Robosapient.Com - Tom Watts - Tech News

DASBLOG 1.9.6264 released today

Tom Watts — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 02:46:09 GMT

OK it's official the dasBlog team has released dasBlog 1.9!

See Scott's post for all the details.

P.S. I appreciate the nice words there about your's truly!

Cheers

Tom

Download here: Documentation here: Forum here:

daily builds here: (including ASP.NET 2.0 VS2005 versions), stay with ASP.NET 1.1 unless you have a developer need.

(daily builds with EST local server time here:)

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Top 46 new features in DasBlog 1.9 to be released soon!

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 01:45:31 GMT

Turned on comment moderation support

Much better multi-user/blogger support including a Top Posters macro and total comments

TagCloud support

Speedup in Macro execution

Support for If-Not-Modified to speed up execution, improve RSS bandwidth and CPU cycles

Direct Feedburner Support with 301 redirection for RSS and Atom feeds.

Direct support for Feedburner and Feedflare

Delete comments directly from your mail reader

New themes out of the box, 23 at last count (including mobile)

New XML-RPC support for newMediaObject

Added support for RSD (http://archipelago.phrasewise.com/rsd) so that blog software can automatically configure itself w/o users entering all the metaweblog nonsense

Pluggable Rich Text Editor, choose from FreeTextBox or FCKEditor or write your own adapter

Support for CoComment

Organized source, build, and packing for clarity

New Feed Icons

Automatic disabling of Comments after a certain number of days. Also manual “close comments” support

ContentLookAhead show future dated posts

Added entry CPU usage optimizatons

Better strings and support for Portuegue, Turkish and Vietnamese

Statistics update, search engine is are not considered a user for click through.

Statistics update, User domain is now logged if configured for DNS reverse lookups.

Fix for faithfully displaying comment formats, included blank lines in RSS feeds.

Statistics update, no longer tracks the admin account as user activity.

Better Post retrieval using the calendar

No e-mail address in RSS feeds, displays the e-mail user name instead

Update for additional capability for storing encrypted passwords on the server

Statistics date handover from one type of view to another, i.e. for example from crossposts to events logs

Cosmetic fixes for the delete confirmation and ActivityBox dialogs.

Updated confirmation messages for post, comment and trackback deletion.

Update of configuration edit page to allow user control of the attribute “DaysCommentsAllowed” in the blog without direct edit of the Site.Config file.

Support for mobile phones and mobile devices if you read the web.config and update it with new browsercaps data, i.e support for displaying your blog on mobile machines like a “BlackBerry”.

Added support for select HTML code in Comments, configurable on the edit page.

Support for GoogleSitemaps https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html Your autogenerated sitemap is at http://<yoursite>/googleSitemap.ashx

Autosave for editing posting posts, (AJAX code)

Improved ReferralBlackList

Bug fix for when caching, take language into consideration.

Added support for alternate SMTP Ports

Resolved validation error in category tag and the issue with the xml:lang attributes

Updated version information for version 1.0.0 of XML-RPC.NET

Macro (Previous Entry, Next Entry, Recent Entries) links for displaying blog posts

Macro to return the text only of the permalink <%PermalinkRaw%>

Adding caching to Blogroll.aspx

Update for XML-RPC.NET to support blogging from Word 2007

Better Titles for Comments in RSS

Adding titles to category feeds in RSS

Added ContentLookaheadDays configuration feature, allows you to display future dated posts on the front page and in your feed - useful for sharing scheduled events.

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Contributions of Justice Gray and DasBlog 1.9x

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:56:28 GMT

Well I've got to just rip off a quick post, I have been so busy supporting the DasBlog community that I just about don't blog anymore <sad>.

Anyway I have fairly recently released a new DasBlog theme which I submitted to be included in the next DasBlog release and it failed the FireFox test. Boy was I embarrassed. I had called myself checking it out but I will admit not very closely at least in FireFox.

At any rate I spent untold hours trying to track down the problem, and along come Justice Gray one of the better DasBlog developer contributors and volunteered to help me out.

He found 99% of the problems in 10 minutes. Apprantley he has and uses all those fancy FireFox development tools. YEAH!!!!!

I got Scott Hanselman to check the theme in this afternoon and by all appearances, the level of activity at Sourceforge we should see DasBlog 1.9 any day now!

Soon I will be hip deep in trying to support the role out and the user community.

Take Care

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

RoboSapient.Com dedicated to DasBlog as Tech Site

Thu, 18 May 2006 14:52:56 GMT

OK folks I have decided to refocus this site as a tech only and 99% Dasblog site.

There will be no more family postings here, I have created a new family blog site at TomWatts.com to support family blogging.

The TomWatts.Com blog site is also based on the Dasblog engine and the theme is a conversion of the CSS web template “Nautica02.2 Liquid” from Open Web Design (OWD). I think it came out very well!!!

I did duplicate some of the old family posts from Robosapient.com for a foundation for the family blog.

I promise you will find more of the lessons learned from my efforts at dasblog.us posted here with maybe some what better background, and easier to find references. I love the forum for the support it offers, but it is not the platform to pontificate about a particular issue raised there, or resolved there!.

I will also try to read the dasblog tea leaves from my hanging around the dasblog developement team and report what I think is going on from the "user" perspective.

See ya later.

Tom

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Musing v0.12345 / Newz Crawler / Blog idleminutes.com / Scott Hanselmans on OPEN SOURCE

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 03:38:07 GMT

Ok just a few rambles here,

#1. I continue to test Newz Crawler, so far it is one of my favorite RSS writer / remote blogger engines! ( I wish it had a built in spell checker, at least a browser based one, but so far I have not found one! This post will be another test of Newz Crawler...

#2. I review a lot of dasblog sites in my admin support duties (self appointed) over at dasblog.us , there are some very interesting blogs out there! I am partial to technical blogs, but I have found one that is artist centric ran by a techie that has caught my fancy. That blog would be @ http://idleminutes.com

#3. Scott has an interesting post over at his blog, "Is OPen Source a Crap Idea?" http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IsOpenSourceACrapIdea.aspx I hope that last leading question doesn't mean he is considering moving away from dasblog and on too newer greener pastures. If that's where he's headed, (I would understand if he did), I just hope he's looking to pass the baton.

/End Musing v0.12345

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Newz Crawler Test Post

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 15:27:43 GMT

I received the following comment at http://dasblog.info the other day, so I thought I would try this product for myself.

The mystery I'm trying to solve is "what are the valid endpoint definitions?" Been Googling all over the place, but no sign anywhere of what you actually enter for a dasBlog endpoint in your upload tool.

I did find on reference that suggested it was "\blogger.aspx", but NewzCrawler won't accept this. Odd that I could be using a combination of 2 popular tools, both of which are lacking dopcumentation on this simple point.

Comments page: http://dasblog.info/CommentView,guid,B5B8DD8C-9A11-4237-8438-514D819FB274.aspx >>

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

So far so good, it does appear that the default endpoint for custom /RPC is just fine and that the html reference is http://domain/blogger.aspx.

Going to hit the post button now.........

Added some help images:

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FolderShare my new Best Friend

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 02:56:00 GMT

Ok a few weeks ago or even longer I blogged about how busy I am! At that time I didn’t know the “half of it” as they say!

I just can’t find time to keep up with blogging here and supporting dasblog.us & dasblog.info, all are suffering <smile>…

There are a few new changes to this busy schedule, I started using FolderShare. It’s the best new thing in my techie life. http://www.foldershare.com.

I can’t count the times it has saved me time (pun) or from a mini disaster (no pun).

For two weekends in a row I have had personal server problems at home, (Exchange 2003 on PDC/you don’t really want to know the details) and FolderShare has unexpectedly saved the day.

Not only the sharing of designated folders on two or more computers but the feature where you can log into you FolderShare account and access any file on your host computers. That is the feature that was the unplanned lifesaver.

Just today it saved me an 85 mile drive home, yeah I do VPN and remote server etc. etc., and sometime it all lets you down, but not FolderShare.

And you can’t beat that for free!!!!

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

DasBlog User Forums now active (Beta Mode)

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 03:28:46 GMT

Announcement: http://dasBlog.us User Forums now active.

In attempt to encourage more user community collaboration in support of the opensource "DasBlog" blogging software project the subject forums have been created. The forums at SourceForge are now depreciated.

Please support your DasBlog community, links back to your DasBlog support entries are encouraged!

The documentation is at the htp://dasblog.info and the Development team still resides at SourceForge.

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

Officials fear base jobs at risk (Wright Patterson AFB, Dayton OH)

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 17:05:48 GMT

Link: Officials fear base jobs at risk

I have been talking to a lot of DOD management teams at Wright Patterson AFB over the last few months and I have been saying for months to whom ever would listen that there is a stealth effort to continue to move jobs from Dayton (specifically DSFG) to Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts, and to OSSG in Montgomery AL.

There is a lot of smoke in this story, major contracting changes in the DSFG, and acquisition philosophy changes... this story is still unfolding. Glad to see Dave Hobson is looking into it!

This article just proves my intelligence work was on the money!

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Stop ---- Problem (dasBlog User Forum now active - Annoucement!)

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 23:28:09 GMT

Hosting provider (Godaddy, not our new host BoundGrid.net) has just killed the database before even the first backup, the grand opening will be delayed!

It is official (the http://www.dasblog.us User Forum is on-line).

I understand the format is beta or draft and I am sure the community will make a lot of changes over the next few days to weeks, but it's "here now" to support the DasBlog user community!

Check it out! http://www.dasblog.us

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

Court Rules in Favor of Anonymous Blogger

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 06:51:46 GMT

By RANDALL CHASE, Associated Press Writer Thu Oct 6, 1:02 PM ET Yahoo News

DOVER, Del. - In a decision hailed by free-speech advocates, the Delaware Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed a lower court decision requiring an Internet service provider to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger who targeted a local elected official.

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