I've made another change to my dasBlog theme. I was feeling paranoid about getting spam through my contact link, and dasBlog doesn't seem to appreciate mangled e-mail addresses, so I just removed the contact link from my theme.

I was also feeling paranoid about other people getting spam because of their comments. I know I didn't force them to enter their e-mail address when they left a comment, but the comment area does prompt them for one, so I decided to get rid of the prompt. Unfortunately, dasBlog doesn't make it easy to get rid of the e-mail prompt; I managed it with my theme, but it's a hack, probably dependent on how ASP.NET automatically generates element IDs. Well, it works for now. I also purged the comments database of any already-entered e-mail addresses, so my conscience is clear.

Commentators still have the option of leaving their home page. If they really want to leave their e-mail address, they can put it after their name, e.g., "Nobody (nobody@nowhere.com)".

CustomDasBlogTheme.zip (3 KB)

As few readers as I have, even fewer of you (if any!) may be interested to know that I've started a personal blog, Ed at Home. It's primarily for keeping friends and family up-to-date on my home life, so if you're friend or family, feel free to check it out.

Happy New Year! I won't bother making “more blogging” a resolution, though I do hope that this space will be occasionally useful to you.

Anyway, I've finally upgraded to dasBlog 1.5, which only seems to be available at the Releases section of the GotDotNet workspace. I finally managed to do the upgrade without a hitch, so I must be getting better at this! The coolest part of this new release has got to be the Search panel...

Also, I've made a few minor modifications to my theme, so here it is:

I don't have many readers (I wouldn't be surprised if I know all of my readers personally), but I do get the occasional Google hit from people looking for dasBlog themes. If you'd like to use or modify my theme, feel free.

CustomDasBlogTheme.zip (3 KB)

Update: I just discovered a few hard-coded URLs in the template; sorry about that. It's fixed now.

I've added a few blogs to my blogroll, but I'd like to highlight Eric Lippert's blog, which has become my favorite. He's got lots of interesting stuff to say, about scripting in particular, so check it out!

I've just upgraded to dasBlog 1.3. Not much changed, but I like to stay current. The most visible changes:

• The titles of blog entry pages (often shown in the browser caption) now show the title of the blog entry. (I had to change %siteName% to %title% in my custom theme to get it to work.)
• The add entry page (displayed when I add a blog entry) allows me to choose the blog entry category with check boxes (instead of forcing me to type it in).

It's not every day that you run across a new blog where most of the entries seem interesting, so I thought I'd make sure you know about it: http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/

I typed up that last entry, clicked Post to Weblog... and got an error message. My heart skipped a beat because I realized that I've been breaking my own rule -- never type interesting content into a browser window, because you're liable to lose it. Of course it wasn't still there when I hit the Back button. Fortunately the post actually made it through, so I didn't have to try to reproduce what I wrote -- which I really, really don't like to do.

Of course, typing a blog entry should be fairly spontaneous, so my standard procedure of first typing the entry into TextPad would be a bit much. Perhaps I'll try to remember to Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C before posting in the future. Just in case.

Free advice if you have a blog -- don't bother with descriptions. Descriptions only show up in aggregators like SharpReader, and most people would rather see the full article in the aggregator anyway, which happens automatically if you don't include a description.

For that matter, you don't even need to include a title; the start of the article will automatically be used as a title in that case. People who generally blog dozens of entries every day don't bother with titles; I figure with just one or two a day, I can bother to come up with a useful title for each entry.

Hopefully you're all enjoying my customized dasBlog theme. I know I've got work to do on the stuff in the margin; some day I'll get to it...

If you're running dasBlog and you want to use/abuse my theme, let me know. I certainly have no love for any of the standard themes.

If you upgrade to dasBlog 1.2, I would definitely recommend following the instructions to change the times of 1.1 entries. If you don't, in our time zone at least, the old blogs will show up on the wrong dates, and you won't even be able to edit them.

So, here's what I did -- copy the *dayentry* and *dayextra* files from the content folder into a temporary directory, drag-and-drop them into TextPad, and do an all-document search and replace from "-07:00" to "+00:00". Copy the files back into the content folder and "touch" the Web.config file in the blog directory.

I have to say, I'm not much impressed with any of the avaialble themes for this blog. I'll have to make my own one of these days. The styles are okay, but there are annoying display bugs that I'd really like to get rid of.

Incidentally, if you'd like to make your own blog with this software, it's pretty simple -- just follow the directions at http://www.dasblog.net/documentation/, and let me know if you'd like assistance.

I finally found free blogging software that was fairly easy to install, so I thought I'd give this whole blogging thing a try. I'm starting small -- this blog is (hopefully!) not visible outside the company, and I intend for it to be a simple way to communicate interesting, but not critical, information to my coworkers. Normally I just call out to anyone within earshot, or send someone a quick Messenger message, but maybe this way I'll be able to share the wealth (ha!) with everyone that might possibly care.

So the question is -- will I actually ever post anything interesting here at all? Stay tuned.