TIP: Clear DNN Cache #DotNetNukeGeek

Have you found yourself needing to programatically clear DotNetNuke (DNN) cache but were dismayed to discover newer DNN versions no longer rely on an easily-cleared cookie?

Here's a simple option to force the cache to clear...

TIP: Beware nefarious spaces #DotNetNukeGeek

I'm never ceased to be amazed at "holes" in software that's been around for ages -- that is, simple bugs that have had plenty of time to be detected and quashed but somehow aren't.  This week I ran into an oversight in the venerable DotNetNuke (aka "DNN") web platform which is a nicely-featured framework for quickly building .NET-based websites.

DNN has been around for over a decade yet the bug that tried to bite me is a simple oversight in how account usernames are handled...

Hosted jQuery fallback plan #WebDevGeek

It's estimated that jQuery is employed by over half of all "major" websites. "Major" means highly-trafficked-sites such as NBC, Amazon, Twitter and ESPN. Close to one-in-four of these sites use Google's hosted jQuery library files (a.k.a. Google's "Content Delivery Network" or "CDN") rather than serving local copies of files. There are some great reasons to deliver jQuery via a CDN -- namely a better end-user experience and less server and network loads thanks to CDN content originating from localized source servers and end-user web browser caching of commonly-served files. Employing a CDN, however, introduces an external dependency that can cause sites to seriously malfunction if the CDN becomes unavailable.

The easy solution is to dual-source those critical jQuery files: attempt to load from a CDN and, if that fails, load from a local source instead. The code for this is super-simple and is being used more and more often as websites feel the bite of unexpected CDN service interruptions...