As you may have noticed, the mojoPortal bundled skins are rather plain. This is because I am a developer not a designer.  When I say design, I'm talking about color scheme, graphics, fonts, layout, etc.  I do know usability but I'm just not that creative visually. Creating a skin in mojoPortal is very easy but you need a good design before you can make a skin.

So I had an idea that maybe I could have a contest and some of you good designers out there might be willing contribute some help for me.  The contest is to design a new skin to be used on mojoPortal.com. Anyone who sends a skin will be given credit on a new page I will create to show the skins. I will make it so that there is a link that will open the site in a new window using your skin. Anyone who sends a skin that I think is particularly cool I'll buy you a pint of Guiness or send you $5 whichever you prefer. I will include all the skins in the mojoPortal download listing you in the credits and source files for the skin.

I know thats not much of a bounty but maybe some of you creative types will take up the challenge.  What do you think? Anyone interested? Any other ideas for a good bounty?

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.

The latest release is now available on the download page. It has a few bug fixes and includes the new Event Calendar module. Be aware that there is a bug in some versions of mono that affect the new Event Calendar. It may not work for you unless you are using a recent build of mono from svn. It should work for everyone once the next release of mono is available.

PostgreSQL users may see some errors running the script to create the tables. I ignored them and it worked for me. I am trying to figure out how to get rid of the errors but I'm not quite a PostgreSQL guru yet. Once I do figure it out I'll update the scripts.

I was trying to solve a sorting bug in the RSS feed aggregator that only happens under mono. At first I thought it was in the DataView.Sort method but it turned out to be a difference in DateTime.Parse behaviour under mono than under windows.

Anyway I needed to rule out the mono version so I pulled the latest greatest mono code from svn as I've done about a dozen times in the past to see if it was fixed in svn.

Much to my dismay the latest mono code broke one of my web sites. 

Right now http://www.joeaudette.com is offline though it could just have easily been this site. Whenever I restart apache, whichever site gets a request first works and the others don't. So mojoportal got the first request and joeaudette.com is returning an error. 

I remember this was a bug in a previous version of mono.  I posted to the mono-devel list but so far no reply. Of course it is a beautiful weekend so maybe they're all out playing, I couldn't blame them.

I really don't want to have to try and revert to an older version but I also hate to have my site offline

UPDATE 4/17/2005 2:30PM CST
Big thanks to Atsushi Eno! Whatever was causing the problem is now fixed as of mono revision 41350
Now all my sites are working happily again. Thats what I call fast response from the community, within 24 hours of reporting the problem it is fixed.

Also thanks to Joseph Hill for telling me about a work around to the problem by running each site in its own instance of mono.  Good to know I could do that if it became neccessary but glad I didn't have to.

I guess the moral of the story is it would be good to have a staging server where I could test the latest svn with my sites prior to updating the production server. I do have an extra machine so I may do that soon, though its a wimpy p2 450 so it will be a slow build process working with that machine.