Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

Omar pulled the trigger and we released DasBlog 1.9.6264. Why 6264 you ask? Because it's 2006 and the 264th day, that's why. Download it.

Here's some of the new features.

• Much better multi-user/blogger support including a Top Posters macro and total comments - from Christoph De Baene
• TagCloud Support - from Scott
• Support for Mobile Browsers like Blackberries and SmartPhones - from Scott
• Note the large section in your web.config and the mobile theme that is required for this support.
• Huge (100x+) speedup in Macro execution - from Scott
• Support for If-Not-Modified to speed up execution, improve RSS bandwidth and CPU cycles - from Scott
• Direct Feedburner Support with 301 redirection for RSS and Atom feeds. Don't lose a single subscriber. We're the only blog with direct support for Feedburner and Feedflare I believe. - from Scott
• I encourage you to check out FeedBurner. You can add FeedFlare to your posts, and modify your feed in ways DasBlog can't. They also handle your Feed bandwidth and provide rich statistics. It's free ($ for advanced stats) and it's very powerful. Do be aware that when you make the decision to move over to FeedBurner your existing feeds will start redirecting folks to FeedBurner immediately. That's part of the power of the whole thing, but be warned.
• Delete comments directly from your mail reader - from Omar
• Comment moderation option
• New themes out of the box, 18 at last count - from Many Folks
• New XML-RPC support for newMediaObject and new version of XML-RPC.NET from Charles Cook - from Omar and Giuseppe Dipietro
• Macros for Next Post and Previous Post - Justice Gray
• Check the DasBlog theme or add this line to the top of your itemtemplate.blogtemplate.
  <%PreviousLink("&laquo;&nbsp;",25)%><%MainPageEntryLink("Main", "|")%><%NextLink("&nbsp;&raquo;",25)%><br/>
• A few security and XSS fixes
• Support for Gravatars, images of your choosing that appear next to your comments - John Forsythe
• Support for limited HTML markup in comments
• Emails removed to avoid having email addresses stolen from Feeds
• Added an Email page for leaving comments to the author, includes Captcha
• New support for RSD so client software can autoconfigure itself - from Omar
• Pluggable Rich Text Editor, choose from the latest version of FreeTextBox or FCKEditor or write your own adapter - from Josh Flanagan
• Support for alternate SMTP ports
• We work with Windows Live Writer out of the box - from Omar
• Support for CoComment - from Scott
• Microsummary support for Firefox 2.0 Beta - from Scott
• Organized source, build, and packing for clarity - from Josh Flanagan
• New Feed Icons - from Omar
• Autometic generation of Google SiteMaps - from Scott
• Automatic disabling of Comments after a certain number of days. Also manual "close comments" support - from Omar
• ContentLookAhead show future dated posts - from Josh Flanagan
• Other fixes and suggestions from Tomas Restrepo, Jason Follas, Rene Lebherz and Steven Rockarts. Added entry CPU usage optimizatons from George V. Reilly.
• Ajax Autosave Drafts support from Steven Rockarts and Justice Gray.
• Better strings and support for German from Alexander Groß, Portuguese from Adelino Araújo, and Vietnamese from Phạm Đức Hải.
• Many great new themes
• Updated readme.rtf from Tim Sherill
• Single-handed support of DasBlog.info and DasBlog.us to the enthusiastic and tireless Tom Watts!
• Welcome to new team members Alexander Groß, Paul Van Brenck, and John Forsythe who really did a lot of work to make this release possible! Thanks to Jacob Proffitt for doing some crazy debugging of caching on FireFox that will be in a point release soon.
• New DasBlog Badges/Artwork from Alexander Groß...download them here: File Attachment: DasBlog Artwork.zip (1015 KB)

Thanks again to all who jumped in this release. The number of bug fixes and patches was fantastic.

If you are starting from scratch, READ THE README.

If you are upgrading, always back up your whole site. You have a number of choices on how to upgrade but mostly it's just merge the web.config and copy over everything else. Read the readme.rtf.

• If you have made changes to your web.config, manually merge your existing web.config with the one we ship, using a tool like Beyond Compare.
• If you are running DasBlog 1.8, you don't need to run the DasBlog Upgrader if you don't want to. It'll clean up spam and tighten up your content, but it's not required.
• If you've modified your themes or an included theme with DasBlog, back up your stuff so you can merge in new features as you like.
• DasBlog is written in ASP.NET 1.1 but runs under 1.1 or 2.0. Read the readme.rtf and the web.config for details.

Some things to note:

• File bugs here.
• Submit patches here.
• Here's how to submit a patch and get the source code.
• Daily builds (if you like living on the edge) are here.
• Some folks have said that DasBlog isn't actively developed because we are slow to release. Do join our mailing list, our checkin list and check out the daily builds.
• Join our developers mailing list (very active) here.
• Subversion Checkin mailing list is here.

If you want to extend DasBlog...

• You can always write your own THEME
• You can write custom macros...here's a writeup from Kris van der Mast on how, and a number of nice macros from Vasanth Dharmaraj including his tutorial.

Regarding Macros:

• The best documentation for the Macros (so far) is the Macros.cs file itself. Nearly every public function in there is a potential macro you can use in your templates. If you wish a Macro existed, perhaps it already does. You can browse the code in the Subversion Repository without installing anything. Here's a link directly to the Macros.cs file.

We're always looking for help editing the documentation and working on http://dasblog.info/. We also appreciate folks who answer questions in the forums at http://dasblog.us/.

Enjoy, and thanks team!

Now playing: Rent - I'll Cover You (Reprise)