Are you a Mold or IAQ professional?  Does everyone who needs your services find you easily?  For most of us, broadening our exposure, especially on the internet, is something we need to do.  We can always buy advertising or spend more time and money on our web sites, but the results are mixed and success is expensive.  Planet Mold offers free (yes, free!) listings that are optimized for web searches.  A Planet Mold listing is not your typical directory (yellow pages, Yahoo!, etc…)  listing.  We use the latest web-standards (xhtml and micro-formats) and tailor your listing to be relevant in the geographic areas you serve.  In addition to the free listings, Planet Mold offers a very low-cost Featured Listing ($2.99 per month) that gives your listing priority placement, a highlighted color, and a unique web page where you can display additional information and content, and link to your own web site.

Check out a sample Featured Listing here, or a Standard Listing here.

Now you’re ready to get a listing on Planet Mold, here’s how:

1. Find your listing
2. Click the ‘Claim Your Listing’ link near the bottom of your listing
3. If you don’t have a listing, you can create a new listing here
4. You’ll need to show us some ID – we use Live ID so we don’t need to store your user name or password (we're really serious about privacy)
5. Give us as much detail as you can about you and your company
6. Select the Featured Listing if you want your listing to stand out
7. Click Create or Update
8. If you selected a Featured Listing you’ll see a payment page, and then go to PayPal to complete the payment
9. If you didn’t select a Featured Listing (why not?) you’ll see your profile page
10. Repeat as needed in order to claim all your listings or create new ones

Hint:  there’s no limit on the number of listings you can have so you can create a listing for each Metro Area, City, and Zip area that you serve.

As the number of visitors to Planet Mold increases so will your visibility and your business.

Thanks!

-Paul

Of late, I'm a fan of XSLT Extensions in Umbraco.  They are an extremely useful feature of Umbraco that span the .NET and XSLT gap I've seen often.  To give credit where it's due - Per Ploug Hansen is really the one who showed my the light in terms of XSLT Extensions at Codegarden US 2008.  Thanks!  In fact, one of my ongoing efforts is refactoring the Commerce for Umbraco UI layer to use XSLT Extensions rather than ASP.NET User Controls - I think this will allow a much slimmer implementation of this commerce project for Umbraco users.

I've had need to create unique HTML meta tags (title, description, keywords) for nodes generated from non-Umbraco data several times recently and have come up with the following approach - using XSLT Extensions, SubSonic, and a simple C# class.  In one case the generated nodes are listings (http://www.planetmold.com/professional-listings/Los%20Angeles-Long%20Beach-CA.aspx) where the data key is a unique string [Los Angeles-Long Beach-CA].  Using Url Rewriting I create a unique Url -the first step in my SEO routine here.  Also, using the data key I retrieve our data records and generate the unique HTML meta content. 

How does this work?  Simple, but there are a few parts to keep aligned.  The code below is shown front to back (in Umbraco terms).

1 - In the Umbraco template set the macro parameter guid to use the querystring parameter p using the shorthand notation [@] to retrieve the querystring:

<?UMBRACO_MACRO macroAlias="ProductMeta" guid="[@p]"></?UMBRACO_MACRO>

2 - Create the macro parameter guid in the macro ProductMeta

3 - Make an entry in your xsltExtensions.config file to register the extension

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<XsltExtensions>
...
  <ext assembly="/bin/xsltextensions" type="commercexslt.productmeta" alias="meta" />
...
</XsltExtensions>

4 - Create the corresponding macro XSLT (simplified here)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet [ <!ENTITY nbsp "&#x00A0;"> ]>
<xsl:stylesheet 
    version="1.0" 
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" 
    xmlns:msxml="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt"
    xmlns:umbraco.library="urn:umbraco.library"
  xmlns:meta="urn:meta"
    exclude-result-prefixes="msxml umbraco.library meta">

<xsl:output method="html" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>

<xsl:param name="currentPage"/>
<xsl:variable name="productGuid" select="//macro/guid"/>
<xsl:variable name="description" select="meta:MetaDescription($productGuid)"/>
<xsl:variable name="keywords" select="meta:MetaKeywords($productGuid)"/>

<xsl:template match="/">

  <title><xsl:value-of select="meta:MetaTitle($productGuid)"/></title>
  <meta name='description' content='{$description}'></meta>
  <meta name='keywords' content='{$keywords}'></meta>

</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

5 - Create the C# class to get the data (yep, simplified again)

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using SubSonic;

namespace commercexslt
{
    public class productmeta
    {
        public static string MetaTitle(string ProductGUID)
        {
            Guid _productGUID = new Guid(ProductGUID);

            // returns an ActiveRecord class which wraps the ProductMeta table
            c4uXslt.ProductMetum title = new c4uXslt.ProductMetum("productGUID", _productGUID);

            if (title.HtmlTitle.Length != 0)
                return title.HtmlTitle;
            else
                return "the default title";
        }

        ...

Note that I'm using SubSonic to access my data source - you may choose that method or any other that works for you.  The important items to note are:

1 - I return a string type

2 - The method is marked public static

6 - Just for completeness, the underlying content table looks like this

That's it! 

Now, when the node renders based on the querystring parameter we generate not only the correct data but also unique HTML meta content.  And, since this data is SQL-based and managed separately from Umbraco we don't need to worry about keeping nodes in sync with external data.  Also, since we're dealing with 15,000 unique records and related content this approach ensures we have unique content for each data item - an important SEO consideration.

-Paul

Have you ever needed to do a large scale search and replace for Umbraco content?  Yeah, me either - until today.  Typically with SQL I'd use a Replace() statement to update the content.  However, Replace() won't work with the NTEXT data type - which just happens to be the data type of the xml column where Umbraco content is stored.  I created the below script to accomplish the search and replace and ran it against content for http://www.planetmold.com and voila!

Grab the SQL script here:

As always, no warranties are implied - you're on your own.  Please let me know if you have improvements.

-Paul