Support Local Journalism

Despite the health risks, Wisconsin went forward with their Spring 2020 election today. After a short, distanced wait I was able to turn in our absentee ballots, and I spent the rest of my day following updates from the polling locations. It really reminded me how important it is to have good local journalists reporting our news.

Times are tough, and the news industry is facing hard times like everyone else. If you are able, I encourage you to support your local news sources.

The local news papers/sites I currently subscribe to include:

• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
• Urban Milwaukee
• Shepherd Express
• The Recombobulation Area

While I enjoy these, there are many other deserving local news sources in the Milwaukee metro. If you read a site/paper often, look in to what you can do to support them. Ads don't always cut it, and many companies are reducing their advertising spending.

In Person Elections During a Pandemic Is a Mistake for Wisconsin

It's been frustrating reading the news about the election in Wisconsin this Tuesday. Our governor Tony Evers has called for the election timeline to be delayed a month, and allow the entire election to be handled by mail, but Republican state representatives are pushing for it be held in person as scheduled. This is the wrong way forward as it encourages people to leave their homes , increasing the spread of Covid-19, and force people to choose between voting, or staying home as they need to do.

New Car - 2001 Chevrolet Corvette

This post is a couple of years late now, but after selling my Camaro I purchased a 2001 Chevrolet Corvette to replace it. It's pretty much a stock Corvette, and had just over 30k miles when I purchased it.

Downsides/Gotchas of using Projections in Episerver Find

Episerver Find is my preferred way to write searches for Episerver. It allows me to write search queries quickly using a LINQ like syntax I am familiar with, while leveraging Episerver's cloud servers to do the heavy lifting.

While this does shift some of our server load to Episerver's servers, the standard implementation still relies on my servers to load model data, and build view models. Generally this isn't slow, but processing complex view models can hurt performance, and impact server load, especially as result sets increase in size, and complexity.

Projections allow me to specify which fields Episerver Find should retrieve data for, for a given query. I try to use them wherever it makes sense, since it allows us to display results with very little server load. There are a few downsides/gotchas that I've had to work through though.

Debugging Episerver Find Queries

Episerver Find is a powerful search platform for Episerver, but it can be somewhat difficult to debug issues with. There are many posts on Episerver World discussing debugging with Fiddler, but none that describe how to configure it. I recently forgot myself and had to look it up again.

Add (or merge) the following to your development web.config:

<system.net>
    <defaultProxy
      enabled = "true"
      useDefaultCredentials = "true">
      <proxy 
        autoDetect="false" 
        bypassonlocal="false" 
        proxyaddress="http://127.0.0.1:8888" 
        usesystemdefault="false" 
      />
    </defaultProxy>
    <settings>
      <servicePointManager
        checkCertificateName="false"
        checkCertificateRevocationList="false"
      />
    </settings>
  </system.net>