Pete left a valuable comment that the hyperlinks were much too subtle in my blog posts. So I changed the link color to orange and its everywhere. It definitely stands out, though I doubt I'll get a design award for it - just clashes a bit. Feel free to suggest a different color if you want!

Just had to share this funny comment that came through my other blog. Not as a comment on a post but from the contact form.

"hi dear kese hoooooo i learn C# but i can't understand what should i do please tell me "

Yes, you are reading this on a dasBlog site and I love dasBlog, but I spent the Christmas holiday playing with the public beta of Graffiti and I really do think they have nailed it for a lightweight CMS/blogging system.

Out of the box, it is really simple to use, but don't let it's simplicity fool you. It is so customizable on two levels. For any end user, the widgets are fabulous and take no braincells to use. For those adept in CSS and HTML, the themes can be customized very deeply. The macros expose gobs of functionality and the views are really easy to leverage. I was able to give the site my own look by starting with one of the available themes, then replacing most of the image files that are used in the theme.

I believe that in using Graffiti, I'm getting a really good taste of either MVP or MVC here.

Also, the fact that you can just plop in an Access database (default) or other database without having to set up SQL Server if you don't want to is a big advantage. This closes the gap between one of the important features of dasBlog - all of the content is stored in files so there's no need to deal with SQL Server - and something like Community Server which requires a database. However, my blog is now made of up over 1300 separate xml files. This definitely makes me nervous. In fact, I looked at CS first, but was stopped by the fact that you have to host the database independently. I didn't see a way to just add the tables and other elements into my existing hosted database.

I've been building something that is not even going to be used as a blog, but a mini-site where I can aggregate some particular blog posts and other content.

One tip regarding the Access database I can share is this. If you want to test Graffiti out locally and you are using Vista, there are a show-stopper issues with permissions to MDB files in IIS7. I spent hours trying to get around it and finally gave up. I was able to open and run it in VS2008 using the web development server instead. When I FTPd everything to my webhost (which means IIS6) there were no problems at all using the Access file. I ended up doing 98% of my customization on the hosted site anyway.

The DevLife blog posts for May 2005 - March 2007 are now being hosted on my personal site at www.thedatafarm.com/devlifeblog.

Thanks to everyone at Ziff Davis and Ziff Davis Enterprise for rescuing the old posts and allowing me to continue hosting them.

Ann DeMarle is the director of the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College in Vermont. She has started blogging at http://emergentmediacenter.blogspot.com  and I look forward to her great insights!

I was honored to be invited by Ann to participate in a Degree Advisory Council for this program.

I spent a part of Thanksgiving day updating my blog to 2.0 (written in ASP.NET 2.0). One of the reasons was that my host (ORCS Web) has been having big problems with my blog app (not like I have the kind of traffic that Scott Hanselman gets on his dasblog blog), but still there's enough and it was eating up server resources.

Rather than upgrading the existing site, I just created a whole new app in a temporary folder and then moved over all of the important pieces - content, images, configuration settings, etc. Once it was ready I had Pam at ORCS Web just change the folder names (not so easy on a running IIS website) and voila, blog now points to the new 2.0 blog.

Already I can tell a HUGE improvement in the speed of things (such as particular administrative tasks). Hopefully the server issues will now go away and they can move my website off of the server that problem sites are relegated to.

Just in time for ASP.NET 3.5!

verb: to manually aggregate selected blog posts

I actually used this in a sentence the other day. Egad!

My DevLife blog that has been on the DevSource blog since June 2005, has been consolidated wtih the other Ziff-Davis blogs onto Movable Type. The old blog was on an OLD version of .Text and the comnent spam had gotten way out of control. I asked if they could just update to Community Server, but it made a lot more sense to move me onto the same blogging engine as all of the other ZD bloggers. MT is so different to use and I will miss all of the great formatting features that I'm used to having easy access to in .Text and in dasBlog which I use for THIS blog. Oh well.

But the spam situation was unbearable and it was impossible to keep up wtih attempting to delete 100 new spam comments a day. We had to turn off the comments which also meant hiding all of the valid comments, too, which was a bummer.

Anyway, here's the new blog:

http://blogs.devsource.com/devlife

Is it obvious that I've found some other things to do with my time, like work or even play? Well, "play" is still a dream... but at least garden a little...

DasBlog is an open source project, so I need to be patient while waiting for a response to my query on the forums. In the meantime, perhaps someone else has experienced this and knows the cause and resolution.

Since Sunday, my blog has been throwing a wierd error that is causing the events log to bloat to 12 or more megs. My datafarm.com sites are in trouble. My webhost had to restart IIS on the web server.

Below is an example of the error. The errors cite different macros, but the rest is always the same. I have gone back to the default Blog Template, but the problem is still there. I recopied the DLL's, but the problem continues.

So, a plea for help if anyone out there has experienced this. It happened suddenly with no changes to the site. I've seen two other unanswered questions about this error in the dasblog forums.

Here is what the error looks like:

l2 time 2006-08-14T15:28:11 code 1 message <span>Error:<br/>Error executing macro: bodytext. Make sure it you're calling it in your BlogTemplate with paratheses like 'myMacro()'. Macros with parameter lists and overloads must be called in this way. Exception: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.Threading.ThreadAbortException: Thread was being aborted.
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.ProcessTemplate(SharedBasePage page, Entry entry, String templateString, Control contentPlaceHolder, Macros macros) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 118
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.ProcessTemplate(SharedBasePage page, String templateString, Control contentPlaceHolder, Macros macros) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 61
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.SharedBasePage.ProcessDayTemplate(DateTime day, Control ContentPlaceHolder) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\SharedBasePage.cs:line 744
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.Macros.get_Bodytext() in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\Macros.cs:line 1233
--- End of inner exception stack trace ---
at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.InternalInvoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture, Boolean isBinderDefault, Assembly caller, Boolean verifyAccess)
at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.InternalInvoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture, Boolean verifyAccess)
at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture)
at System.Reflection.RuntimePropertyInfo.GetValue(Object obj, Object[] index)
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.InvokeMacro(Object obj, String expression) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 332
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.ProcessTemplate(SharedBasePage page, Entry entry, String templateString, Control contentPlaceHolder, Macros macros) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 105<br/> while processing .</span>

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I've been getting a new type of comment spam on my other blog. The spam is a statement that is very coherent and totally relevant to the post, but then at the end has a link to a page that is filled with a huge list of links to other pages on the site - all for the sake of trackbacks. My guess is that they are copying text from other blogposts, then googling for related blog posts then pasting the other blog's text along with their own link into the comments.

When you live by rss feeds, you miss stuff like this beautiful redesign of Michele's blog!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Like many, I have been overwhelmed by the full msdn blog list and realized that I don't need to have so many blogs on topics I can't focus on at all in my feed. So I finally did it. I removed the feed and have subscribed explicitly to a bunch of individual blogs.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

This story on Mena Trott is linked on the home page of cnn.com.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Wonder why I didn't know you had a baby? Wrote a book? Released your product? Changed jobs? So many blogs, so little time....  How do you keep up with your own blog list? [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

One of the nice things about having a smart client blogging app that let's me store posts is that I can write to my hearts content about how I feel about what is going on in the Gulf Coast and rant  to my hearts content about the government's slow and deadly response. I can get it out of my system and then save it and never even post it if I don't want to.

www.acehaid.org

Out of curiousity, I have added Google Adsense to my site. I hope nobody is offended. For some reason, it seems only to come up with ads related to blogging. If I point to a post with Christian Weyer's name, then I get Christian Blogging. Sheesh. I have selected the "pay per click" model and have earned $1.04 already. LOL. I guess there aren't too many Christian bloggers visiting my website. I don't foresee doing this for much longer. I'll report my findings.

www.acehaid.org

Well, the big problem with a conference filled with bloggers is that EVERYONE is blogging about it and I have NO clue where to start finding out how the day went and what came out of it without pouring through hundreds of blogs. Can you say information overload?

When I find a good thread to begin on, I will post it here, in the mean time: you can start here

www.acehaid.org

I first heard about blogging listening to Chris Lydon a bunch of years ago. In fact, here is a link to the very show, from May of 2000! I was definitely fascinated by that show and actually signed up for a blog on blogger.com that day (which I only ever put two posts in as I recall). It was a few years later that Scott Watermasysk asked me if I wanted to blog about INETA on his newish blog site (now weblogs.asp.net) to which I replied "ummm, nah, but thanks for asking". A few months after that it was I who emailed Scott asking if it was too late to take him up on his offer but that I'd like to blog about other things in addition to INETA. No problem, says he...

So, anyway, Chris Lydon....yes. I heard a promo on VPR today (which I only really listen to in the car - that is when Rich isn't in the car - which is not frequent these days. I can't listen to people talking when I'm trying to work, so I don't hear it at home) for a newish show that Chris Lydon is doing called Open Source and the promo said "blogs, podcasts, etc"! That definitely caught my ear.

Of course, I realize that I've just missed the show as it is 8:15! But it looks interesting:

Open Source is a lively, hour-long on-air conversation designed to capture "the sound of the Web," with the popular Christopher Lydon engaging callers, e-mailers and bloggers from around the world in a range of fascinating topics. It is the first radio program to embrace bloggers, Web enthusiasts and the Internet transformation of media.

www.acehaid.org

Thanks to Scott Hanselman for hunting down and fixing what he referred to as a "latent and **HORRIBLE** bug" that surfaced in the latest version of dasBlog. It was mucking up the RSS feeds when you were filtering on a category. For example, my VTdotNETFeed">VTdotNETFeed RSS was randomly selecting a handful of posts from the past, with nothing newer than April showing.

So that code ahs been fixed. It will be in the versoin 1.8 which has not yet been released. If you want the fix now, you can go to the SourceForge dasBlog workspace, into the CVS Repository (bottom of the page), and then drill into the source folder, then newtelligence.dasBlog.Web.Services folder. The fix is to the SyndicationServiceBase.cs file.

To fix this now, it requires downloading the entire current dasBlog source, updating the contents of that one file, and rebuilding and redeploying the newtelligence.dasBlog.Web.Services project.

Thanks again, Scott!

www.acehaid.org

If this was near me (NYC or Boston) I would definitely make the effort to attend the one day BlogHer Conference. Even though I am not very political, I am very interested in the voices of women in the blogging world - especially technical women. How we represent ourselves? Do we just be a techie or can we women techies? Do we blend in or show our ti**ies (tee hee). (shut up, Sahil - I'm just making a point). And how does what we do today affect young women coming into the world of tech (and blogging). But it's in California - all the way across the country. No can do. Bummer.

www.acehaid.org

my website is broken and I am testing again

of course, my last 3 posts were there for a while and then disappeared into thin air, so we will see what happens!

www.acehaid.org

I finally figured out why the category RSS Feed that I feed to the VTdotNET site doesn't have anything recent on it. If you look at the VTdotNETFeed">VTdotNETFeed category on my blog, you can see all of those posts. But if you look at the VTdotNETFeed">RSS output, there is a huge hole of missing posts. I'm not sure if it's something wrong with dasBlog or with my files. Anyone else having this problem with the 1.7 version?

www.acehaid.org

Speaking of Markus, I just subscribed to his travel blog and it's great reading! Markus and I end up in the same place quite often. In the past year alone: Montreal for DevTeach, Redmond for Tablet DevLab, San Franciso for Windows Anywhere, Orlando for TechEd, DevConnections in Las Vegas and SysCon in Boston.  So it's fun to read in his blog about some of his travels since I can connect! He's a great writer - its a fun read.

www.acehaid.org

Scott & Omar want to include more themes in the next dasBlog update. More here....

www.acehaid.org

Scott Hanselman & Omar Shahine continue to work diligently on dasBlog. Scott reports that there is an update on the horizon.

www.acehaid.org

I was just cruising around Leon's blog to get a link to one of my favorite posts ("You are not Inadequate") and started realizing something. I started reading his blog because it was (and still is) hilarious. But there are also so many really deep, thoughtful, interesting posts on there. For example, one where he analyzed the famous Spolsky API Wars article. I also noticed he had grouped his archives in a way that reflects what he was writing about. It would be interesting to look at our own blogs that way. I definitely go thorugh periods for example, where I was working on ADO.NET 2.0 heavily, making so many interesting discoveries. I was writing gobs of technical posts. Right now, the focus of my work is a little different and my blog is a little less technical and probably a little boring (sorry). I consider about Scott Hanselman's blog and how heavily it is read and why.

In a time of blog overload, it's that much more important to think about what you are writing about - but on the other hand, by doing that, I worry that I am losing the sponteneity that I think has made my blog stand out in the past. With hundreds of posts pouring into my feed every day, I am very selective about which I actually read. Generally I check out the post titles and anything that interests me I'll look at, maybe read, maybe not. Then I go by who wrote the posts (a big chore in the msdn feed or weblogs.asp.net feed) and pick out ones by people who I definitely want to "check in with". But I'm not reading as much. And I know for sure that not as many people are reading my own blog - for the same reason. Just too much to read overall and a post has got to be really worth anyone's time to be read.

Then it gets back to the most important thing. Why are we blogging? To be read? To get lots of comments or referrals? To get famous? No. I don't think any one of these should be the driving force (though I know a few people who do blog for that reason...and now you are all twitching in your boots wondering if I am referring to YOU heh heh). I think just saying what's on your mind and what you feel like when it strikes you (with some reservations obviously - like not ranting every time GWB opens his mouth because he makes me crazy - yes, I've learned NOT to do that Andrew, James and Avonelle! ) is what the whole point of blogging is. So if I am so excited about a new discovery in .NET that I just had to tell SOMEONE (and my dog just isn't interested), I'll blog it. If I'm looking out the window at the tree that makes my heart skip a beat every time I look at it,  and I just want to share it with the world, I'll blog it.

Anyway, I should be outside getting my kayak on the car roof rather than rambling away. But Leon's blog is really great and I decided that thought was worthy of mention.

www.acehaid.org

This is a side benefit of having blogger friends from around the world. Once in a blue moon, Malek Kemmou, writes his blog posts in his own language and I get this beautiful artwork in my feedreader:

I have no idea what it says, but that's okay. Another thing I love about his blog (besides all the usual stuff) is that he has an entire category called: "don't read if you're not Stephen Forte". If you know Stephen, you can only imagine the content of those posts!

www.acehaid.org

okay - there just went the folder with all of my blog images

I am downloading fast and furiously

To whatever a**hole is doing this: Thanks so very much. It would be nice to be able to get some billable work done today. Help my clients. You know, the little things in life.

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

Can someone email me my posts from today - maybe they are still in your aggregator??

There are a bunch missing, but now I think everything is all cleared up on my server and with my blog update.

Thanks!!

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

Too much comment spam - server problems, etc etc. I am going to do a clean install of the latest dasblog and maybe captcha as well. Ahh, Sundays. I have always gotten gobs of referral spam, but since I don't show referrers, I didn't worry. But now the comments spam is coming on fast and furiously.

My DevLife blog on the DevSource website is now live. It is awaiting it's skin, and I've asked for Captcha ... which one should we use??

But I have started posting things to there as well. Here's how it's gonna work. When I post something there, I will post a bit of it on this blog. Click on the text of the post and it will bring you to the full post on the DevLife blog.

You can also subscribe directly to the DevLife blog. It's a .Text blog. I've already got a few posts there now and have some more organizing to do. And no, the makeup picture isn't there yet!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Sometimes when I read blogs (and I'm talking about those from the .NET community) I think that the male bloggers (you know, that 99% of the .NET bloggers) are definitely writing for guys, when in the context of a technical post, they make some joke about their sexual prowress or the hottie quality of a particular woman. I don't really think a post like that was written for me. I dunno - maybe it's just me, but I don't think I'm ultra sensitive. Even if I am highly unlikely to ever be the subject of "who's the hottest..."

But it is a bit of a turnoff for me to be lured into a post like that and then suddenly be in the middle of some male bonding ritual. Not a big problem, mind you, because I *am* in the company of men, and I know they are really just being silly more than anything...

http://www.AcehAid.org

I hate seeing this happen! [With her permission,] I am copying and pasting Heather's post here because she might remove this explanation as well. She already chose to remove the original post. I can understand, I had to do this once, too, although I didn't get hate mail, just a lot of people who wanted me to debate when I just didn't feel like it.

04 Apr 05 - 11:51

i've gotten so much hate mail from writing about a certain film with an assisted suicide, a crappy script and poor props management that i simply took it down.

never again will i express opinions that have even the remotest possibility of offending anyone with a taste for bad films. it's simply not worth it!

i tried writing back directly to those who've left comments but they didn't have the decency to spew their venom from real email addys.

this post will only remain up temporarily, just so you can get this message- in particular the very most recent and evil one which threatened me with God, etc in it. who's site is this anyway?

http://www.AcehAid.org

I noticed a bunch of test posts coming through my aggregator from MS bloggers. Then I went over to weblogs.asp.net and saw they were gone, although they still exist at blogs.msdn.com. I also remember noticing blogs.technet.com earlier this week. So Josh Ledgard and Robert Scoble explain the changes. Basically they have moved to Ccommunity Server and finally disconnected from the big community blog, creating a dev blog and a tech blog. Lastly there's a portal page where you can search those blogs rather than googling to find a blog when you can't remember someone's blog name. I'd like to see an alphabetical list (actually two, one by last name, one by first name) of all of the MS blogger there. All in all - good move!

http://www.AcehAid.org

See what blogger's are nearby...

blogs I love, bloggers I admire, but every time I see that "sponsored" note it just annoys me and so I am probably going to be unsusbscribing from those blogs. :-(

 

http://www.AcehAid.org

well, it seems that Jeremy Wright's EBay auction to blog for $ was so successful he has hired a full time employee and starting up InsideBlogging.com. Very interesting. Here's a little more on his take on this.

thanks to Robert Kloosterhuis for the link

Posted from BLInk!

Thanks to James for pointing at this hilarious BoingBoing article on MSN Spaces and an odd mix of vocabulary checks.

Posted from BLInk!

Funny you should mention it, Dare. I signed up for a space and started playing with it to see if I could jam msn spaces into BLInk! Best I could see is emailing them using the mobile settings. So I can do that from BLInk! but not sure if it's worth the effort since you can just use Outlook!

Posted from BLInk!

Tempting? Hell yes! Shelley's going through some soul searching. But of course, even if I wanted to be a Marqui call-girl, who knows if they would have me.

Posted from BLInk!

www.sevendaysvt.com (they only leave stories there for one week) just featured local political blogger, Jerome Armstrong (www.myDD.com) of Howard Dean blogging fame, on in the popular, independent, Village Voice for Vermont-esque weekly paper.

Paul Wilson mentioned that his blog was featured in the local paper where he lives.

(update: check out Dare's post on NewzCrawler (and others) as Denial of Service clients)

There must be a few people who have their aggregators set to check rss feeds every 10 seconds or something. I very rarely look at my stats because they don't really tell me much. But I have to say I was a little surprised to see that there were over 14,000 hits to my website today (from 12am to almost 5pm).

So where do they come from?

10,000+ are from NewzCrawler then a whole lot of other aggregators and then a small # of browsers.

Very strange. I get a few links and fewer comments, so I really don't think there's a lot of people reading this and of course I know that the high aggregator number is from frequent refreshes.

One thing that I love to see coming in through referrers is that people are starting on the Vermont.NET website that has a feed from my Jobs category here and there are a lot of click throughs, which means that my posting local IT jobs that I find in the local papers over coffee (or that my hubby is kind enough to point out) is a good resource for some people.

I have two posts that make me very happy. One is a post on a Crystal Reports problem that I had a hard time figuring out and did not find help online for. I frequently see referrers coming in to that post where people are googling the same error message that I had received. Hopefully my post has answered their problem.

Another one was a debugging problem that made me nuts until I found a nugget in one of John Robbins books. I have gotten two comments on that post from people saying “THANK YOU!” as they were going through the same horrible pain.

This makes it all worth while!

I used to enjoy your blog, but not anymore. You don't provide any useful or knowledgable content anymore, and who wants to keep up with your 15 posts per day? If you quit posting useless information so much, maybe you'd have time to to accomplish something and actually scale it down to one useful blog per day.

You need a dog. Or maybe a cat.

Sorry for my ranting. I just hate it when good blogs go bad.

But I HAVE a dog & cat!

I can never figure out why people feel a need to say “sorry I haven't blogged in a while...”

I love this new feature on Shelley Powers' blog.

Brian Dear was approached by an editor/publisher/whetever of the San Diego Reader about publishing a straight months' worth of his blogs as an article. It is coming out soon. Here's how it happened...

Those of you who do not stray far from the weblogs.asp.net feeds may not know about the larger blogging world around us. One of the big (and innovative) players is Six Apart, creators and owners of the MovableType weblog software and the TypePad weblog service. There was a recent shakeup when SixApart decided that it was time to charge something for MovableType and the controversy seems to be around how much they are charging  - not that the software is no longer free. I have not followed it closely (not much of an as the world turns kind of person...what can I say) but I know that they are responding to the outcry...check this recent post on their site:

If free isn't an issue for you and you're willing to pay for a version of Movable Type (say the $69 version) and the blog/author limits won't work for your current use, write a non-emotional post explaining how you're using Movable Type and TrackBack this entry.

Key words here “a non-emotional post“... so far there are 159 trackbacks to that one. (This will make 160.)

Shelley Powers wrote an interesting post about this and compared the tough decision on SixApart's part to the “bite the bullet” moments of Oracle's major change to version 6 and Microsoft's huge change with .NET. Shelley's got some deep roots in the software world and this is definitely an interesting read. Go check it out.

I loaded my current opml from SharpReader up to Dave Winer's “Share your OPML” site and it is linked under BlogRoll here on my site. You do have to log in to that site to people's OPMLs. 

I've also been fiddling a bit with my site configuration and made just a few slight changes. No biggie.

Don't be a dope like me and miss the “Templates and Macros” section on the dasBlog site for how to configure your site. Thanks to Erv Walter for pointing that out for me!

Thanks to a teaser from Scott Hanselman, and a helpful line of code he sent, I was able to add the archive feature to my dasBlog site.

The line of code Scott sent was

<%newtelligence.drawArchiveMonths()%>

which was all I got from him, so it was a good puzzle!

Here's the rest.

dasBlog has a subfolder called THEMES which contains folders for each of the various skins.

In each of those folders there is a file called homeTemplate.blogtemplate

You can find in the patterns within this file, the area that builds the panel (on my site it is on the right....search, navigation, etc.) So I just copied and pasted one of those sections and replaced the title with “Archives” and the innerhtmll with the above macro.

   <div class="sidetitle">Archives</div>
   <div class="side"><%newtelligence.drawArchiveMonths()%> </div>

I placed in between two other sections (Navigation and BlogRoll).

Once I uploaded the modified file, I had to go to config and reselect my theme so that this template file would get pulled into the main site.