Robosapient.Com - Tom Watts - dasBlog

New dasBlog Theme dasEmerald for download

Tom Watts — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 13:34:37 GMT

I released the theme to this site a few days ago to be included in the new dasBlog release 2.2. But if you just looking for a theme for your current dasblog then you might want to take a look at this theme now.

Download:

dasEmerald.zip (166.32 KB)

To use, just unzip into your theme directory and change your configuation via the configuration page to use this theme.

The theme gives a link for detail on how to edit your theme to your taste.

Cheers

Tom

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

dasBlog 2.2 Released

Tom Watts — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 12:36:13 GMT

We have quite a few new features along with a few new bug fixes.

Custom Macros: The number one issue resolved by this release is the 2.1 version inability to support legacy custom macros. This has been resolved!

Resolved Theme loading issue: (missing Mobile Theme crashed system for mobile browsers)

Added check to delete entry method: only admin or author is allowed to delete; (Window Live Writer (WLW) editing allowed contributor to delete admin posts.

Added OPENID identifier editbox to user edit page: And some cleanup of the sitesecurity classes; (extensive OPENID for comments support added)

web.config for use in IIS7 Integrated mode: (sample file for IIS7 hosting in default Integrated mode, document in release.

Fixed live comment preview bug: (The last allowed tag was not working correctly in the live preview)

Added support for themed 404 pages: (an optional feature if you control IIS)

Fixed IsDaylightSavingTime bug: which always returned false, resulting in comments always being off by one hour.

OPENID Improvements: Added configuration page options for OPENID comments and admin, and updated site.config file; (version upgrades should take updated site.config file change into consideration)

BLOG Stats Macro: Blog Stats macro bug resolved.

Enjoy!
Tom

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

New Dogfood dasBlog 2.2.8252.15603

Tom Watts — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 04:07:41 GMT

OK We have new Dogfood dasBlog 2.2.8252.15603

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

Dog Fooding dasBlog 2.11.8163.12568

Tom Watts — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:13:44 GMT

This site is Dog Fooding dasBlog 2.11.8163.12568 daily build. I created and posted this daily build today at dasBlog.info, link at CodePlex.

This is a release candidate for 2.11 which resolves the third party macro issue and resulting dupe "Util class" issue.

We were slow enough fixing those issues that the team has pretty much now completed the OPENID for comments capability.

I also made the source is VS2005 buildable, we have a tendadancy to drop VS2008 project files in the source which is a pain for anyone who has not upgraded to VS2008.

Hopefully we will have a good test, and release 2.11 ASAP

Cheers

Tom

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

dasBlog update 824 sort of!

Tom Watts — Wed, 28 May 2008 15:12:09 GMT

I updated the dasBlog repository today to resolve the "Utils class defined twice" issue. This release will be tested for the final 2.1.x release soon. We have been having minor problems with SVNBridge, that is why it took so long to update.

I am calling this update 824 here in my blog, that's sort of based on the fact that the old subversion source control incremented by one each time it was updated. And since I started with 823 from SourceForge and this is my first update this would be 824.

The way the TFS source control works is mystery to me, the first update was change control # 11773 and my new update is 13133. I can only assume that the change control set numbers is for the entire repository and not for just dasBlog. That sort of sucks to be plain about it.

This change control set numbering is going to impact our release numbering also. While we were at SourceForge, before we moved to CodePlex, our release scheme was "version.date.svnrevision#".
Now we will have to consider "version.date.tfsrevision#", which losses some of its value to me!

-Tom

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

dasBlog Repository at CodePlex

Tom Watts — Tue, 20 May 2008 01:18:58 GMT

I released the dasBlog source code for dasBlog at CodePlex today. I took the revision 823 from SourceForge as the starting point.

As soon as I get a chance I will be updating that source to better fit its release at CodePlex, i.e. update the documents etc.

Then as time permits, I plan to release the R823 or later revision as a formal release which resolves the current Custom Macro issue and gives us a new OpenID capability for comment login support.

Later I have a number of new themes to add along with some other new functionality.

Later..

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

BlogDesk Remote Blogging Client for dasBlog

Tom Watts — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 02:51:55 GMT

Ok, I have stumbled on a new (new for me remote blog client) that I feel is as good or better than Windows Live Writer.

The latest version supports dasBlog (including images without FTP) it does not use RSD (Really Simple Discovery) but since complete support of dasBlog is built in, that does not matter!

(Note: BlogDesk expects you to have the older 1.8 series dasBlog installed which BlogDesk only supports images with FTP, so re-edit your blog profile and tell it to support direct images and it will, older verions of dasBlog may not work as well, but the current dasBlog build 1.9+ is 100% supported)

This post was made with BlogDesk!

Your need to check it out! BlogDesk

Except from site:

"No need to use those annoying HTML Tags in the WYSIWYG editor. Images can be directly inserted and are automatically uploaded. Even publishing simultaneously to multiple blogs is a matter of a click.

With the ImageWizard you can not only insert images to your posts - it's possible to edit them as well (crop, resize, rotate, shadow etc., see Examples). Even Thumbnails can be created - the preview will be shown in the blog and a click on the image will open it in its original size (just like here in the right column). Linking and uploading those images is automatically done by BlogDesk."

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

CoComment Support for dasBlog 1.9.6264.0

Tom Watts — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 05:15:33 GMT

DasBlog 1.9.6264.0 now supports CoComment

Track: coComment keeps track of all the online conversations you're following in one convenient place, and informs you whenever something is added to a conversation.

Share: Publish your conversations to your blog in a click, or send them to your friends via email.

Explore: Check out the top commenters, what articles and posts are generating the most comments, who's commenting on the same conversations as you.

Cross Post from http://dasblog.info

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

DasBlog Badge Artwork Released

Tom Watts — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 05:09:36 GMT

With the current release we provide dasBlog buttons and badges for the first time. The whole set with many other formats including png is available here.

Simple jpg:

Reflection jpg:

Simple gif:

Reflection gif:

Cross Post from http://dasblog.info

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

Adventures with Windows Live Writer and dasBlog

Tom Watts — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 02:00:44 GMT

OK today, I have started updating http://dasblog.info for the new 1.9 info and I thougt there would be no better time to try out Windows Live Writer.

(Windows Live™ Writer is a free, downloadable beta program from Microsoft that will help you include rich content in your blog posts and know exactly what your blog will look like.)

Well I love Windows Live Writer but today's postings were not as easy as I thougt they would be!

Everybody is raving about Windows Live Writer, and it is great but it does have some pros and cons.

Pros:

You can include images without an FTP upload setup. (yawza that beats Blogjet here!)
Super easy to setup with dasBlog 1.9 (but not hard with earier versions)
There is no easier blog post engine, and I have tried about 20...

Cons: If these are fixed I will be a super WLW fan!!!

You can't refresh the category list - (the only thing I was able to do to get a refresh was delete the blog site and reinstall, apparently this only happens if you have a big cat list!)
The category list just scrolls on and on down the page, - (I can live with that?)
You can't add a new category with a post -(this is very important to me, as I use categories as menu items at http://dasblog.info and almost every item has a new category)
You can't delete a post, -

Deleting would not be important, but the system throws an error if you manually delete a post at the blog site and then try to repost the same data again from WLW. You can work around this by cycling to another blog account and back and the WLW post id will clear.

You can not include png images??? - (I could not include the new dasblog png badges in a post today!)

Cheers

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

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:)

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

http://dasblog.info updated with new code 1.9.6251.0 and Custom Theme

Tom Watts — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 14:42:10 GMT

I have updated http://dasblog.info the dasBlog Documentation site to dogfood the lastest beta release of 1.9.6251.0 and have created a new custom theme to commerate the event.

I have also made the old theme and all the generic themes available to use at the site!

Updated postings for 1.9 features coming soon!

Cheers

Tom

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

DasBlog 1.9x New Feature (Previous Entry, Next Entry, Recent Entries)

Tom Watts — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 16:36:00 GMT

Please note these new features are a DasBlog contribution by Justice Gray.

Note that the macros below (with the exception of PrevNextSeparator) are currently implemented on Justice Gray's ( http://graysmatter.codivation.com), so you're welcome to take a look there and see how they work.

Previous Entry and Next Entry

These display a link to the previous entry and the next entry. They *only* display if the user has loaded a page with a single entry on it, i.e. a permalink. After all, it's pretty useless to have previous and next links if you're on the main page of the site, or looking through a full category worth of entries. Obviously, if you are on the most recent post the Next Entry Link will not display, and if you are on the very first post you ever made the Previous Entry Link will not display.

Both of these macros take a string for an argument (which can be empty) that is prefixed to the Previous Link's text or appended to the Next Entry's text.
e.g. <%previousentrylink("<< ")%> = "<< [Previous Post Title]"
<%nextentrylink(" >>")> = "[Next Post Title] >>"

PreviousNextSeparator

Depending on your formatting desires, there is also a PreviousNextSeparator macro that will display a separator string of your choice if:
a) the user is on a page with only one blog post (e.g. a permalink)
b) that page is not displaying either the most recent blog entry or the earliest (because, obviously, you're not going to have both a previous and a next at the end of the spectrum).

e.g. <%previousNextSeparator(" | ")%> = " | " when in the situations described above.

RecentEntries (FrontPageTitleList)

There were two reasons I didn't like using FrontPageTitleList:
a) The table cells it created are all automatically aligned to the center using align=left, making it impossible to override this even in CSS given the precedence levels.
b) It's a bit disorienting for a user who hits your blog via an old entry to click on a recent post link and all of a sudden be jumped into the middle of nowhere (at least this is apparent in my blog's design).

Hence I made RecentEntries, which is pretty much FrontPageTitleList with two changes:
a) the alignment setting has been removed so that CSS can be used to align it
b) the links it produces are now permalinks to individual entries (which happens to work well with the previous and next links)

This docuementation was generated by Justice Gray on the DasBlog Developer E-Mail list.

Cheers

Tom

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

Robosapient.com dogfooding Dasblog 1.9.6238.0

Tom Watts — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 02:13:49 GMT

If you don't know what dogfooding is, its to Eat one's own dog food. To say that a company "eats its own dog food" means that it uses the products that it makes.

Well I can't say I made DasBlog, but I sure helped a little with this version!

I really like all the new features, and I am not even sure of some of them, we had so many contributors and new features it will take me forever to get up to speed to help users with this new version and to start writing up the features at http://dasblog.info.

If you have an article on a new feature, or are some kind of expert on a feature, or are said contributor, please send me your articles, or give me permission to pinch what you have elsewhere!

Version 1.9xxxx coming to a host near you soon!!!!!

Cheers

Tom

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

Daily builds of dasBlog - Just for you Developers

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 00:40:33 GMT

Just want to let any DasBlog developer types who may not have heard that the lastest test code is availble here: http://dasblog.info/dbftp/

Remember the real approved final vesion/s will be released at SourceForge here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=127624

Enjoy!

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

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.

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

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.

Re-Post of "Compiling the DasBlog Source Code" from DasBlog.info

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 01:04:52 GMT

(I don't usually repost from www.Dasblog.info or www.Dasblog.us, but this is one cool and important post!
Thanks to Eric Appel.

How-To Setup DasBlog for Development Using Visual Studio 2005

1. Get the latest dasblog source. See information here

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DasblogMovedFromCVSToSVN.aspx

2. Setup your virtual directory for newtelligence.Dasblog.Web and set it to use ASP.NET 2.0

3. Open “Dasblog All.sln” in notepad and modify the url for the newtelligence.Dasblog.Web project to point to your virtual directory.

4. Download and install the Visual Studio 2005 Update to Support Web Application Projects.

5. Download and install the latest version of Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Projects. You can read about it here http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/05/08/445742.aspx and here http://webproject.scottgu.com/.

6. Open Visual Studio 2005 and go to File->Open Project/Solution

7. In the dialog, browse to your “Dasblog All” solution file and open it.

8. The Visual Studio Conversion Wizard will pop up.

9. After hitting next you will have the option to have the wizard create a backup of your project.

10. Finish the wizard. The wizard should complete successfully without any errors.

11. Go to your web.config file and add cookieless=”UseCookies” to the <forms> element. Read here for more information
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/NewFormsAuthenticationSignOutBehaviorInASPNET20.aspx

12. In the Solution Explorer in Visual Studio 2005 click the Show All Files icon. In the newtelligence.Dasblog.Web project right-click on the StringTables folder and select Include in Project. Do the same for the site.config file in the SiteConfig directory. You also may want to include other folders such as bin, content, and logs.

13. Modify the site.config and site.config.deploy to point to your virtual directory

14. Modify siteSecurity.config to setup your admin account.

15. Set directory permissions as you would for any other dasblog setup.

16. Rebuild Solution.

17. Enjoy

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

New DasBlog Theme Released by Robosapient.com

Sat, 20 May 2006 06:03:11 GMT

New Dasblog Theme "Nautica022 Liquid" is available for download here: nautica022

Here is a sample site using the theme with no mods:
www.auburnhighschool.us
(Pretty much what you see is what you get!)

My family blog site using the theme with mods:
www.tomwatts.com

Originial Web Site Design by: www.studio7designs.com
CSS Coding by: mejobloggs
The Original CSS Template is at: OpenWebDesign

Yes the DasBlog Conversion is by:Tom Watts, (Also documented at www.dasblog.us)

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

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

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

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

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:

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

Dasblog.us forum statistics

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 06:43:45 GMT

Dasblog.us forum statistics

Some interesting statistics from http://dasblog.us

(The dasblog support forum)

The Top 50 Visitors (by IP) report per the server web logs to-date!

User Visits

1	65.54.188.26	400	Msnbot
2	xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx	321	Tom Watts
3	65.54.188.27	302	Msnbot
4	61.135.145.207	269	User from Beijing > >
5	66.249.65.225	221	Googlebot
6	207.68.146.40	220	Msnbot
7	66.249.72.106	139	Googlebot
8	65.54.188.28	137	Msnbot
9	65.54.188.24	119	Msnbot
10	207.68.146.103	92	Msnbot
11	xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx	88	Tom Watts
12	66.196.90.15	66	Inktomisearch
13	66.196.91.11	60	Inktomisearch
14	207.68.146.53	58	Msnbot
15	66.154.102.58	51	gigablast (search)
16	65.54.164.31	50	user/s at Microsoft (Redmond)
17	66.196.91.170	50	inktomisearch
18	66.196.91.17	41	inktomisearch
19	66.196.91.125	39	inktomisearch
20	66.196.90.252	37	inktomisearch
21	66.196.91.169	34	?
22	66.196.91.122	33	?
23	66.196.91.13	31	?
24	65.55.246.37	29	?
25	66.196.90.14	28	?
26	64.241.242.18	27	?
27	24.18.196.163	24	?
28	67.11.180.35	24	?
29	59.160.129.133	24	?
30	82.159.33.166	23	?
31	69.25.39.22	23	?
32	64.124.85.79	23	?
33	64.4.8.93	22	?
34	72.36.254.178	20	?
35	207.58.165.175	20	?
36	66.249.64.44	19	?
37	70.189.72.116	19	?
38	72.36.254.186	18	?
39	66.249.71.1	18	?
40	66.246.252.86	18	?
41	66.246.218.83	17	?
42	64.92.172.74	17	?
43	69.25.170.22	17	?
44	66.249.64.15	17	?
45	83.236.206.74	16	?
46	72.60.40.173	16	?
47	63.70.164.200	16	?
48	66.249.64.49	16	?
49	69.41.174.31	16	?
50	209.123.8.173	16	?

Make of this what you will!

Tom

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

Ok, its Blogging reassessment time!

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 21:13:48 GMT

Why am I blogging here, what do I want to accomplish, what do I stand to gain!

Oh and why am I reassessing this issue now?

Well earlier today I caught myself thinking that I must blog more, with interesting blogs to get my visitor count up! You guessed it, I was looking at my web server stats and they are pitiful compared with some of the bloggers I read. Scott Hanselman, Omar Shahine, Clemens Vasters, Russ Nelson, Rory Blyth, the list goes on!

I guess that old competition thing jumped up a bit me for a while, but I soon woke up. I am not doing this for you reader; I am doing this for me.

I have always been interested in writing, for hobby or profit. My favorite genre is Science Fiction. Well what does that have to do with this blog, you say?

I believe we all have a need and desire for creation, be it art in its many forms, or literature in its many forms or building something, real or conceptual. I know that the many websites I have built over the years were mainly all about creation. Now do I have a real talent for art, literature, or construction (real or code)?

I would have to say that my skills in all these areas are modest at best. I work in the Information Technology area, I have gravitated towards technical operations management, (Hey a Vice President of a small company), because I seem to have some wining ways with people, and apparently I just don’t have the conceptual mathematical ability to be a great programmer.

Oh I have done my fair share of programming, but I have always ended up on the maintenance tasks. I am pretty good, about going in behind somebody else and making order out of chaos, but original coding seems beyond my skill.

So how does this equate to blogging on a site called Robosapient.com. Will just writing about ones self, is just self aggrandizing, and while satisfying for a while, it ends up that only your mother is reading what you have to say. Hi Mom.

So I looked around for good open source blogging software, that was Microsoft centric (MS Bigot here), and decided that I would blog, and support that blogging software. You need a useful purpose for creation, and I am a Technologist first and foremost. Well things did not really work out as I intended.

I have let this blog become a family web site, while I went off in my usual modes operandi and created http://dasblog.us and http://dasblog.info to support DasBlog.

DasBlog my chosen blogging engine and focus of my creative energy! I need to work on my creative writing skills, but I keep letting myself fall back into IT support roles. You would not believe the hours I have put into the dasBlog community. I am going to continue, but I must refocus to make sense out of this hobby, more writing less site building!

(Yea I guess you could call it a hobby!)

So the final assessment result: Hobby + Technology + Literature + Helping Others = dasBlog

Cheers
Tom

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

Usability Upgrade for DasBlog.us Forums

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 22:04:50 GMT

This afternoon at the urging of user owencutajar, Ugh!!'s Greymatter Honeypot
http://www.u-g-h.com, I have added Syndication Tools to the dasblog.us forums.

They are linked at the forum Forum Technical Issues.

The direct link is ** See Forum Syndication Tools Here **

The first thing I did with this system was to generate some Java script here at RoboSapient.com so I don't have to guess if anybody has posted to the forums. I now always have the last post listed on my side panel!

The system also supports RSS feeds and is very flexible. Maybe one day I will update dasblog.us for simple RSS links, but until then, this is very cool!

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

OK, so we are all busy in the dasblog world!

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 15:18:34 GMT

I noticed Omar Shaine is telling the world how busy he is, that’s cool; always busy is so much more fun than the dull life.

One of my favorite observations, is if you want something done, ask a busy person, they get it done. The procrastinators of the world don’t ever get anything done!

I guess I am something of a work-aholic I usually take my employees work home with me most weekends, if I am not working on the wife’s “Honey Do’s”, I am working on an employer work project. I work for DOD contractor, so I can’t really go into any detail on that!

Will recently I have changed my modes operandi, I am still the same old work-aholic, but I have decided to spend some of that free time on personal projects instead of giving my free time back to my employer.

Hence all my recent work on the dasBlog support environment. I really like this product but the more I really use it, (and I have become a power user in a very short time), the more I discover how it should not be used!

I created the dasblog.info documentation site. For the first 50% of the effort I had the site hosted on my personal web server, and it went fairly fast. Later I moved the site to our hosting provider BoundGrid.Net. Then things really slowed down. Not BoundGrids’ fault just the inevitable result of a hosting environment. Making the remaining 50% of current changes took several days.

dasBlog is a great blog engine but it’s really not the best document management system I ever used. Having said that I think it is way cool that dasBlog is being used to document itself! (Even if I do say so myself!)

So to sum up this little diatribe: Crap I am busy!

• Working on creating two new commercial web sites for my employer as a subcontractor. (This is to mostly keep my “hands on” in the tech stuff and to pay for my IT hobby expenses) Yeah I think its fun, most of the time. When you are the only developer on a web site, you get to touch it all bad or good!

• Working for a foreign government (part of my employers contract), actually doing some hands on coding for an “international database web application”, (almost over my head here), but they swear they are happy with beta 1, so who am I to complain. Again just trying to stay up with the technology. No I don’t really consider myself to be a programmer! I have been trying to stay at the DOD business analyst level, but it’s hard.

• Building a new studio recording “computer system” for my son “the musician” this weekend. I bought a really nice four channel I/O sound system (M-Audio delta 44) and a 200GB drive etc. etc. Learning about music recording PC’s as I go! A little slow here, since I am not a musician myself! I think he will be thrilled, he is not expecting the super duper system I am building!

• I am also working on updating a charity www site I support, Day-of-caring.org It's way out of date!

• Oh did I mention, I am far from finished updating dasblog.info documentation, it’s still pretty chaotic, and I would love to have a single “user manual” document for new users to peruse or download! FAQ’s could stand a lot of help also! And I continue to husband dasblog.us as much as I can, I really appriciate the users who contribute here!

• I have not figured out what I am doing for Christmas for the remainder of the family, and I only have this weekend to figure that out! Oh my!

So are we having fun yet (smile)

Tom

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

Site User Activity at DasBlog.us and DasBlog.info

Wed, 14 Dec 2005 02:53:21 GMT

While I know most people don't care about this, these site are new and these visitor stats are interesting to me so here they are!

http://Dasblog.us

http://Dasblog.info

These sites have been up the total days documented above and their off to a good start! On 12/13/2005 http://dasblog.net was redirected to http://dasblog.info, that changes everything!

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.

Hosting Provider BoundGrid.Net provides auto install of dasBlog

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 21:32:22 GMT

Yep you read that right Hosting Provider BoundGrid.Net will provide auto install of dasBlog.

I am proud to announce that we have negotiated with BoundGrid to provide to new and existing hosting accounts the option to have dasBlog installed automatically for them! BoundGrid is the hosting provider for the dasBlog.us forums and dasblog.info documentation site! They are very reliable and inexpensive!

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.

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.

Bloody Hell – 12 Hours of my life I will never get back - Godaddy.com Hosting

Sat, 29 Oct 2005 20:08:06 GMT

For reasons outside the scope of this blog entry I decided to a host a forum in support of the dasBlog software project. After tacit approval by the real powers that be in the dasBlog world, I went looking for appropriate forum software and hosting companies.

Again for reasons outside the scope of this blog entry, we decided to try a PHP forum. I was very impressed with phpbb and that is what I setup to support. I spent some hours doing the prep work, and even decided to create some custom graphics and mods for a theme for phpbb in support of dasBlog. (Those hours are not of the lost 12, unless we finally do drop phpbb)

Next, a brain storm hit me; I saw that Godaddy.com was offering both ASP.NET and PHP on the same Windows Server box. I then decided that it would be nice to have a sample dasBlog forum for a potential user to see, it could be linked from all the different dasBlog web locations, SourceForge.Net and the Wiki system etc. More bang for the buck on one hosting site. I opted for the professional hosting with lots of bandwidth etc.

So my Godaddy saga begins. I called tech/pre-sales support twice on Friday evening to confirm that they truly indeed had PHP and ASP.NET on one box and I could setup the site I envisioned at http://dasblog.us. They even had a reasonable price for a full years’ support, so I bought it. Around midnight after all my phpbb prep support efforts were finished I tried to install.

Well to shorten this Rant a bit, after talking to 7 techs and the effort lasting into Saturday afternoon. I found I had wasted 12 hours. The install crashed, the techs didn’t know why, and said they did not support phpbb. I finally determined that Godaddy runs PHP in safe mode with no database support of any kind, MySql or Sql2000.

Did I mention I spent several hours trying to get the install to work with Sql2000 after MySql crashed and support didn’t know why it would not work, or that the SQL2000 generation took hours? The final resolution was that if I was going to use phpbb, it would have to be on a Linux box, I have yet to find a host that will support the full dual environment on a windows box.

So right now, I have canceled my Godaddy hosting account, got a refund!

I might mention the Godaddy.com support guys and gals were extremely nice and professional, but they really don’t know what they support and what they don’t, and if your requirements are a bit technical, then their systems and polices are not up to the task.

Having said the above, I may use their Linux hosting, if we go that way! Now my weekend is shot, my wife has other plans for what’s left of it, and I probably won’t get back to this effort till next weekend!

(UPDATE TO THIS RANT)

I tried to go with Godaddy once again, via the linux route, got the entire forum running and Godaddy killed the database, after working with them for 7 days, I gave up on them forever and moved everything to BoundGrid.Net. I hope to never have a reason to rant about hosting again!

This weblog is sponsored by Tomwatts.com.