One of the neat features of dasBlog is that the statistics pages filter out search terms so that I get to see all the search terms that lead into my blog. Some are quite naughty, some are very funny (especially the dozen-or-so daily search terms for "alien" that land here), some have a surprising search rank, and some are like this: forgot password windows server 2003. I'm really sorry for that fellow ...

Omar is announcing (like Scott) the new newtelligence dasBlog "Community Edition" 1.7. It's so fresh that I am not even running it myself, yet.

What's important is that this is not an XCOPY upgrade and that you must follow the instructions in the dasBlog Upgrader download if you want to upgrade from 1.6 or earlier. Scott and Omar had to change the structure of the content store XML files to improve performance and add new features.

Here is the SourceForge home for the new version, make sure you get the download for the Upgrader if you want to upgrade and -- as always -- make a backup of your old version in case stuff doesn't work.

I haven't really looked around what other people's ideas (or implementations) are on referrer spam, but I think these idiots who want to use our blogs as a way to boost their Google rank are setting themselves up for trouble, because we are not really stupid. For the time being, I am simply letting it all run to collect evidence. There are wonderful things we can do with all these spam URLs. Distributed denial of service attacks come to mind   Or just redirect them to themselves.

Seriously, I am thinking of having word filtering and a manual negative list in the blog engine and to expose that list as a separate RSS as well as to allow import of such RSS lists into my blog engine. My exported list might also reference all my trusted negative lists that I import, so that this forms a mesh where folks can report those idiots and the engines will pick it up and throw out the crap. 

I start to believe Mono is real. Check this out. The folks from the mono team apparently ported dasBlog to Mono's ASP.NET incarnation. My friend Martin Spedding gave me the "heads up". Thanks.

Omar has already posted the announced fix for version 1.6 and has updated all the downloadable files. Go here to get the updated versions. If you run 1.6, get the hotfix, otherwise just get one of the full archives. We should now be stable again. Thanks to Omar and Erv Walter for providing the fix and the repacking so quickly (while I am busy in San Diego at TechEd).

We'll have a fixpack for dasBlog 1.6 within the next two days that will roll back a few internal changes that had been made to improve performance, but unfortunately caused significant instability. The code is already checked into our tree and we're going to have the fix packaged up for download very soon. If you don't have 1.6 installed yet, wait until we have the fix. Within a week we are going to replace the 1.6 verson available from the Gotdotnet workspace with a version that incorporates the fix.

Now that we're getting close to the dasBlog engine's 1st birthday, I'd like to know how people use it. I am seeing quite a few blogs out there who run the software, but it's just as interesting to know how the engine is used in corporate Intranets and whether you use it as a tool to help coordinate projects, share knowledge about certain topics or .... how would I know?

If you use dasBlog, it'd be great if you could share with me how you use it, how you like it, and what you don't like. If you've warped the engine into something totally different or if you have some really cool design but it lives hidden inside the corporate firewall, I would appreciate getting a screenshot (blur out the secrets). None of the information will be published unless you allow me to do that.

I am also interested to know whether and how you've used snippets from the blog code for your own projects and/or products. Knowing what pieces are valuable to you would allow me to isolate them and put them into some isolated "goodies" library down the road.

Scott Hanselman ran into a critical bug in dasBlog 1.6 that has to do with the new caching logic that the folks in the GDN workspace came up with (I didn't do it, I didn't do it!). We've both sent email to those who know about this issue and will see who will look at it and when. Apparently Scott posted something using an external tool and a couple of things were happening in parallel around that same time and that got the caching mechanism confused. If you get unexplicable errors and all you get is the "error page" , go ahead and delete the files entryCache.xml, categoryCache.xml, and blogdata.xml; then open and save (touch) web.config. that should get the blog back on its feet.

If you are on version 1.5 or earlier, stick to it while this is being checked. If you are on 1.6, have some tea or a lightly alcoholic beverage and don't panic.

Omar Shahine, who took the role of the "Program Manager" for dasBlog 1.6 added a new macro feature (I am actually not really sure who added it; someone correct me if I am wrong; at least Omar OK'd the feature) that totally rocks and put us on par with MovableType in terms of easy access to older entries:

<%newtelligence.drawarchivemonths()%> 

The macro creates a list of links for all months that have blog entries and if you look at my site (not at the RSS feed), you'll see it on the left-hand side of the page just under the "What's News" section. Thanks! Now I can find my old stuff again.

if you haven't see it already; Omar's comments about the 1.6 drop and links to release notes and binaries/source are on his blog.

There's a free weblog hosting site under the domain dasblog.com. I'd like to inform you (my readers) that neither me nor newtelligence AG are associated with that site and that we are not providing that service. The operator of the site does certainly nothing to make that clear. We're currently investigating the situation.

The Releases section over at the GotDotNet workspace has three variants of v1.5:

"Source ZIP" with the code, "Web Files" with the runtime files (to update existing installs and do manual installs) and "Web Setup" which is an MSI to install the web site. Because the feature list keep growing, but we haven't done a language update for the various local languages, yet, updates to the string tables are welcome in the workspace source control system. And before you update: make a backup.

I am running v1.5 here without any problems. Let us know in the GotDotNet workspace message boards if you find any. I likely won't be able to answer any support questions this or next week.

Please note that you must not have the Whidbey Alpha version of ASP.NET mapped to the web into which you install this version; it can be present on the box, but not on the web for dasBlog. Otherwise you will get all sorts of assertions and error messages that aren't my fault ;)

 

I had too little time today to make the necessary corrections on the few install issues that I found due to the workspace fellows not adding the files where they need to be (It's tricky so not necessarily their fault). The problem is not fixing, the problem is testing: Install the source MSI, build, find problem. Go back to original version, fix, full build, install source MSI ... you get the picture. 

I think I am done with v1.5 of dasBlog. However, experience tells me that I'll usually find a tiny problem just after I've packaged it all up and posted it, so I'll keep the source tree checked out and the files sitting here for another 24 hours until I am sure that it works well here.

Omar and Harry have done a fantastic job cleaning up some of my mess and they've added some cool new things.

We've got a simple search facility now, comments can be deleted, the administrator UI got a bit better organized, a bunch of annoying little bugs were fixed, the stylish "dasBlog" theme does work now and is the default, you can finally change your password through the UI, a corrupt login-cookie won't crash the site anymore, comments now show up in the correct time zone, the SMTP server settings for notifications can now be tested, we have a plugin for NewsGator, etc.

 

I'll put together the v1.5 build version of dasBlog next week. The v1.4 "PDC build" proved to be "true to the spirit of PDC bits" and turned out to have a couple of problems with the new "dasBlog" theme and some other inconveniences that v1.5 will fix. The true heroes of v1.5 are Omar and the many other frequent contributors to the workspace; I just didn't have enough time to add features recently.

As I blogged last week, I am very busily involved in a exciting (mind that I use the word not as carelessly as some marketing types) infrastructure project on service-oriented architectures, automnomous computing an agile machines. I wrote some 50 pages of very dense technical specification and a lot of "proof of concept" code in the past two weeks and we're in the process of handing this off to the development team. I am having a great time and a lot of fun, but because the schedule is insanely tight for a variety of reasons (I am not complaining, I signed it knowingly), I've been on 16 hour days for most of the past two weeks.  In some ways, this is also an Indigo project, because I am loosely aligning some of my core architecture with a few fundamentals from the Indigo connector architecture published at PDC to that we can take full advantage of Indigo once it's ready. The Indigo idea of keeping the Message body in an XmlReader is an ingenious idea for what I am doing here. In essence, if you only need to look at the headers inside an intermediary in a one-way messaging infrastructure like the one I am building right now, you may never even need to look anything from the body until you push the resulting message out again. So why suck it into a DOM? Just map the input stream to the output stream and hand the body through as you get it. That way and under certain circumstances, my bits may already be forwarding a message to the next hop when it hasn't even fully arrived yet.

One of the "innovative approaches" (for me, at least) is that within this infrastructure, which has a freely composable, nestable pipeline of "aspects", I am using my lightweight transaction manager to coordinate the failure management of such independently developed components. The difficulty of that and the absence of an "atomic" property of a composite pipeline activity are two things that bugged me most about aspects. There's a lot more potential in this approach, for instance enforcement of composition rules. It works great in theory and in the prototype code and I am curious how that turns out once it hits a real life use-case. We're getting there soon. (My first loud thinking about something like this is was at the very bottom of this rant here.) I'll keep you posted.

In unrelated news: Because I know that I'll be doing a lot of Longhorn work and demos in the upcoming months (my Jan/Feb/Mar schedule looks like I am going to visit every EMEA software developer personally), I've meanwhile figured that my loyal and reliable digital comrade (a Dell Inspiron 8100) will be retired. Its successor will have a green chassis.

My 4 continents in 4 months drinking buddy Stephen Forte thinks I am insane (that from him!) for keeping all blog stuff in XML files instead of SQL and I just had a quick chat with Jason Whittington about multi-user capabilities for dasBlog.

So... here's a couple of points on what I am thinking about "storage futures" for dasBlog.

XML files are goodness for small sites. There are a lot of folks I met who don't have SQL Server acess for their sites or don't want to deal with the additional complexity. I reckon that it's still a minor administrative burden to set up the permissions, but that's much less than administering your SQL store. Still, SQL is of course superior of sites that have more traffic, because it excels in dealing with concurrency, data consistency and all the database goodness. Come Yukon, there's a great way to mix the extensibility of XML and the power of SQL in a very rich way (to use a Microsoft marketing phrase). And of course, for folks like Stephen, SQL administration is something they do in their sleep. For SQL 2000, I am thinking about submitting Infoset to the data service, breaking out the elements needed for relations and indexes and store everything else as a BLOB. dasBlog only looks at the entry id, the date and the categories when looking for entries so that seems sufficient.

WinFS seems a great way to store the files and add search. I will have to look into that, but it's too far out to even do a prototype.

Multi-User capability is what I discussed with Jason. He suggested that the "author" is just another field. I disagree. The multi-user version of dasBlog (there will be one) will be organized in a very different way. I will actually keep the content absolutely separate on a per-user basis. Site config will be split into user preferences and site preferences. There will be master themes and user-supplied themes. However, there won't be a merged store. Reason: If I am blogging at a shared site and I want to move to a site that I host myself, I want to be able to take the content and make the move myself. Xcopy. If your weblog is on a site with a common store, you will have to extract and remove your content first and that may hard to do and may break stuff in the end, because there may be dependencies in the store that you don't know about. What I am going to do with the multiuser model is that there will be one runtime and app, but content, templates and content will be stored in subdirectories. If you want to move away from a shared site, you grab your stuff drop it into a single-user blog and it just works.

On the inside, the multi-user version will keep one data service instance (and cache) for each user and the portal page will by fed by a data service that aggregates all user data services and creates combined results. Logging will be separate for each user, but the logging information will be fanned out to the common site-wide logging service as well.

Download: hotfix-clickthrough-1-4-3297-1.zip

The source code archives (SourceSetup/SourceZip) are missing four files in the Assemblies subdir that the gentlemen who added the respective features didn't care to put into the source setup project. You can get the files either from one of the other distribution archives, from the GDN workspace (source control) or the fixed source code archives from the dasBlog download location. GotDotNet doesn't let me upload the corrected release version right now, so I deleted the source release copy over there for the moment.

Doug, you are absolutely going to get newtelligence's PDC T-Shirt, but in all reality you should give me a T-Shirt for allowing you a super smooth transition and perfect upgrade path from your outdated blogging tool to this here. Tell Don that he's going to get one, too, if he makes the switch.

"newtelligence PDC T-Shirt!" you ask? There will be two types. The one Doug is asking for is very on-topic for PDC and it's subtly outrageous. You will have to wait until PDC and catch me (or someone who's got one) to see it.

Of the other one I'll have just three made for myself and it's not really subtle in it's message, but rather conveys it quite clearly:

Thanks everyone. I got about 20 MMS and SMS messages to figure out how to support these types of emails for dasBlog. I actually found a few minor bugs in the Mail-To-Weblog support and while the messages of course don't come out as pretty as from a regular email client, it does at least work now.

What's key -- and that's something that I can't figure out a consistent workaround for -- is that the SMS/MMS gateway must be capable of setting a subject line for emails so that dasBlog can do it's passphrase check. For Germany, this page has a bunch of info on how that works in the major networks (in German).

Yesterday and today I have added another new feature to dasBlog called "Crossposting". This feature, which will be available in the v1.4 build that I still plan to publish before the Microsoft PDC next week, is simplifying having multiple blogs on several sites by allowing a entries to be posted to a master weblog running dasBlog and having the engine crosspost across multiple weblogs using the Blogger API or the (more powerful) MetaWeblog API. If the entry is updates locally, the crossposts are updated and if the entry is deleted, the crossposts get wiped, too.

My concrete problem was that I wanted to contribute to longhornblogs.com, but didn't want to maintain a separate blog. Now I can post a local post here, check a checkbox and it'll appear in both places. To still get the referrals, I am "bugging" the crossposted articles with a transparent GIF that phones home into the referrer stats of the main blog.

I'll post a "how to" along with the release, which I hope will happen by Friday. Until then, you can check that it works by looking at the three synchronized weblogs.

I've bumped up the version number for dasBlog to 1.4. I've got a couple of enhancements myself in a private build here and the folks over in the workspace at GotDotNet have added quite a few cool things as well. I want to check in my new stuff before end of next week, so that we'll have an "official build" ready just before PDC.

The two features I added today are evil spy-features "ClickThrough" and "AggBug".

ClickThrough is an automatic mechanism that will (if configured) replace all hyperlinks in your web-page content with references to a redirector service, which logs clicks. So you'll learn which links people actually click. I added this mostly because I am curious about my downloads.

AggBug (long version: "RSS Aggregator Web Bugs") injects a reference 1x1 transparent GIF into the HTML that's emitted by the RSS generator for each entry. The GIF is served by the engine itself and tracks those requests. I am doing that, because I really want to know how many readers I have. Currently I only see the readers who are coming to the web-site, but I suspect that the vast majority are using aggregators.

Update: I should probably add that I am not logging IP addresses in these two features just as I am not doing that with referrers.

Ummm.... did I document that? If you use dasBlog, you can have an individual template for each category. Just create a subdirectory with the same name as the category (and subdirectory of the subdirectory for a nested category) and place the modified template files there. I just did that for the dasBlog">dasBlog category (subcategory of newtelligence) and placed the new files into the newtelligence/dasBlog subdir below the main template directory. Requires version 1.2 or later.

I read on some blogs that people are confused about the trackback support in dasBlog. Trust me, I am confused myself. I have implemented version 1.1 of trackback, using HTTP POST instead of version 1.0's HTTP GET and neglected supporting the 1.0 variant. That may be part of the problem. Still, I freely admit that trackback is probably one of the worst tested features of the whole code base in general. Getting that to work properly is on my list. Pingback works.

It seems that Dare Obasanjo is getting ready to switch off the lights over in the BlogX workspace on GotDotNet or at least is about to drop the existing BlogX code base for good and replace it with the current build of dasBlog. In this comment here on this blog Dare is also hinting at moving all of the Microsoft blogger blogs on GotDotNet from BlogX to dasBlog.

I swear! A hostile takeover of BlogX wasn't part of the plan! It just happened! 

What's still an open discussion point is whether we'll have a logical second of synchronization between the two projects and from there, the newly dasblogged BlogX will move on its own while dasBlog will remain the cozy little project that it is or whether Dare will bring all of his 338 friends over to the dasBlog workspace.

Indepent of how that's going, both projects or the merged project will be under stricter project management than before. For instance, BlogX suffered massively from files being checked out for weeks or months. If that'd happen in the dasBlog workspace, it'd have a member less.

I just uploaded a new build of dasBlog (1.3.3266) to the GotDotNet workspace and the dasBlog site. Although it carries a new minor version number, the changes aren't dramatic and the new build mostly consolidates some cosmetic changes, add-ons (languages) and fixes that were done by the folks in the GotDotNet workspace and myself.

I am investigating a problem that occurs very rarely in dasBlog and causes rendering of pages to fail consistently until restarted by, for instance, touching web.config. I've seen this happen only on the newtelligence website and only once.

Apparently, the resource manager that's used to pull in the localized strings for various elements and is stored in application state is lost at some point and causes the data binding of the controls to throw a NullReferenceException. What I assume is that the Global.Application_Start() event isn't fired in all cases when the worker process recycles.

I am looking into it, but before I have a good answer for the why and a fix, the best workaround is to touch (load and save) web.config in order to restart the app.

Update: While I still don't know why the original problem happened, I have a permanent workaround for 1.3, which is due very very soon (I am already posting using the 1.3 build that consolidates a couple of fixes, language additions and minor enhancements)

The new newtelligence homepage now runs on top of it. In fact, there are a couple of features like the nested categories and the whole localization story that only made it into the blog engine, because we wanted to use dasBlog for that purpose as well.

Ok, I couldn't resist getting the Arabic support (mostly) right. Malek helped me and by what he tells me, we've succeeded mostly. There are a few things left to do around wildly wrapping symbol characters, but that'll be worked out eventually.

So, this little patch updates dasBlog with French, Russian and Arabic, including full right-to-left reading support, which the engine injects appropriately into the <body> tag (dir="RTL") based on a hint in the Arabic resource table.

On the download site I posted add-on packs for French language support and the first steps toward Arabic language support, which are the string tables. My friend Malek Kemmou from Morocco wants to help me figuring out how we can make right-to-left reading work "magically" and without having to rework all the templates. He also did those two translations. Thanks!

Update: I added a first attempt at generic RTL support to my private build and installed it here. If the primary language is set to any of the Arabic language variants, the page will flip into RTL reading. There are some issues around formatting to be worked out, though.

The workspace is maxed out at the current 20 users. I already submitted the form to ask for more users (the largest decimal number it takes is 99 so I went for that) and I really hope that there's someone at the other end of that form. GDN team, are you listening?

Update: Fixed.