Today has been a productive day - My new site will be ready for the launch of 3 but will still be running in 2.1.2 mode because it's been a big job and I wanted to use some modules that aren't 3 compliant yet, but nevertheless, can't wait to get some of the new sites running on 3. It's very cool. Particularly because I have a third party editor, which is just amazing and lets me put in very cool templates to help build my pages in a uniform manner.

I have some new things coming on my site - One is a members only articles area, where I will be reviewing modules, interviewing some of the best developers around, a cool submit a question module which allows you to submit questions and I can answer them so it's building up some resources.

Also, I have a nice gallery/portfolio of some of the work I've done, and it's looking nicely presented.  Skinned the articles module, and... let me think... oh yes, worked on the inventua module - that side menu is so cool. I really like it.  I'd even pay for it, if I weren't paying them to do my other work!!

Currently downloading from the DotNetNuke site, on my server, the latest build because I'm having problems uploading to server and uzipping it, keeps coming up with corrupted headers, but I think it could be the ftp uploading that has made it worse.

I'm going to have a range of colours and gradients available on my site for people to download and create some mix and match dnn 3 skins, and have converted 3 of the skins to 2.1.2 for those who like the look, but can't install 3 yet.... why should you miss out.

I'll also have available my free skins updated to 3.0 as well and for a change, will convert my free skins to the Snapsis skinning engine - I think I started on this and there were a couple of changes or something got in the way - but now Kirsty is well and truly becoming very knowledgable on the functionality and usability of DotNetNuke, she's going to be handling this under my instructions.. (poor thing!!)

Also, have lost information - alot of my chm files on my hdd that had a corrupt partition and I thought I had backed it up, but no such luck - I had moved it to that drive, while emptying another, backed up the other drive, and neglected to capture that information. That was disappointing, but the only thing I can say is that we get faster and smarter the next time round.

Looks like my new file server will be up and running by the end of the week and our backup mail server will be setup with most likely an adsl line in just as backup should the network be upset for a moment.  Have had some problems with a webserver wer're rebuilding, and for some reason it's not liking our attempts at installing Windows 2003. This will be our non-dnn server while we test another hosting provider, once its up and running - and then I'll decide which path to take for hosting.

Kirsty got her car today- she's building a site about it. Needs a little bit of care and attention, but it's cool and she's as excited as when she got her license.  Tonight I'm going to to export the blogs and users to the new site, and even if it's not 100% finished, would like to get it running as I want to launch my skinning site which is dedicated to only skins, object, cool modules and forum dedicated to skinning and usability. And then get the tutorials working better via exe files which allow browsing and working on your site at the same time.

I'm going to put 3.0.10 on http://www.dnnbeta.com after it's downloaded, but boy it's a slow connection tonight, and I'll see if i can't get catalook working on it.  I know Mark Hoskins has been busy on his ecom app, but haven't seen it lately. I had skinned elements of it, but it appears he's changed alot of it.

I know that Chris Paterra has been busy working on the PA for Tams gallery/forum/blogs module, which I skinned a little while ago and he told me today it was looking good. I also saw the search features running on his beta 3.0.10 build and was very impressed with how far it's gone.

I think I'm reading now that 3 is a much more stable environment, still having fun and games with the localisation, but that's going to be something to build on in the future and as soon as we have it behind us, will do what I can to assist in the localisation areas where possible, and work on creating those chm/exe files for the DotNetNuke documentation.

I have been looking at the skinning docs again and replacing the older images with some of the newer ones, will have to submit to Shaun for review, if it's not suitable, will convert to articles here to possibly take apart and analyse a bit more. I'd like to be working with some fun things though, rather than the grind of learning learning learning - it wears even the toughest of us down.

So there you have a snapshot of some of the news I've heard around the place today - Here's hoping yours is a good one.. and I'm thinking of listening to music again..

Nina Meiers