Scott Hanselman

DasBlog 1.9 Released

September 22, 2006 Comment on this post [20] Posted in ASP.NET | DasBlog
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DasBlog Reflection 640x480 GrayOmar 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:

If you want to extend DasBlog...

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)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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September 22, 2006 10:45
Congrats fellas! Great work!
September 22, 2006 11:08
Great work guys - really enjoying using dasBlog.

Is there any information available on how to enable FCKEditor instead of FTB? I see it's a feature of the new release and have the new release installed on my blog but can't find any way of enabling FCKEditor - I only get the choice of a plain text box of FTB.

Thanks
September 22, 2006 11:39
Martin - See the FCKEditor deployment details here: http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/dasblogce/trunk/source/newtelligence.DasBlog.Contrib.FCKeditor/Deploy.txt?view=markup.

Because of the licensing we had to split it up.
September 22, 2006 11:42
Will DasBlog (this version / anytime in future) support Medium Trust Level for the guys who have to run on a shared hosting environment?

I've looked at ThinkJot which was an interesting fork of DasBlog that did the trick, but their site basically says:

"In the long term, ThinkJot will move away from the original dasBlog source code, with the goal of simpicity in use, minimal complexity in source code and quick feature enhancements and additions"

Anything for guys who want to enjoy the DasBlog feature-set but still run on a Medium Trust Level environment?
September 22, 2006 12:13
Nice!!
Let's upgrade...
September 22, 2006 13:00
Rajiv - Not sure about ThinkJot guy. He basically just picked a day in 2005 and copy/pasted DasBlog and made a few changes to get it to build in 2005. With Web Application Projects thats pretty easy. He hasn't packaged up the changes and given them back to us, although I could probably diff his stuff.

He says it runs under Medium Trust. If you (or any volunteer) would like to help get official DasBlog to run under Medium Trust, let's do it. Join up and email me.
September 22, 2006 14:04
Great work scott!
thank you !
September 22, 2006 15:36
Hi Scott, <br />Been waiting ages for this. Nice one Scott. One thing I would add here is that dasblog assumes by default that the anonymous account IIS is using to access the dasblog virtual folder is IUSR_machinename rather than any custom account you may have created for security reasons. That caught me out for a few minutes - after following the readme for a clean install, IE kept telling me I wasn't connected to the internet. The solution - obviously - is to change the anonymous account for the vdir back to IUSR_machinename. Any guidelines for using a different account though? Simply adding modify permissions to content, logs and SiteConfig doesn't seem to do the trick.
September 22, 2006 19:03
Actually I'm using ThinkJot for my blog engine because of the fact that it is ported to the 2.0 version of the framework. Any idea on when would dasBlog support ASP.NET 2.0 by default?
September 22, 2006 19:15
Michal, dasBlog works fine under 2.0.
September 22, 2006 19:22
Excellent work to everyone involved. Scott, I don't know if there's a place but maybe you can post about it. What features are you guys thinking about/looking for that would inspire people to create patches? It's all grand that we come up with things we think are cool, but what is it that you guys are looking for but don't have time/effort to do it yourselfs that the community could help out with?
September 22, 2006 19:40
Scott,

What is the url of the sitemap page ??

Thx .. Ken
September 22, 2006 19:49
Sitemaps:

googleSitemap.ashx

also, a note on gravatars. You can use an http:// full URL as well as a local /theme/images/* or /images/* path for no-gravatar image path.

JRF
September 22, 2006 20:25
Michal Talaga - DasBlog has worked fine running on .NET 2.0 for over a year. ThinkJot guy just took the source and compiled it, and fixed the warnings. Compiling on 1.1 and running on 2.0 versus compiling on 2.0 and running on 2.0 leaves us at the same endpoint. If you diff the code it's a few dozen lines different and it was to stop compiler warnings and one Trust issue. I must admit, I don't understand why he forked our codebase. It sends a mixed message. We offered to have him make his changes in the main base.

Now, of course, there's probably 1500-2000 lines different between ThinkJot (based on 1.8) and the new 1.9 - did I mention it runs fine on 2.0? ;)
September 22, 2006 20:30
Danm - DasBlog doesn't make any assumptions about IUSR_machinename or the anonymous account. I run DasBlog as a different anonymous user...as long as there is write permissions to those folders, you should be cool. What are you seeing?
September 22, 2006 23:17
Can I just drop this into an existing install? Are there major and/or breaking changes in the configs?

Thanks!
September 23, 2006 2:23
Yes Scott, couldn't agree more. I used ThinkJot to get my Blog running quickly in medium trust but the fact that it's not being able to cope up with the feature-set of DasBlog makes me a little paranoid and "not so sure" about my decission of using it.

I was hoping the ThinkJot author was going to be merging his changes into DasBlog sooner or later; but it looks like I am out of luck.

I'm going to be traveling starting tommorrow for a couple of weeks, with scanty email / internet access, but I would like to investigate, see and document what it would take to have DasBlog run in a Medium trust environment as soon as I get back home, end of first week of October.

I’ve ended up buying Server space for my Blog in an environment that allows only Medium trust (bad mistake :)) - so (out of my own shelfish interest :)) I'll start spending some free time next month playing around with DasBlog code and seeing what it would take to make it run in Medium Trust Level and then start making changes. Will keep you posted.
September 25, 2006 5:11
Hi Scott,<br /><br />Cool glad to see how easy it is for you guys to bundle.<br />Is there support for mutli-blogs like SubText scheduled anytime soon?<br />
October 07, 2006 1:46
Installation was a piece of cake.
Was the issue with uploading images resolved with LiveWriter. Of course the quick fix was simply to use FTP but I wanted to check and see before I broke something which was already working.
October 09, 2006 17:27
Is there a problem with Captcha running on .NET 2.0 versions?
I'm not using dasblog for my own blog at the moment because my phone does mobile blogging through blogger.com.
But I still have my friend's blog running on my server using 64 bit .net 2.0 and if I turn Captcha on it stops working after a while.
nj

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.