Blog rollover complete

Just finished up moving everything over to the new blog.  The old feed url should redirect now, but you will get some dupes.  The old url forwards to the new url, but all of the old permalinks will stay active at least for now.  Comments are now turned off on .text also. 

I took the shortest path from A to B to make this happen.  To handle the redirects I added an rss.aspx file to .text, and edited the default.aspx to include redirects, and removed the handlers for those two files from the web.config.  I couldn't find a backend way to turn off all the comments, without leaving them visible, so I just set the visibility of the comment submit button, and added some verbiage on the page linking to the new blog. 

The old blog will no longer get updates, but will be up for at least a little bit. 

If you find any issues with the new blog, please drop me a comment. 

Last night's CT .net sig

I went to my first .net sig last night.  Of course I was a little late, and left a little early.  Nothing like good first impressions  :)

Already a fan of Mark Miller, I had pretty high hopes for the talk.  Although I think he had good intentions of speaking to component based development, the whole crowd never let him talk about it.  Of course he had his share of tangent's too, but I think most of the presentation was consumed by the audience oohing and ahhing coderush, and for good reason.  To see what Mark could do with what seemed like almost no typing was amazing. 

Besides Coderush, Mark also spoke alot to context and UI design.  You could tell that he loves usability just by how excited he got talking about it, and some of the concepts he was throwing around were very good, and I will certainly be taking some of his suggestions into consideration next time I have to lay something out.  Man I wish I had his knack for usability.

I had tried to try coderush before, with no luck.  Come to find out, it was something that has since been identified and addressed.  So, last night I installed the coderush trial.  I'm siked.  I can't wait to play with it, and I have some ideas on how to extend it.  Oh, that was the other thing.  Mark was showing us how to extend DxCore which is the free core to CodeRush.  Although I didn't see the end product, it looked like extending coderush was a pretty simple task. 

Anyway, I've rambled on enough.  If your a local I hope to see you at the next SIG, hopefully I'll be a regular now.  If not, then go try coderush if you haven't yet.

Podcasts worth checking out

As I've mentioned before, I have had the chance to listen to a number of podcasts lately.  I try to fit new ones in when I find them, while catching up on older episodes of some of my favorites. 

You'll notice that on the new blog I have a list of podcasts on the right.  Those are on my current “must listen” list.  Most are technical, minus Monday's, which teeters on technical sometimes.

A new addition to this list is Software as She's Developed.  I found this podcast earlier today on podcast.net, and was hooked immeditely.  I listened to the four about agile processes right away since they were all related, and was looking for more.  Too bad I didn't have the time to listen to the last one on interfaces (damn football).  Even if you don't listen to podcasts all the time, but are interested in some details in agile programming methods, snag these.

G'Day world has also skyrocketed up my list of favorite podcasts.  They are doing fantastic work, and grabbing huge names like Scoble, and Doc Searls.  This is some great stuff people, don't miss it. 

In the Trenches offers the view of the world through the IT side of the industry.  The techchats produced by Kevin are also excellent, and every so often even have a developer spin  :)

New blog almost done

The new blog is almost done, and now public.  Here is the link.  Not sure how I am going to handle funneling traffic from dottext to dasblog as of yet, but will figure that out soon enough.  I think Mr. Hanselman's suggestion should probably work nicely since I decided to move the blog. 

This blog will stop getting updates sometime this week.  When that happens, I hope to have a redir on the feed and homepage so that everything but the permalinks will just flow through to the new blog.  I'll give some warning either way when this happens.

DotText2DasBlog now with comments

New release, now with comments.  The commentapi support was staring me right in the face the whole time. 

The new release will now move comments over via http.  The comments will not include the original url of the user that posted, and the html that worked in dotText is not allowed in dasBlog, so comments that include HTML will look as you would expect.  Trackbacks also come over, but only with the name of the site, not the url.  I didn't see these things in in the commentrss feed, but honestly I didn't look very hard yet.  Getting this functionality in was enough for this snowy weekend.

I would like to clean up the issues above by either exploring the commentrss in more depth, or adding comment importing from SQL.  Other then that the next few features are up in the air.  I would like to have something that maps my .text urls to dasblog urls, but thats a pretty vertical need.  If others would be interested in this tool expanding to support multiple blogs, speak up and let me know.  Most of the blogs support some sort of interface in, and it should be pretty straightforward to add support for other blogs into this app.

As always, the source is in cvs, and you can also get it from the urls below.  Please let me know if there are any issues.

Source Here | Binaries Here

[WARNING] 

When importing entries, please be sure to check the setting for outbound pings.  If you are importing your blog, and do not want outbound trackbacks to be created since they have already been created for these entries, be sure to turn off the feature in dasblog before importing!  Don't send bad trackbacks like I did.

Erroneously creating trackback spam

My apologies to anyone out there that I may have created some localhost trackbacks to today.  My test blog was configured to pump out trackbacks, and I have been working with a blog import utility. 

I have configured the blog to not send out the trackbacks, and also changing to a test .text as a host with no real links.  Again, my apologies for any unwanted spam.

 

Book review : Visual Studio .net Tips and Tricks

When I got this book I was skeptical.  I spend more time with vs.net then really anything, so what could this little book tell me about my closest companion?  Well, I was sadly mistaken, and feel cheated, almost like the environment was hiding something from me all these years. 

This book is littered with time saving tips that I had no idea existed in the IDE.  I read the book cover to cover, but find its real value as a reference while I code.  The book is very well organized, making it easy to find the tip you need quickly.  Tips cover the code editor to debugger, and everything in between.  The last chapter covers Whidbey exclusively, which serves as a nice introduction to some of the upcoming IDE improvements.

As you read through this book, even if you are aware of the feature being covered, Minh often adds some additional thoughts to how it can be used effectively.  The majority of the tips are hidden gems within the IDE, but Mihn sometimes covers process hints, such as how he debugs asp.net pages.  These tips are also very solid, and worth the read. 

As Minh states, the majority of the book is already documented someplace, but having the compilation of all of it in one handy book has proven to be quite an addition to my toolkit.  Since I never explicitly went looking for tips like these, a lot of the book was new to me.  If you are a keyboard shortcut fanatic, and have read every source already published on the subject, you may not find this book quite as valuable.  Otherwise, I would highly suggest snagging a copy of this book.

Amazon link

 

cold

its. so. cold.  damnit.  Makes me wonder if I really need that nicotine.

brb

Pillars of the tech community giving back
I saw over on Clemens Vasters blog that a number of pillars in the tech community are going to be auctioning off services, with all proceeds going to help Tsunami victams.  This is just a fantastic way for these individuals to help the tsunami victims, bravo!  I'm sure more details will be forthcoming, so be sure to watch Clemens' blog, I know I will.

Mark Miller speaking at CT .net sig

How did I not know this yet?!  Mark Miller, of CodeRush and Monday's fame, will be speaking next Tuesday at the Farmington MS office.  Kick ass.  I have become quite a fan of his listening to him both on Dot Net Rocks, and Monday's, and am now really looking forward to the talk.  Maybe I can even get it from the horse's mouth when we might see a public Refactor! beta for those of us not priviledged enough to have a subscription  :)

Details here

DotText2DasBlog release

Just updated the source and binary local links.  Source is also in CVS.  I really need to start releasing on sourceforge.  Anyway..

Only update is it works with categories now.  Like works, not funky works, but works  :)

Ensight.org contest prizes

A while ago I had won a contest.  In case you were living in a bubble, Jeremy Wright sold some blogging services on ebay.  If you don't read Jeremy’s stuff, I would highly suggest you subscribe.  He is quite a blogger, and is set for quite a venture.  It should be exciting to see where he goes, in spite of other recent unfortunate events.

Back to the point, I was the lucky reader who guessed closest to where the auction closed.  Through some time travel, a few visits with my psychic, and of course mad skills, I guessed $3300, and won.  Although I think I thanked Jeremy, as well as each of the contest sponsors individually, I would like to thank them here as well. 

The coolest prize had to be the poker set provided by HomePokerPros.com.  I just had to take some pictures, they are below  :)  We play quite a bit of poker, and this is a really nice set.  I would highly suggest it to others looking for a poker set.

Once again thanks for the great prizes, and be sure that everyone that plays with these chips will know I won them from a blog (which will of course lead to a long conversation with some blank stares.  That happens alot.)

My favorite new refactoring tool

Since most of my day is spent in vb.net, I don't have the luxury of a “top shelf” refactoring tool (although I am anxiously awaiting a public beta or trial of Refactor!).  Latley, though, I've found the yahoo branded x1 to fit the bill quite nicely. 

In the past few days, on a number of occasions, I've used it to help when making a few changes.  I have it set to index all of my code, so within seconds I can see everywhere a method is called, as well as quickly scan the context of each call in the preview window.  It may not help in the IDE, but I was able to quickly evaluate my options for changes, and then hit the code with a good plan of attack in no time.

Since all the SQL is in scripts in a database project, I can also search across all the scripts in the system as well.  Added bonus that doesn't come with those fancy integrated solutions  :)

 

New DasBlog bits posted

Came through on the mailing list less then an hour ago.  The new bits include a ton of changes since the last “official” build.  If you have been looking for an app to blog on, I would highly suggest looking at DasBlog.  I haven't made the official switch yet, but you can see here what it will look like. 

Get the new bits here.

I'd also like to thank the DasBlog team for their hard work, and keeping the package moving forward!

EA does it again

EA once again has the gaming world in an uproar, purchasing exclusive rights to the espn brand for 15 years.  I guess the motto is don't compete with EA.  Instead of trying to win gamers over with a better product, they will just buy your means to produce your product.  How fair is that?

The only EA game I play right now is Need for speed underground 2, and as far as I can tell this will probably be the last.  Of course this will be very difficult to uphold since they release 80% of the games it seems, but it's just so hard to support a company that has made such a chain of perceived mistakes, and bad decisions.

First podcast wish coming true

After fast forwarding through about 45 minutes of the last dotnetrocks, I realized how important MP3 bookmarking will be.  I have officially requested this for a future iriver h320 firmware upgrade, but am not holding my breath.

Looks like I may have gotten a player just a bit too soon.  This post, snagged from scoble's link blog, shows that the new creative zen's will support this future.  Now just implement Adam Curry's thoughts on processing opml, and we have a fanstastic podcasting device.

Now, how do I convince the wife half way through the year (of course if no new iRiver firmware is released) that I need to replace my player.  Oh well, looks like I'll be fast forwarding for at least 2005.

Podcasts are for (currently) commuters?

Over the past few weeks I have done alot of thinking about podcasts.  In reality, I've been hooked on something like this for well over a year now, as I have admitted my addition to dot net rocks long ago.  So as podcasting starting coming into the limelight, I was an obvious adopter.  The lack of an MP3 player made listening to podcasts a pain for a while.  I was burning quite a few, I mean like 7-10 cd's a week, to listen to on my commute.  I spend about 2 hours a day commuting. 

I turned to podcasting because our local radio.. well.. it's not good.  There are a few channels that play some interesting music and content, but for the most part the radio bores me.  It has for quite a while.  That's why DotNetRocks was a great thing.  Now I could fill otherwise mind numbing time with something I might enjoy, nerds talking about code.  And by golly I did.  I enjoyed it so much, that I ended up downloading and listening to every show. 

So, enter podcasting.  Podcasting is so insanely simple, yet so powerful.  Attach some audio to an xml stream, and you have some sort of makeshift radio where the consumer has control of the broadcast.  Think tivo for radio.  Think tivo for radio where the radio shows can be produced anywhere from a million dollar studio, to a 3 year old pc in someone's basement. 

So how is this a good thing?  Does anyone want to listen to Dave the Engineer talk about cleaning out his fridge tonight?  Probably not.  But, this opens up doors to having specialized audio and video content creation and delivery like never before.  Being a software developer, I am already interested in the different shows that are created on that subject.  This delivery channel is hardly limited to technical content, though.  It's conceivable to think that most knowledge based industries could use a channel of content delivery like this, since the passionate usually are both willing to talk and listen, no matter the audiance size.

I'm not going to touch heavily on the music side of podcasting, but will say this.  ipods (although not at ALL required to listen to podcasts) are in the hands of many, many young people, who embrace technology very quickly.  It will only take one or two good feeds of “new and cool“ music for podcasting to catch up with this crowd.

The problem, though, are the tools.  As with any technology when it debuts, the tools take a while to catch up.  The idea of delivering audio and video through feeds was coming at some point, the questions that remain are what do we do with them, and how do we distribute them.  Monetizing them is another issue, but for now lets say they take the blog route for that (although I doubt that).  Nerds that need something to listen to will support podcasting for another year or so, but for this idea to live up to it's potential it needs to move past that.  To move past that the tools need to be there, and easy. 

I'd like to see packages that record, and, and publish all in one.  Tie it to skype (or some open alternative), and then make it easy enough for anyone to use it.  How about a network of podcast torent seed servers, and have all the major aggregators support retrieving and seeding the files.  Wouldn't it be cool if your mp3 player could sync, and publish your podcasts remotely?  I could drop a message in my family feed and all of their phones could grab and play the feed.

Back to the point of the post title.  I think that I have adopted podcasting because I am a commuter.  I needed something to listen to, and this has filled the void.  I have spoke with some other techies who also read blogs, and many of them are not on board yet.  One thing I have noticed about most of them is that they do not have much of a commute.  Anyone else out there listening on your commute?  Any non commuters listening?

 

DotText2DasBlog last release for weekend

Heres the last release of the weekend.  Screenshot below.  Codes in CVS, and links to direct download are below. 

I have re-added the direct option.  The direction option allows more then 25 entries to be converted.  When moving them over 1 by 1 the active and showonfront page options are moved also, direct db they are defaulted to 1 setting (thatll be fixed later). 

I still have some work to do with the categories which you'll see in the next version of the blog I release.  I hope to fix that this week.  I'm also still working on the comments, trying to figure out how to bring them into DasBlog.  I have seen a post around about it supporting CommentAPI, but haven't found it yet. 

Also the beta blog will be updated any minute now, so check it out if you get a chance, I'd love to hear from comments.  I'm going to hopefully roll it over this week.  I think I will probably move the blog to iceglue.com/blogs/tranqy.  Everything will stay up at the old blog until I can put in a redirection scheme, but the baseurl and xml feeds will be redirected as soon as I flip the switch. 

Get the source here and the binaries here.

Last update tonight

Source will be in cvs..  Heres a screenshot..  Still some fixes to make before another minor release.  Oh soon the frequent updates will move off here too the sourceforge mailing list.

Scriptomatic 2
Saw over on ActiveWin that ms released Scriptomatic2.  This is a cool little app that creates scripts based on the numerous WMI sources on a machine.  It's a neat little tool to easily create some really powerful scripts.  The new version adds perl, and python generation, as well as some new output's.  Check it out here.

DotText2DasBlog release and new home

Another release out the door.  This release works soley with the web services of each product.  It still only moves posts, but it is getting the .text comments :)  I haven't found an xml endpoint in DasBlog for creating comments yet.  If I can't find one I'll see if I can make a small addon release that could handle that.  The DotText service also seems to only return 25 items, which I'll be looking into.  I'm guessing I will be adding a “direct” option that will support everything. 

The sourceforce site was approved, and is here.  I'm stumbling through CVS now, so expect to see some source in the repository later this evening or tomorrow. 

For now, here's a new screen shot.  And heres a link to the source. 

DotText2DasBlog update

Well I won't have a beta out this week, but hopefully this weekend I'll release some new bits.  I've been moving the source to the web services and comment api, while also refactoring the app a bit to make it cleaner.  I still have to look into how to post comments to DasBlog via services.  I'm not expecting that to be an issue.

I also applied for a spot on sourceforge.  That would provide some public source control, as well as some tools to manage the project.  Should hear back on that in a couple days.

I'll make sure to post back when either one of those are final. 

Halo2 playing itself?

Today's the second day that my bloglines showed me playing halo2.  I got the same type of entry yesterday.  I haven't played in a month or so (thanks to this damn blog  :) , so I find it odd that I'm still playing.

I'm actually subscribed to a friends halo2 feed that has the same messages, although I haven't checked with him to see if he was playing.  Anyone else seeing this?

Arranged Game: None on Unknown

Game played at Thu, 13 Jan 2005 03:31:53 GMT Playlist: Arranged Game None on Unknown Gamertag (Team): Score, Kills, Deaths, Assists hello (0): 12, 12, 1, 0 goodbye (0): 1, 1, 12, 0

Oh you silly little apple

Obviously this is a very apple week.  The new headless mac may even find it's way into my home this year, although no ipod for me (thanks to iriver's fantastic h320).  Either way, had to check out the ipodshuffle site, and saw a very interesting disclaimer on their site. 

1. Music capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128Kbps AAC encoding.
2. Do not eat iPod shuffle.

Well shit.  Who'd have thought the ipod wasn't in the grains group.  Oh well, guess I better plan something else for lunch.

Web Service Testing

Started playing with the .text web service last night to see how I might be able to move DotText2DasBlog to web services instead of direct connection.  My initial thought was to just replace the DB connection with web services, but it's looking like I might build both in.  I don't see a way to extract comments from the web service as of yet (if anyone know a comment would be great), so since a goal is to also migrate comments, I may choose to support both methodologies.  More on this soon.

Either way, as I started testing I started to think about a better way to test web services.  Knowing there are probably a ton of ways to handle this, I went searching.  I was right.  There are just a ton of apps that have been developed to help test, and work with web services.  Most of them cost $$, though, which is not something I was interested in spending for this. 

My search did end up yielding a few cool things, though.  First, is the .net xml web service repertory (del.icio.us'd).  This is a nice collection of resources for web service development in .net.   They also had a direct link to the .net Web Service Studio.  This was an app that I had seen earlier in the search, that seemed to be removed form gotdotnet.  Even though the sources were removed, though, they had a direct link to the binary which is still there.

This little WSS app is very cool.  It uses wsdl and reflection to build a simple web service test client.  It's a very cool little tool, especially for the price.  Released in 2002 so it might be old news for most, but for me it was new.  Wish the source was still out there. 

 

And the desktop search winner is...

Long time readers might remember that I have been using these desktop search tools for a long time.  I started with lookout, moved to copernic, moved on to google (never posted), then msn, and last night installed yahoo.

All of the tools have pluses and minuses, and I have really enjoyed working with all of them.  After just a little time with the yahoo search, though, I think this one will be a keeper (until the next release).  I don't want to get into a full review since there are probably about 50k of them being written today, but I did want to share my thoughts on why I think yahoo will be the keeper.

For me, one of the most important aspects of a desktop search tool is searching code.  Finding emails is great, pdfs, fantastic, but the real power comes from being able to find any code, at any time, just by remembering something such as an obscure comment you may have put (like //comment this later  :)  , in a matter of seconds.  This, to me, is power.  It makes me more productive, and much more likely to do research on past usage scenarios of the various things we do.  That being said, my choice is GREATLY influenced by how the product works with my piles and piles of code.

So, why yahoo?  MSN, and copernic both also index code out of the box, and google's offering can be modified to search some code, so what makes yahoo better for me?  First off, the memory usage.  As a developer, I burn through resources like they were kindling.  Gig of ram?  Filled by noon.  So when I noticed that the memory requirements of the yahoo offering appear to be the lowest, and by a pretty sizable margin.  MSN seemed to be the biggest culprit taking upto 100 megs of memory/swap space at a time (between all of the components combined), where yahoo (so far) never goes above 30.  Still early in the tests, so this may change, but my initial impression is very good on this front. 

MSN's interface was (and probably still is my favorite), but the yahoo offering is a close second, with one huge improvement.  Search context, from the first letter you type.  So lets say you are looking to see how you've used an xmltextreader in the past.  Start typing, and by the time you get to xmlte you have all of the files, with highlighting of the use, in the search app.  Very, very nice.  I knew X1 did this, and knew if it filtered down to yahoo it would be a huge plus for me. 

So it seems like I have changed desktop searches as much as underwear in the past few months, but I think at least for now I have a clear cut winner.  For me, yahoo takes round 1.  And yes, I do realize it probably has ALOT to do with being last to the table.

Reboot into java?

Well, not really, but this link from Stefano Demiliani's blog seems like a great option.  Learning java has been something on my list for a while, but also not something that I could realisticly include in my development environment (at least until my next laptop, maybe with 2 gigs of ram).  This option, though, seems ideal if you want to learn java and some other non .net languages, without impacting any of your current environment setup.  Sweet.

DasBlog and DotText coexist?

During lunch I started thinking a little bit about how I would roll this over.  One thing that came to mind, is, could I make the two co-exist in 1 web site?  The main reason I would like to do that is I would love to keep my blog at blog.iceglue.com, and still support both my old links and new ones.

There are a few options I have come up with.  First is take a static snapshot of the .text blog, and keep the permalinks up as static sites.  Possible, and relatively easy, but lose the .text functionality. 

Another idea I had was just to move the new blog to another domain, ie weblogs.iceglue.com, but that solution feels like I am getting beat down by the code. 

Another possibility is having both of them co-exist in the same dir, and just munge the http handlers together so the right urls hit the right codebase.  This seems like the most flexible, but probably the most technically challenging. 

The last idea I had was to move everything over to DasBlog (I will be updating the DotText2DasBlog to handle categories and comments anyway), and then make some http handlers that will redirect the old .text site to the new DasBlog site on a post by post basis.  Actually, this one is probably the most challenging, and probably the best solution. 

Has anyone gone down this road and not taken the easy way out (new hostname).  Any good or bad experiences with any of these ideas?  Anyone have any other ideas?

 

Beta dasblog up

Here goes.  24 starts in 30 minutes so I better wrap this up now. 

Still have some work to do, but it's getting there. 

DotText2DasBlog beta released

I searched for something that would move my DotText over to DasBlog, and didn't see anything handy.  Since I've got the DB here, and theres the DasBlog web service, I was able to throw something together in about 30 minutes to handle it. 

Currently it will move entries only.  No comments, no categories, just entries.  The main reason I want to import my entries is for searching them in DasBlog, so I'm not that worried about the old stuff.  If others seem interested, I might add some more to this though.

Heres a screenshot:

Grab the source code here

[Edit]

There have been a number of updates since this post.  Please follow this link to get the details on the newer releases.  Thanks

DasBlog : Adding page templates for individual pages

As described here, here are the quick and dirty details on how I implemented multiple templates in DasBlog. 

Each page in the DasBlog system inherits from SharedBasePage, which has a virtual method GetPageTemplate.  All of the pages I investigated defered to the base SharedBasePage.GetPageTemplate, which in turn calls GetHomeTemplate. 

Being as all these methods are there, I either assume there are parts of the framework that actually already dynamicly load templates, or there were plans to add these features in the future.  This being the case, I wanted my implementation to touch as few places as possible so I can yank it out if I need to. 

To quickly implement this, I added some code to the GetHomeTemplate method in the SharedBasePage that will :
1) Get Current Page Name (ie Permalink.aspx)
2) Attempt to load a template for that page (ir permalink.blogtemplate)
3) return the custom page, or if null return the home template

To accomadate this, I also added an OpenNamedTemplate passthrough method in the themes.cs file.  Once again, these two minor changes now facilitate each page having their own template by simply adding a new template permalink.blogtemplate.

You may ask, why would you want this?  The main reason is to try to emulate how MT works when someone clicks an individual link.  So once I had this, I added a new permalink.blogtemplate, and removed the DIV's that handle the right sidebar content.  Easy as cake.  I haven't found another place to use it, but I'm sure I will as I continue to dive into DasBlog.

Complete Change :

In SharedBasePage.cs:newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.SharedBasePage (CHANGE)

  /* [DynamicPageTemplates]
   * Changed to allow dynamic templates.  Will parse out the page name, and attempt to
   * load a template based on that name.  If it finds one, it will use it, otherwise
   * will drop back to home template. ajj 1.7.04 [/DynamicPageTemplates]
   */
  public virtual string GetHomeTemplate(string path)
  {
   string templateString="";
   string localPath = this.Request.Url.LocalPath;
   string pageName = localPath.Substring(localPath.LastIndexOf(@"/") + 1 ,localPath.Length - (localPath.LastIndexOf(@"/") + 1)).Replace(".aspx",string.Empty);
   using ( TextReader sr = Theme.OpenNamedTemplate(path,CategoryName,pageName) )
   {
    if (sr != null)
    {
     templateString = sr.ReadToEnd();

    }
   }
   if (templateString == string.Empty)
   {
    using ( TextReader sr = Theme.OpenHomeTemplate(path, CategoryName ) )
    {
     templateString = sr.ReadToEnd();
    }
   }
   return templateString;
  }

In Themes.cs:newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.Theme (NEW CODE)

  /* [DynamicPageTemplates]
   * Added this method to load a named template to allow a page to load
   * any template ajj 1/7/05 [/DynamicPageTemplates]
   */
  public TextReader OpenNamedTemplate(string basePath, string categoryName, string templateName)
  {
   TextReader templateReader = OpenTemplate(templateName,basePath,categoryName);
   if (templateReader == null)
   {
    return null;
   }
   return templateReader;
  }

 

Blog rollover delayed

I'm going to put off rolling over the blog for a little bit.  This is mainly since I doubt I will be moving forward with movabletype.  MT is a fantastic product, but I just had a bad feeling about introducing ActivePerl and MySql into my environment.  Since I host my own blog, I had this feeling of void not knowing what was going on inside the blog.  I also had no idea even how to backup and restore mysql, let alone administer is.  So in the end MT it was fun, but I have to say goodbye.

The problem is I really like how MT works.  It's template engine is fantastically simple yet capable, and I also really like the out of the box end user experience with MT.  Based on my experience adding podcasting to .Text, I knew modifying .Text to do what I was looking for would be out of the question. 

Enter DasBlog.

Not knowing what to expect, I grabbed the latest source off of GDN for DasBlog, and started up with that.  I had originally passed on DasBlog because of it's lack of SqlServer support, but then figured I don't get anywhere NEAR the traffic of say a Scott Hanselman, so I'm sure I will be ok without Sql Server.

I was up and going with DasBlog in about 20 minutes, and started diving into it right away.  The first thing I noticed is it had somewhat of a template system, using the .blogtemplate files as a partial direction on how to render pages.  Not quite like MT template, but still quite usable.  I quickly modified the source and added support for multiple templates (separate post on that), and suddenly DasBlog was looking damn good.  Within an hour of installing it I was able to setup a basic blog, AND modify the source to support multiple templates. 

I started doing a bit more research on DasBlog, and ended up spending a good portion of the weekend working on a replacement for the MT blog I just finished.  I think DasBlog will be a keeper.  I was able to move all of the HTML and stylesheets over in a couple hours, and although there are some features not in DasBlog yet, the newest source off SourceForge includes enclosure support.  Nice.  It also looks like development has picked up on it greatly in the past few months.  Even better.

I should have a public dasblog no later then Tuesday, and hopefully move over either next week or weekend.  Also, anyone know any .Text -> DasBlog converters?  I'm sure it will be pretty simple since I can get to my .Text DB and DasBlog has web services into it, so if I can't find any I'll post some details here.

 

Blog rollover this weekend

This weekend I plan on moving the blog over to the new blog.  I hope things go smooth, but there may be some difficulties getting here over the weekend. 

Currently my plans are to snag my entire blog into static html so I can preserve my old links, and then move the host header in iis.  I thought about trying to make .text and MT coexist, but decided not to even try that since I didn't see much value in it.  The feed url will stay the same, although there will be a new feed that will have enclosures. 

After some thought, I've also decided to ad some google adsense to my blog.  I debated about this for a bit, but decided to try it out.  The ads will be at the bottom of the pages, blended into the new design.  I think it's very unobtrusive, but might generate at least some revenue for server expenses.  (read: I want a new server since this celery900 can't do much more then what it does  :)

The new blog also has my del.icio.us feed on the sidebar.  I have been using this site for a week or two and so far it's fantastic.  I've tried a few ways of centralizing bookmarks, but this is by far the most versitile tool I have tried.  The social aspect of the bookmarks has already taken me down a few interesting trails, so I think I'm going to find all kinds of value in del.icio.us. 

New year new blog

First off, I’d like to say Happy Holidays to all, and I hope everyone had a great new year.  Back to work tomorrow, bah.  Oh well. 

I was actually on vacation this week, and it has been wonderful.  Not only did I get to spend alot of time with my family, but I got a decent amount of time to play with my new toy, and work with my blog a bit.  More on that in a minute.

First on my new toy.  All I wanted for Christmas was an MP3 player.  I was burning just a ton of CD’s (to the tune of 7–8 per week) listening to podcasts, and it gets pretty annoying.  Now, I have a ton of podcasts loaded for some archiving and Nimiq out working making sure I am up to date.  Yay, now I’m on top of podcasting. 

Speaking of podcasting, I was going to do a post on predictions and goals for the new year and all that, but I was too busy working on them to talk about them.  I hope to go into more detail on some of my thoughts on the upcoming year in the next week or two, but if I don’t get to it I at least wanted to say podcasting will be huge.  This year, I think podcasting will make huge strides.  I think next year is the year my mom asks me about podcasting, but this year I think alot of the geeks that aren’t yet on board will be. 

Back to the MP3 player for a second.  If you are in the market, I would highly suggest you take a look at the h320.  I plan on posting more about that too, but this thing rocks.  And, with a little firmware upgrade, you even get video.  All for around 250$.  Sweet.

I did alot of thinking about digital media, and content delivery this week, and have some thoughts that are coming together.  I had been wanting to do _something_ with the blog, but wasn’t sure what.  I knew it had to involve podcasting, though, so the first thing that came to mind was to modify this blog to do what I wanted.  Thanks to this tutorial, I was able to add podcasting to .text in just a matter of a few hours.  As I started to dig more into .text, though, I realized alot of the things I wanted to do were going to be difficult, so I decided it might be time to switch platforms.

After some buy/build decisions of my own, I decided to start playing with Movable Type.  So, after installing a few things, I had a test blog up and going.  In a matter of about 30 minutes I had some podcasting support, and by then I was hooked.  So, sometime in the near future there will be a pretty big change to the blog. 

With the cosmetic update, I would also like to make a bit of a philosophical change.  I want to post more, more original useful content, and more personal bullshit.  Along with this, I hope to provide some audio content soon, but you’ll have to wait on details for that.  I think you might like it though.  In the meantime, you can at least see a beta of the new blog.  This is a beta, broken links all over, feeds not right, the url isn’t even final.  Check it out, but don’t change your subscription yet.