OCDProgrammer.com

For the longest time I've wanted the ability to choose which categories show on my site.  Took the time tonight to add a small patch to the category list control to add a display property to it.

Download the file below and just copy it over your current files, or consume the changes if you've made customizations.

Its pretty simple to use, go to your admin screen on the category tab and use the check box to set the value.  It defaults to true for all of your existing categories.

Admin Screen for Updating

Admin Screen for Viewing

Version 1.0
CategoryPatch.zip (8.81 kb)

So Chris Blankenship, maker of many DotNetBlogEngine extensions has done it again.

He created one that shows the top referrals to your site.  He did it in such a great way, allowing for many aspects of it to be specific to your setup.  From the width of the columns to the number of items to show.

You can see my top referrals down the left column.

One of the big weaknesses for the DotNetBlogEngine.Net platform is its lack of comment and post moderation.  However, one of its strengths is its extensibility model.  So a developer took the time to write a comment manager for the platform.

Also in the extension is the ability to edit comments.  So if language is used, or even if a blatant typo is present I can edit the comments.

You can go get the extension here.

Being a writer of two extensions for the DotNetBlogEngine I've honestly not installed any non standard extensions on my site... until now.

As  you notice there are some  links inserted at the bottom of each of my post, these are some social bookmarking sites that a lot of folks use.  I honestly don't, but I do know that a lot of people do.

With all that being said Danny Douglas wrote an extension that does this for me.  So if you run DotNetBlogEngine and want to have the links on your site then go check out his extension. 

I have added support for the new Extension Manager that is in DNBE 1.3 to the Quicker Links extension.

You can download it here.

I have added support for the new Extension Manager that is in DNBE 1.3 to the Quick Links extension.

You can download it here.

I've recently upgraded to BlogEngine.NET version 1.3.  As I generally stay somewhat update with the beta fixes and such not a whole lot of new features for me.  But the good thing is that it works pretty well.   This version did have some Windows Live Writer support and supposed fixes in it for me, so it was my motivation for taking the time to upgrade. 

To the credit of the developers the WLW support was better, but I found a bug.  On my LifeBlog I generally write a lot of post well in advance of them showing up (as of this post I have content for the next week scheduled to appear)... so I have to set a future date.  Previously the API for this assumed local time and it should hve assumed UTC time (which is spec).  So that was in there, however the new code would adjust the time for the server offset and then my post would be off by three hours.  The new code wasn't taking into account that the post.saving method would also adjust the time and that function is global, and should win in this issue.

As of this post they haven't applied the patch, but you can read it about on the issue tracker and apply the fix yourself. 

I've released QuickLinks and QuickerLinks 1.1.

Its a pretty minimal change, but if you want the ability to track who clicks what... then you want the upgrade. 

As my previous post alluded to, my blog has had an issue with FeedBurner.  Basically their site is not updating my feed when my scheduled post become visible. 

Matt Shobe (yep, co-founder of FeedBurner) told me that my If-Modified-Since header was inaccurate, and a potential cause of the issue.  So I went on searching for a way to test this header on my Windows XP box.  Couldn't find one, so I emailed Matt and asked him if he could point me in the right direction.

He said you could use Linux (don't have a version installed) or I could possibly use Cygwin.  And I can!  So I grabbed the latest version and looked through all the packages and found two that had curl in them (in the Net component).  Let Cygwin install then ran this line in the command line that appears when you launch Cygwin:
curl -H 'If-Modified-Since: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 05:59:00 -800' -IL http://www.ocdprogrammer.com/myfeed.axd (don't go to it, it isn't valid)

And sure enough my BlogEngine had a bug in it.  I've since fixed the bug and hope it resolves the issue.  We will find out in the morning as my LifeBlog has a post scheduled for six in the morning.

I am blown away that FeedBurner is as helpful as it is when it comes to support.  Thanks Matt!  Because regardless of whether or not this bug is the cause of my FeedBurner issue, it was a bug and now the BE platform is better since it is fixed.

I have developed a new extension for the DNBE platform.  This feature will replace certain key words with a link to a site you specify.  I have named it "Quicker Links", and using it is rather easy.

After following the README.txt file in the zip file you will see a new tab in your administrative section of your site.

In that page you can specify what words to replace with what links.  For example, I have specified the short cut dnbe to be replaced with a link to Dot Net Blog Engine's website.

This works pretty easily, you enter the text on the left and it will be made into a link.

So download it for yourself! 

QuickerLinks.zip (6.01 kb) - Version 1.0 - December 1, 2007

Now I have tried to account for many different ways for this text to appear in HTML, but I'm sure it could use some improvement.  So if you have a code change let me know!  Here what the code should be able to replace in version one.  Lets assume that you have ckurl defined in your entry to be replaced with a link. 

• If you just have it normally in a sentence, like above it will become a link. 
  
• I also allow for certain punctuation to follow the word (!.,?:).
• I check for a leading or trailing HTML bracket <, or >.  This is mainly if the word appears after a paragraph or line break.
• I allow it if the word is followed by a space.  So lets say I have ckurl at the beginning of a sentence it will be replaced with a link.
  • NOTE: This introduced the only known bug.  If your word is in the end of a word it will break that word and give you a link.  For example if I have this wordckurl, the ckurl part of that will become a link.  Would love some better regular expressions for this, so I'm all ears.
• One last note, I ignore case here.  So if you type cKuRl, it will make that word... just as it is a link.
  

Well I hope you enjoy!