Have you ever had the need to blog a range of IP Addresses from accessing your website? Or perhaps, setup a website that is only accessible to a specific range of IP Addresses? DotNetNuke Request Filters are a great tool for getting such functionality configured, all configurable within your browser, without needing access to the settings in IIS.

Before configuring the request filters, I’ll throw out an example of why you might do this. If your website has a forum, or other community type interface, you have likely experienced spammers trying to take advantage of these features. Sometimes these spammers come from a specific IP Address, or even a specific range of ip addresses. If that is the case, you may want to turn off your website for those IP Addresses.

A word of warning, the instructions below are very powerful, if you aren’t careful, you could bring your website down. Read through the instructions before attempting to configure your website’s request filters.

Configuring your DotNetNuke website to be accessible from one IP Address

Here are the steps to configure request filtering for an IP Address, essentially making the website ONLY accessible to a person browsing from a computer using the defined IP address. All other addresses will redirect to DotNetNuke.com. (these instructions assume you are running on DotNetNuke 6+

If you follow any of my blogs, you may remember all the discussion last fall about Movember. Yes, you read that correctly, Movember, take the N in November and replace it with an M, Movember!

Why would you ever rename November to Movember? To raise awareness for cancers that affect men, primarily prostate cancer, but others as well. The basic premise of Movember is this, for the entire month, you grow a mustache. How simple is that? Start on November 1st, clean shaven, and finish on November 30th, clean shaven except for your mustache! All while raising awareness, and money for research into cancers that affect men.

The Personal Connection

Earlier this year my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. While he is fortunate that they believe it to be caught very early there is always the risk that it can spread, He is getting ready to start the process of treatment. So obviously, my connection to Movember this year is even stronger than last year.

Movember 2010

Last year we formed a DotNetNuke team on Movember.com, which we plan to do again this year, just as soon as they open up the process. I’ll post a blog, and update this blog post as well, with a link to the team and how you can join.

We had 38 folks join the team, and a lot more donate to the cause. While not everyone who joined the team worked for DotNetNuke Corporation, a number of the members were from our offices around the world. Check out this slide show comparing some of the employees to famous Mo’s (mustaches)

Then of course there is the fact that last year I said if I personally raised $1,000, I would shave my head at the end of the month. Well, I did, and I did.

To be honest, my wife was NOT happy about the head shaving thing, and most of the office was pretty put off by it as well! I won't be making that challenge again, not this year, but perhaps I will come up with something.

Goal for 2011

In 2010 we raised almost $7k for Movember, for 2011 we’re setting a goal of $10k, doable, but it is definitely going to take some work to get there! We’re going to need to grow our team, and we’re going to need to get everyone involved to try and raise money. I think everyone should set a goal

Getting Ready

So you have just under two months to start getting ready for Movember. Most importantly, prep your significant other for the fact that you are going to grow the mustache! If you can't grow a MO, then perhaps you can find a surrogate to do it for you!

So if you are anything like my mother you probably are wondering what the heck has Chris been up to lately? Well, I am not AWOL, just busy!

I spent last week in Lincoln Nebraska at the SCCA Solo National Championships, what’s that? Car racing. How’d I do? eh, not worth mentioning where I actually finished, but I did get to see friends I haven’t seen since Nationals in 2008, the last time I attended. I couldn’t really believe that I hadn’t been since 2008, but that is the truth, with the move to Colorado in 2009 and then California in 2010 I just didn’t get to go. I’ll have more blog posts/videos/photos from Solo Nationals in the coming week.

When I got back from Nationals I spent two days catching up with Natalie and Jacqueline. Sunday we headed into San Francisco to get out of Half Moon Bay and see some things. We didn’t do much, but had a nice brunch in the Presidio, drove around Golden Gate Park, and walked around near Fort Mason. Here's a photo from a lookout point at the Presidio

This morning we went to Olivia's first birthday party in San Carlos. Check out some of the photos from the party. Saturday Natalie and Jacqueline went to Sophia’s birthday party as well, photos here.

After the birthday party today we had a few folks over for a crab fest. A couple of weeks ago I had a crab dinner at a local restaurant and was kind of grumpy that I paid $22+ for half a pound of crab, so I decided that we should have our own crab dinner at our house. We had the Strohls (4), Jeff Seeling (1) and Heyward and Julia (2) over for dinner tonight. I picked up some crab from the Half Moon Bay Safeway. It was $7/lb, cooked, cracked and cleaned. I had gone to the Half Moon Bay Fish Market on Sunday to see how much it was there, I thought it was a good deal at $10/lb cooked/cleaned. I am glad that I went to Safeway this morning before the party to check things out though, the Yelp reviews for the Fish Market made me start to have second thoughts. Safeway turned out to be great for this dinner.

Basically we took the crab from Safeway, put it into foil lined and covered pans with a small amount of water in them, and put them on the grill for 6-9 minutes. I think they turned out great. We had 5 crabs, probably 12 lbs total, and it seemed to cover the 8 of us, though I think only 5 or 6 of us actually ate crab, in the future I’ll likely do 1 per person if we do this again. I only took 2 photos tonight, was too busy cleaning and having a good time with friends!

This week I have a lot of catching up to do on work! It was great to have the week off, but I feel like I am now way behind at the office!

If you didn’t hear the news, DotNetNuke 6.0.1 was released yesterday, check out Joe’s blog post for more details.

On that note, I put out two new open source releases as well. I updated DNNSimpleArticle with a fix for DNN6 and made made a few other minor changes. As always, the module is released in C# and you can get the installable package, or the source package over on http://dnnsimplearticle.codeplex.com/. If you want to see the module in action check out http://www.bicycletips.com/

I also released an update for Multifunction, the World’s Best Free DotNetNuke Skin. It has a minor CSS fix for DNN6 (and 6.0.1). I also removed the custom actions menu it was using in favor of the new DotNetNuke 6 specific actions menu. MultiFunction is a C# skin, with both install and source packages available from http://multifunction.codeplex.com/

Be sure to rate both releases when you download!

If you don’t know Will Strohl, you are one of the lucky ones. He’s an annoying guy, a total lunatic when it comes to DotNetNuke, but even that can’t fix his flaws.

You can however help fix one of the flaws of the “Mighty” Will Strohl. Will has a problem, he can’t afford collared shirts. Seriously. if you’ve ever met him you know this.

Check out this public service announcement for Will.

Now, here’s a challenge for you, two of them actually.

1) Bring your un-needed collared shirts (size XL) to DotNetNuke World in Orlando in Florida. Will needs them.

2) Make your own video for Will! Actually, provide your own audio track. I created the video and audio in about 30 minutes. I’m looking for people who can come up with a better audio track for the video, come up with something funny, something sad, something crazy, I don’t care! Just download the original WMV file (right click, save as) for the video and remove the audio, add your own. Then upload it to YouTube or Vimeo, and tweet the link to the video with #Collars4Will in the message. http://cjh.am/strohlc

Disclaimer: this video was generated out of necessity, check out the video that Will made for me a while back.

I just need to convince Natalie that Colorado is where we want to go after California.... 

So there goes Day 3, I missed another blog post.

To be honest, I wasn’t too up for blogging yesterday. Too much going on with the conference, I didn’t feel like writing anything. So I guess it is official! I’m done with the blogging every day for the year. I’ll blog as I have content, rather than trying to blog just because.

Today is a day I don’t feel like blogging. Why not? Too much to do! I’m working on a big project in the evenings that I am hoping to finish up before I head to the St. Louis Day of .NET this weekend, so blogging will have to wait.

Today Natalie and I, along with Will Strohl and Kim Rausch (and kids), went to the Travis AFB Air Show, the weather was great, if a little windy. As we were walking around after the Thunderbirds show, taking photos and getting ready to leave I came across this spot on the tarmac

As we walked by that painted pavement I realized I had been there before.

That was where my dad retired after 30 years in the United States Air Force.

The latter two photos were taken with my first digital camera in March of 1998.

I’m a proud son!

Today after finishing up the custom DotNetNuke Training I took off on the Causeway, crossing over the Lake Pontchartain Causeway bridge. The bridge is the longest continuous bridge over water in the World, so I had to take a drive over it.

From there I decided to head west to Hammond Louisiana. Why not? I drove through town, took a couple of pictures which I’ll post later, here is one I posted while I was there.