.TEXT

Changes in the offing...

Blog Author — Wed, 04 May 2005 23:16:00 GMT

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!)

CodeBetter - the new .NET blogging place

Blog Author — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 19:46:00 GMT

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 old clunker too (though I'll probably wait until 1.0 - need the source dude!)
Ooh, wonder if they'd let me cross-post some of my more code oriented posts?
UPDATE: Apparently not...I can take a hint...sniffle...

The battle continues...

Blog Author — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 06:59:00 GMT

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 appear, just hit refresh until it does, I'll fix this later tonight.

So should I just work on .TEXT 0.95?

Blog Author — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 03:52:00 GMT

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 coupled plug-ins are fairly straightforward to do...but there's been a lot said about how radical the changes to the blogging engine will be in the next version...hmm...

Dumb little update to the Amazon book control...now it knows where you live!

Blog Author — Sun, 06 Jun 2004 20:27:00 GMT

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 now detects a few (umm, 6 at the moment) countries and directs you to the correct (hopefully!) site for your country - try it out, let me know if it works for you (slight issue of my being in the UK only :-)). I'm trying to hack together an independet control using this, I'll put this up for download from this article as soon as I can (currently lives in a single 'ExtraControls' namespace with my View tracking module,a web service and a whole lot of other gubbins...)

FreeTextBox 2.0 for .TEXT 0.95

Blog Author — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 07:24:00 GMT

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 in case though!).

Little hit tracking module for .TEXT 0.95 blogs...

Blog Author — Mon, 24 May 2004 05:16:00 GMT

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 void Dispose()

{

// TODO: Add ViewTrackModule.Dispose implementation

}

#endregion

///

/// Ok, bit unusual...but I need the BlogConfig object to be available for the DB access...

///

private void context_EndRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

HttpApplication httpApp = sender as HttpApplication;

System.Uri ur = httpApp.Request.UrlReferrer;

string testHost = string.Empty;

string thisHost = httpApp.Request.ServerVariables["SERVER_NAME"];

if(ur != null)

{

testHost = ur.Host;

}

if(testHost != thisHost)

{

HttpRequest re = httpApp.Request;

LogToDBDel del = new LogToDBDel(LogToDB);

IAsyncResult ar = del.BeginInvoke(re,null,null);

}

private delegate void LogToDBDel(HttpRequest re);

private void LogToDB(HttpRequest re)

{

string m_connectionString = Dottext.Framework.Configuration.BlogConfigurationSettings.Instance().BlogProviders.DbProvider.ConnectionString;

string clientIP = re.UserHostAddress;

if(!clientIP.StartsWith("192.") && !clientIP.StartsWith("10."))

{

string clientUserAgent = re.UserAgent;

string clientReferer = re.ServerVariables["HTTP_REFERER"];

string clientHostName = string.Empty;

try

{

clientHostName = Dns.GetHostByAddress(clientIP).HostName;

}

catch(Exception)

{

clientHostName = re.UserHostName;

}

string clientQueryString = re.RawUrl;

SqlParameter[] sqlParams = SqlHelperParameterCache.GetSpParameterSet(m_connectionString, "pr_Blog_SaveEntryStats");

sqlParams[0].Value = clientIP;

sqlParams[1].Value = clientUserAgent;

sqlParams[2].Value = clientHostName;

sqlParams[3].Value = clientQueryString;

sqlParams[4].Value = DateTime.Now;

sqlParams[5].Value = clientReferer;

try

{

SqlHelper.ExecuteNonQuery(m_connectionString, CommandType.StoredProcedure, "pr_Blog_SaveEntryStats", sqlParams) ;

}

catch(Exception)

{

}

As usual, this needs an entry in the web.config to hook in the module:

Hmm..this is wierd...

Blog Author — Fri, 16 Apr 2004 02:15:00 GMT

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.

Stuff on compressing .TEXT RSS feeds from Jeff Julian

Blog Author — Sun, 11 Jan 2004 21:25:00 GMT

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 I the only one who's rerally annoyed that you have to contact MS to obtain this - what's wrong with just providing a download link (oh, I'm not - and i even mentioned this before)?

Problems with most blogs...

Blog Author — Sun, 23 Nov 2003 00:59:00 GMT

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 being the original post), what I though I would develop (well once I get my dev machine working properly again...stuipid computers!) is a simple control which can sit in a side-bar displaying the most active discussions. Also some form of notification system, where a user posting comments can optionally choose to have all future replies to the discussion (or simple notification that a reply has been made with a link to the discussion). Problem comes with RSS - would there be any point in providing an 'active discussions' feed, would this even function with RSS readers?

UPDATE: Been having a play with this (the comments tracking stuff) - .TEXT does not make this overly simple (well, not really .TEXT, blogs in general) - the problem boils down to the fact that you're requesting a notificaiton without membership.
Now, there are a couple of ways to do this; since a 'remember me' checkbox exists this could be used as the basis for a rudimentary membership system with the cookie being used as the only authentication mechanism; also, with each notification sent, a URL could be included which would allow the user to 'unsubscribe' from the notification.
I prefer the second option since cookies are just too flaky to be used as an opt-out mechanism (getting deleted, privacy settings etc...). Oddly this is where things like .NET Passport and .NET Alerts come into their own -- and represent a pretty perfect vector for the delivery of such unimportant, transient notifications...so, anyone want to give me a free license for passport and alerts (rough value $20000 :-)), I wish Passport and Alerts were MUCH cheaper, the only sites I've used these systems on are Microsoft's own brand sites and for charities - really a shame, it could be a brilliant system if more developers got interested.
Anyway, I'll look at doing the URL system in the next day or two (just got my dev machine running again so I'm busy installing software right now)