mojoPortal now has 100 registered users!

of course there are a lot more people visiting the site and downloading both the code and the release files, it seems that most people won't register if they can help it. I must admit I'm the same way, it takes a lot for me to register at a site. I guess its because we fear the possibility of an onslaught of spam. But I assure you if you register at mojoportal.com you won't get any spam from me at least until we get the Newsletter module built! But seriously it, even that will be an infrequent thing with an easy opt out on your profile page or from within any email newsletter that we have in the future. So come on if you haven't already, register and show you appreciate mojoportal.

In case you are interested, here is how we are doing in terms of traffic.


February was only half a month of data, before that the site was running on a Windows server but in the middle of February I moved the site to a Linux server with mono.

mojoPortal is coming up on a year of development time this month and 1 year since the first release in November.
Of course I only get to work on it mostly on weekends and some evenings. I do have a full time job separate from mojoPortal

I'm very happy to report that mojoPortal is included on the new mono-live cd! This new bootable cd should make it easy for more people to take mono out for a test drive. It has the MonoDevelop IDE, mono documentation, tutorials, and a number of good applications that run on mono including mojoPortal.  There's also Beagle, the cool new desktop search tool, F-Spot an awesome photo management tool, and a neat little note taking app called TomBoy. Pretty sweet! I'm downloading my copy now.

Another cool thing to notice is that the www.mono-live.com web site is also running on mojoPortal!

mojoPortal.com is now running on a new server hosted by GrokThis.net. I highly recommend them.  The level of customer support in getting my sites setup was outstanding.

It seems like a small operation but sometimes its better to shop at a boutique than at Walmart.  They specialize in customized configuration to meet your needs and my impression is that they know what they are doing and are very responsive on support.  I've been very pleased with the service.

For $14.95/month I get :

• ssh access
• my own instance of apache that I can start and stop as needed which is nice when you are updating a site running on mono.
• mono 1.1.7
• ssl
• smtp
• awstats
• 2 databases (I got 1 each of MySQL and PostgreSQL)
• 5 domains
• unlimited hosts within a domain
• 384 MB disk space
• 15 Gigs of monthly transfer

You really should check their site for more packages and features, I'm only listing the ones I'm using.

Right now I'm only using the MySQL db, using mojoPortal, I am running both mojoportal.com and joeaudette.com from the same web folder and using the same db.

I'm going to setup some other sites and my demo site using the PostgreSQL db. At the moment the demo sites are still running on the old server.

I have to also mention another hosting company that provides Windows hosting.

SeekDotNet hosting company is also the provider of a free open source ASP.NET file manager that is used in mojoportal.  Since all the page says is "Free and Open Source", I emailed them just to make sure it was ok to distribute the file manager with mojoportal.  They were very gracious, they gave me permission and also offered me sponsored hosting for mojoportal. Sponsored hosting is very generous offer that I appreciated wholeheartedly but nevertheless declined, hope it didn't offend them, but I feel it is very important for mojoPortal.com to be running on mono.  That is after all one of the most important features that mojoPortal has to offer. Of couse mojoPortal can run on Windows and for those who would like Windows hosting, I do recommend you checkout SeekDotNet, they do have some of the best package prices I've seen anywhere and they seem like very nice folk.

I'm targeting November 1, 2004 for a first release of code that I will call an alpha release. I really would have liked to have a few more features before making a release but I think I will have the forums ready by then and thats a pretty big feature made up of a lot of small to medium features. I had to extend the properties of the user to include the expected things like avatars, instant message addresses, web sites, number of forum posts, etc. A member list is also important. I don't think I will have the private message system ready for the alpha but that is in the works.

Part of the reason I'm eager to get a release out is that there is now a free hosting site for ASP.NET under mono/GNU Linux at www.monoForge.com and they specifically support using MySQL, giving you a free MySQL database. Its free during the beta period which lasts at least till Q3 2005 depending on the progress of mono. After that they are suggesting it will be cheap for the beta users to continue, perhaps $5 per month. I think this is good news for mojoPortal. All of the ASP.NET projects currently listed at the gotmono.com web site only work with Postgre SQL and to my knowledge mojoPortal is the going to be the first one with support for MySQL. So hopefully with the new free hosting available it will encourage people to try mojoPortal. I've already registered there and connected to my MySQL database last night using SQLyog. I was able to copy the whole database from my local linux box to my database at monoForge in just a few minutes. Of course SQLyog is a windows program so I was doing it from a windows box. This site is running on a windows server but using MySQL from a Fedora Core 2 machine. I also have a copy of this site running on the Fedora machine but it is only exposed to my local network. The site works great there running under mono 1.0. I'm excited to be able to test it on the internet with a linux web server using my monoForge site under mono 1.0.2. I'll post again when its up and running there.

This skin only took about 20 minutes to create. When I have time I'll do something more elaborate. For the moment I'm much more focused on functionality than making it pretty. I envision being able to create tools within the site that will allow creation of skins using the web browser. Other features need to be done first. I'd like to have the photo gallery and forums modules ready before I make a release, particularly the forums because then if people find bugs they can post to the forum instead of sending me an e-mail and I can avoid having to answer the same questions to multiple users.