Extending Community Server User Profiles in Vast Rank

I built Vast Rank integrating a lot of different pieces of technology, ASP.Net, ASP.NET AJAX, Google Maps API,  Google Ajax Search API,  Google Custom Search, CSS, and the list goes on and on.

I have been a Microsoft oriented developer all of my life so when I built Vast Rank, I wanted to find a decent profile system and forum system  based on .NET that I could build on top of.  Community Server was by far the best platform to use when I started developing Vast Rank in 2007.

One of the challenges that I faced was that I wanted to extend the Community Server User Profiles in such a way that those profiles can be queried based on the extended properties.  Before you follow this post any further, if you are considering going down path, ask yourself “do I really need to query these extended attributes?”, because it gets complicated.  If you don’t need to query this extended user profile data, but just store and display it, then I suggest using the out of the box ExtendedAttirute storage mechanism that comes with CS. It is a heck of a lot less work.

Anyway, I spent the time extending user profiles and detailed it in an old post here. In that post I went through changing the source code in the CS SDK, but here I will post a few blurbs from the CS forums that I posted about how to extend CS User profiles without changing any CS SDK source code.  I originally did these modifications in CS 2007, then I rolled them into CS 2008.5 in one day.  (Some of the CS code changed a little but it was easy to fix up my extensions to align with these changes).  So the big payoff of using this new strategy: ease of upgrade to new versions of CS.

The basic “A Ha” moment for this new extension strategy was, hey doesn’t CS use the provider model?  Maybe I can hook in at that level to override and extend the CRUD and search operations.  Well that worked. 

I am posting some CS specific source code directly from Vast Rank here:

Download

Since so many people were interested in more details around this new strategy, I slotted an hour out of the many other dev things I’m working on to put this up for my friends over in CS land. I figured it was better to get something into your hands than nothing at all…

So… the code posted does not compile because it depends on Community Server (which you can download from them) and my own Service / Data Access Layer (which I’m not posting:) ).  But, if you are pretty good dev you can look through the code and get some “A Ha” moments.

The code has a sample configuration where I load my overridden version of the the CommonDataProvider.  That file in my project is called “VRSqlCommonDataProvider” and it shows how I extended the CRUD and search code.  I also included a few of my theme files where you can see where I integrate the extended data (creating, editing, viewing, and searching profiles).  There are also some sub forms and helpers in there.  You’re just going to have to dig through…

Here are a couple of links to my “A HA” moments from the CS forums. You can test these things live at http://www.vastrank.com

• My “A HA”, I bet I can extend CRUD operations via the provider layer: here: Extended User Data – Might have a better way
• My “A HA”, I can search this crap too but it’s complicated (I chimed in on this thread):  Expanding Member Search

Please chime in on this post if this helps ya, or if you have any feedback.  As I said it’s a little sloppy but I wanted to get something into my friends hands over on the CS forums.

Vast Rank – A drastic drop in Google SERP

Edit: I posted an update to my findings here.

Vast Rank was steadily growing since its launch (a month ago) and last week was at its peek with a lot of organic (search) traffic from Google.

I saw this drop start on Saturday, October 25th and as a result I have started to dig into the Google Webmaster Guidelines and the world of SEO.  It looks like Google has algorithms that determine whether your site is “spammy”, and may penalize a site that it thinks is spam.  Since Vast Rank is so new and has a fairly low Page Rank, I am concerned I may have fallen prey to this algorithm.

The tough part about all of this is Google may or may not tell you if you are under one of these penalties.  I believe this is so that people can not use these warnings to reverse engineer their algorithms.

For the most part, I am hoping that my major drop in SERP is because my site is barely a month old.  However, I am taking a serious look at Vast Rank to see where I can improve things.  Here are my top tasks:

• Create accurate last mod dates in my SiteMap for all College Profiles and for the ratings & comments pages
• Make sure my title Tags are unique
• Review all meta description tags

The accurate last mod dates are going to be the most challenging but should only take a few hours to get it all setup.

Edit: I posted an update to my findings here.

Coal Fired Brick Oven Pizza (aka CBO) Pizza – Bradley Beach NJ

Every Friday night, my fiancée Nicole and I head out to CBO the best Pizza place I have ever been to.  There  are a lot of reasons  that we love CBO (pronounced C-BO by the locals here at the Jersey shore) but here are a few that come to mind: all pies on the menu can be ordered on wheat crust, all of the ingredients are fresh and of the utmost quality, the service is top notch, it is clean, and the ambience is great.

We found out about CBO when Nicole ran into one of our friends Jen who happens to work at CBO.

We always start off the night with the excellent Arugula salad and  bruschetta with fresh mozzarella.

I took this picture of the two pies we got tonight on my iPhone.  Nicole usually orders a Pattie Pie on wheat – easy on the cheese  (pictured on top). A Patti Pie is basically a gourmet pizza topped with bruschetta.  I keep it real and order a Sausage and Peppers Pie (pictured on the bottom).  I keep it unreal by getting it on wheat as well:)

The night is capped off with fresh cookies from the amazing bakery next door to CBO.

On Saturday morning I eat all the left over’s.  If you live in Jersey or come to visit, come check out CBO for that great pizza indulgence without the “I shouldn’t have ate that” feeling afterwards.

Vast Rank – Featured Project on Google’s Map and AJAX Search API

I did a lot of work on Vast Rank in my spare time and I am really proud to have Vast Rank recognized by the Google API team.  Vast Rank is now a featured project on the Google Maps and Google Search API.

Featured Projects are somewhat buried on the Google API pages.  The first screen shot here shows where Vast Rank is featured on the Google Maps API page.  The second screen shot below shows Vast Rank featured on the Google AJAX search API page.

Special thanks goes out to Ben Lisbakken on the Google API team for being so helpful with my questions and for hooking me up with the featured spot on Google.