.TEXT
Well, I’ve finally decided that I need to move this blog to a more reliable provider, with that in mind I’ve bought hosting on OrcsWeb (most of my readers are in the states anyway…), plan is that I’ll spend a part of this weekend migrating the site content over to CommunityServer ; between studying for my driving theory test next week.So there *might* be some downtime this weekend while the domains shuffle around – but the result should be a far faster response and more bells and whistles on the eventual site (the Community server ‘pimpin’ scene has really taken off!)
So, a few (actually, rapidly becoming more than a few) bloggers have defected from DotNetJunkies blogs to a new blog destination called CodeBetter (as opposed to mine which could be subtitled 'CodeWorse' :-) ). Lots of good blogs over there including Brendan Tompkins, Geoff Appleby and Darrell Norton three of my favourite bloggers...so good destination (I know Geoff won't let that place become too serious). One of the most interesting bits for me is that the site uses the new Beta of CommunityServer:Blogs , the successor to .TEXT - looks like the time is rapidly approaching to update this...
Well, finally got around to implementing a CAPTCHA control in my comments (using the excellent HIPValidator by Stephen Toub). It's still experimental - so it might not work totally smoothly - but let's see if it works against comment spam! Anyway, any problems please email me at blogcomments@mostllyucid.co.uk . Oh, should say I won't be able to provide the source for this (most of it is in the article I mentioned above) because my .TEXT source is heavily modified... UPDATE: Looks like there's an issue around a font installed on my server - this causes the little image to not...
I have a ton of modifications I want to do to the source of my blog to make it more closely suit my needs (comment spam removal, POP3 entry submission along with some search & perf enhancements, improving layout for Firefox etc...)) - but I've been holding off, waiting for Community Server :: Blogs before spending any amount of time on this stuff - but there seems to be no sign of this being released and no recent updates on when this will change.It does look really cool though!Hmm...still in two minds, dues to the way .TEXT is currently structured, loosely...
I've been using Scott W.s little Amazon book control on this site for a while now - and it's pretty damn good, haven't made any cash from it as yet...but...well, it always bugged me that it was .com only as written - so if you were in the UK, by default it directed you to Amazon.com. The version of this control on my site of course directs you to Amazon.co.uk - not much use if you're not in the UK. What I have now done is incorporate the "Extreme Optimized IP to Country Lookup" stuff on Codeproject into this control so the little control...
Was perusing the ASP.NET Forums earlier when I stumbled across this post by Revjon (of FreeTextBox fame), his question was on whether plans exist for integrating FTB 2.0 into .TEXT. Well, I went ahead and did this for 0.95 - not perfect (there's a Javascript popup which I'll have to figure out how to get rid of) but gets the job done (and is cross-browser compatible). If you want to have a play, the files you need are in this archive - should (fingers crossed, I haven't tested this much!) just be a copy into your .TEXT directory (back up your original just...
OK, terribly documented, but it works...this is just the source for a little HttpModule which tracks hits to a .TEXT blog - pretty simple but should give anyone who wants to do it a start. I'll post a more complete version at some point (mainly just want to test how this skin behaves with posted code ;-))
using System;
using System.Web;
using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using Dottext.Framework;
using System.Collections.Specialized;
using System.IO;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml.Serialization;
using System.Threading;
using System.Net;
using Microsoft.ApplicationBlocks.Data;
namespace ExtraControls
{
///
/// Summary description for ViewTrackModule.
///
public class ViewTrackModule : IHttpModule
{
#region IHttpModule Members
public void Init(HttpApplication context)
{
context.EndRequest += new EventHandler(context_EndRequest);
}
public...
A sudden problem has occurred on my blog and I'm not sure why...RSS feeds work fine, but the actual homepage does not, tried reindexing my SQL server, deleting a bunch of posts etc...still no joy! Very annoying!
UPDATE: So changing the skin seems to have cured the problem - I'll leave this boring one on for the moment, I'll upgrade to 0.95 (maybe 0.96 if I'm feeling brave) at the weekend.
Pretty useful if you don't have the ability to use IIS compression (or choose not to) - Jeff Julian has released a 'plugin' for .TEXT which enables you to compress the RSS feeds produced by .TEXT 0.95 - which is very useful, most of my traffic for instance comes from the RSS feeds (I get around 200 HTML compared with 1800 RSS views per day). This uses the HttpCompression module by Ben Lowery, which is in itself a brilliant way to enable compression. Ben also links to a MS hotfix rollup package which fixes an issue with HttpModules and Server.Transfer - am...
A comment from Rob Howard (I'll dig out a link later) go me thinking about problems with most blogs. Now, in my every day job I develop community applications, forums and all sorts of similar 'social software systems' one of the big keys to helping discussions to take place it giving a simple path to reach the discussion. Blogging systems are very different, giving exclusive prominence to the posts, with 'comments discussions' becoming secondary - which frankly is a bit of a shame! So here's the idea, the comments in blogs are essentially single threaded forums (with the initialising message...
Full .TEXT Archive