Black's Web

oday the latest version of Colorful Tabs add-on for FireFox got installed and as I read about it, I noticed that you could use background images in the tabs and found  a link to a background image generator.  Now this image generator is nothing to write home about, or post about, but on that page there was this cool Tag Cloud Widget.  It is a 3 dimensional rotating tag cloud.  Quite nice, but it is a plug-in of sorts for WordPress and I haven’t yet taken the time to see if I can make it work with BlogEngine.NET.  But for you WordPress users, enjoy!

 

Roy, (Roy’s site) the creator of this Tag Cloud thing also created a Flickr/Picasa Widget that operates the same way, but instead of pulling in Tag Clout text/links, it pulls in pictures and links from Flickr or Picasa RSS feeds.  He has easy form to fill out to generate the require HTML code to add this widget to your page. 

 

 

 

Here is a larger sample:

Tags: widget, picasa, flickr

ecently I have been exploring and experimenting with BlogEngine.Net Extensions.  These are great little add-ons that provide additional functionality that currently is not included in BlogEngine.net.

 

In the past (with Picasa and LightBox extensions) I noticed when I added them to my blog and I refreshed a page, I would get the following error:  “The process cannot access the file ‘…\App_Data\datastore\extensions\BBCode.xml’ because it is being used by another process.”

 

I thought this was just something that happened when you add an extension, (Silly me to think it was the way it worked… ) because if you refresh the page again, there was no error and the blog and the extension worked.  Until I tested Download Counter extensions…  I tried 3 different Download Counter extensions and none of them would work.  Well after much pestering of the developers of these extensions and posting a forum thread at BlogEngine.NET, I discovered that there is a bug in the Extension Manager that has been fixed by the BlogEngine.Net team.

 

So after adding the corrected \App_Code\ExtensionManager\Manager.cs extensions can be added and removed with out the error described above and the Download Counter extensions now work.  I would post the fixed file here for you to download, but it would be better if I referred you to the source code change set in BlogEngine.NET and get it there.  Feel free to contact me if you don’t know what to do.

 

Here are the tree Download Counters I have tried.

 

Geert van Horrik's detailed download counter Al Nyveldt's simple download counter Ruslan Tur's download counter

 

Personally, I like the detailed download counter by Geert van Horrik, but there are many different needs and concerns, so you may like a different one.

 

I hope you found this information helpful.

Tags: blogengine.net, extensions, enxtension manager, picasa, download counter