used the AFL.com.au website as an example... and NO I didn't have anything to do with it so yes to one of the members who came up to me to tell me it's ugly it's OK - I've even been known to make some sites that aren't as 'pretty' as others but it's not always the choice of the developer on how the product looks in the end.

I touched on the fact I'd done some intranets - top countries in the world in fact, and how DNN allowed us to make the site meet the requirements of the very strict marketing team who's role was to keep the sites 'within style guidelines' at all costs and that's where DNN shines.

Another area I covered was that DotNetNuke is in fact one of the only open source applications that I know of that allows you to add ecommerce after the event.  So many people are looking at ecommerce these days but things like oscommerce and zencart -they are ecommerce apps on their own.. they don't allow the flexibility to have a website. Even the forums with other CMS based products (yes dotnetnuke is known as a 'web application framework') but to us little people - content management seems to ring more in a lingo we understand. 

I believe the talk went well and thanks to the PCUsers for letting me fill a space in short notice and for letting me 'wing it' somewhat.

I will make the presentation available soon -I have another DotNetNuke Powerpoint presentation I've updated that gives an overview on some statistics, some sample 'befores and afters' some screen shots of ecommerce and wil make that also available - -  more for marketing people and doesn't talk about DotNetNuke in as much as talking about what it can do.

That was my night for Wednesday evening and now it's off to put the final touches on my new skincovered.com website!! I love it.

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OHH by the way - before I forget -    WHAT DID I LEARN -

Did you know that USB sticks are formatted with FAT - and that if formatted using NTFS they are incredibly faster - I saw a great demo of this - I don't have all the details but I did see a working example of the USB stick being formatted to NTFS without losing data, after data transfer comparisons and that was cool... 

AND it was also VERY HANDY to find out where some of these files are when we want to backup specific things and how Microsoft often puts them in places we just don't know where to look all the time.

It was very interesting overall about what you can learn about the finer details of using computers.

Nina Meiers