newtelligence dasBlog v1.4: After you have read the release/upgrade notes, get it from here.

I have done a bit less testing than I usually would, because I wanted to get this version out in time for PDC – just because I want to have some of the new features (especially cross-posting) for myself for PDC. I have bravely deployed this new build on my own blog (here) and it didn’t break me, so it should work for you as well. Make a backup of your site before you install, ok?

Cross-posting is certainly the coolest feature if you happen to have two or more blogs (the number of folks who have that is growing daily). Before I add a formal explanation to the docs (which isn’t going to happen tonight) here’s a quick primer:

If you have cross-posting enabled on the configuration page, you will have two more entries in the administrator bar. “Crosspost Referrers” and “Crosspost Sites”. Crosspost sites is an editable list where you can enter the other blogs you want to post to and where you want to keep entries synchronized. The picture shows my setup for Lonnghornblogs.com. Hostname and Port should be trivial to understand. The “Endpoint” is the Blogger API or MetaWeblog API endpoint of your blog engine (leading forward slash required). It’s tested that dasBlog interops with itself ;), with .Text and Blogger.com. There’s not much of a reason why it shouldn’t interop with more engines. The API type is either “Blogger” (for Blogger.com) or “MetaWeblog” (for mostly everything else, including dasBlog and .Text). Click the “Test” button to verify the setting before you save them.

Once you’ve set up one more more sites, you’ll get the following little extra box at the bottom of the “Edit Entry” page:

Just check the sites you want to cross-post to. If the site supports the MetaWeblog API, you can also enter categories there. Multiple categories are separated by semicolons. Once you post, the cross-posts are queued up and will be posted within a couple of seconds. One catch: You should no re-edit the entry before the synchronization is done; typically within 15 seconds after your post has been stored. If the entries haven’t been synchronized, yet, the checkboxes will remain unchecked.

If you subsequently edit the entry, the changes will be replicated into the foreign Weblogs (not vice versa). If you delete the entry, the foreign entries will also be removed. In essence, you only have one blog to maintain, but multiple publishing points.

The feature isn’t yet integrated with Mail-To-Weblog. What you need to do there is to post your entry via mail, edit the entry later via the web interface and change nothing except checking the appropriate boxes and setting the categories. Support for cross-posting via Email will be in v1.5.

The “Crosspost Referrers” page shows the referrers that you are getting on the foreign site. Note: Your main blog is going to get some of the traffic of the foreign blogs because of the referrers feature. The referrer stats are baked into the cross-post feature and can’t be switched off singly at this time. For each unique hit the foreign site gets on one of your entries, there’s a potentially a request for a 43 byte image plus a bit of protocol overhead; let’s make that 100-150 bytes. Keep that in mind before you enable cross-posting to a high traffic site, otherwise this feature may end up “slashdotting” your own server. (Similar considerations are true for “Aggregator bugging” – see the release notes)

PS: Thanks to all the heroes in the GDN Workspace who helped a lot with this release.