January 2005 - Posts
Dennis van der Stelt
reviewed Community Server Beta 3. He also links to screenshots of the
web setup procedure.
Finally, Scott answered to my previous series of posts, via mail as well as on his blog. I'm happy that Scott seems to understand my point. Sometimes I get stuck for the right words, and after getting first feedback to my posts, I noticed that it you may understand them the wrong way. But he didn't.
Anyway, Scott started his answer as follows:
So a common question the last couple of days, "Is .Text Dead" ?
Absolutely not. No way. Nie..Nao. Het.
Just to be clear:
- Community Server is the evolution of .Text (I consider CS 1.0 to be the missing .Text 1.0)
- There will be a free upgrade tool to upgrade a .Text install to CS 1.0
- You 100% can run Community Server Blogs, without galleries and forums. (as you can run forums without blogs, etc)
- We will ship the source code (to keep things simple, we have held on to the source until we ship 1.0)
- You will be able to contribute
I have expected the first two points. The third item is good news for all who want a blog only. What I really like are the two last statements.
Further down his post Scott gives a rough overview of new features:
Set up and configuration is now infinitely easier and more flexible.
- We have a web based installer
- A new virtualization model capable of not only running multiple sites on a single install but the ability to use shard or unique users
- UI for creating and managing blogs
- Secured/control access to blogs (globally and individually)
General Features
- Built in search
- Support for medium trust environments
- More flexible URL overrides
- Ratings
- Comments
- Moderated
- Authenticated only
- Timed (i.e., new comments for 1, 2, etc days)
- You can both hide all comments and/or turn them off
- A much simpler and documented skin layer
- Much simpler and less restrictive UrlRewriting
- Posts can be dated for the future (and will not be visible until then)
- Multiple authors per blog
- Role and Permission based access (i.e., users in role X have Post access while users in role Y have read-only access)
- Email subscriptions by post and blog
- Updated CSS Hierarchy
Well, it looks very promising. Yes, it does. Many mods published by people as Dave Burke, Don Demsak, Dan Bartels, and others will already part of CS::Blogs.
I don't want to repeat every single word of Scott. Read it yourself. He explains the reasons for the long delay since the last release of .Text very well.
He closes his post with
We have one minor issue to clear up and we will be releasing a release candidate to Community Sever 1.0 have already started working on plans/features for 1.1/1.2/2.0 (current plan calls for two point releases before 2.0).
To summarize, we are still making progress and if you have the time/desire to contribute, we would welcome you to contribute to CS.
One thing missing is the release date. I have many items on my to-do list. I want to adopt several mods, and have lots of additional ideas I want to realize in .Text. Is it worth to start implementing them, or should I wait for the release of CS::Blog (incl the sources)?
I was told that DonXMl has mailed Scott about my previous post. Well, I think the main point of my posts was: where's .Text going? To be more specific: Will .Text aka CS::Blogs released only together with CS::Forums and CS::Gallery, or will there be a stand-alone version? Is Telligent going to publish the sources? Hopefully Scott (or Rob Howard) can comment on this.
BTW, others have the same questions:
Dan Bartel wrote in ".Text v.96 and beyond?":
The official update to .95 has been over a year in the making, and the community is getting anxious. There is some growing interest in the community for a revival of this project as open source, especially with the virtual collapse of Movable Type due to ridiculous licensing, and the unknown status of the new holder of .Text (telligent systems) with their plans to charge for the source... I am trying to have faith that a corporation can do more for the blogging engine, and the fee wasn't too high, but I have a wait and see attitude there... and I have been waiting a long time =)
and Dennis van der Stelt said in ".Text .96 and bringing it further":
If I can find the time tonight, I'll try and get the 0.96 code working at home. I also want to take a look at CS Beta 3, to see what features it has. But I have the same problem as Thomas has, I'm not looking for a full blown product which also includes a forum and a gallery. I just want my blog. And if Telligent Systems decides to release the code, it'll probably much harder to add features to it, as there's so much code. As said, I'll have a look at both.
Hell, I've got lots of feedback about my previous post. Some commented in the blog, others send me private mails. Many questions arised. Therefore, I think I have to make my point clearer.
First of all, I don't want to publish my own release of .Text. I'm not the owner of .Text. That's Scott. He did an awesome job, and I don't want to take credits of it. I love coding, and I love to learn. And I've learnt alot from the excellent architecture of .Text.
The intention of my post was more that there are many developers who did really cool changes to .Text. Let's call them mods (the changes, not the developers). Many of them have changed major parts of the code base, so they are not compatible anymore. It's not easy anymore for one to adopt changes made by another one.
On the other hand, many bloggers are using the binary release of .Text. They are no developers, they don't want to make any changes to sources, they just want to use the binaries.
My original idea was to bring all of them together. Making it more easy to exchange mods for the developers, and giving non-developers the chance to benefit from the mods. (Someone already mailed me that he gets paid for customizing .Text, so he's not very responsive about the latter ;-) )
That's what I tried to express.
Almost one year ago I upgraded my .Text blog to .96. I blogged about it several times, my last post was about adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to links in comments.
Since then I've got several requests how to get the .96 sources and upgrade. One of them was Dave Burke. Yesterday he published the entire upgrade process. (Thanks, Dave, now I can forward all request to you ;-) ) BTW, he has done awesome improvements to .Text.
Today, I've got another request by Dennis van der Stelt. First, we talked about how I could provide him with my code base. But then I've got another idea. But first some points which lead me to it.
- Since last summer Scott, the creator of .Text, works for Telligent, and now .Text is bundled with nGallery and ASP.NET Forums in Community Server. They are working on version 1, currently beta 3 is published. I haven't tried CS yet, but I'm not sure whether I like it. I only want a simple blog engine, not a full bloated server.
- There are many lone warriors like Dave, Bob Roudebush, Chrissy LeMaire, or Dan Bartel, who have done minor or major tweaks to .Text, such as a solution against comment spam or a webcam panel.
- I don't know, how these others handle their .Text engine, but whenever I see an interesting improvement I try to adopt it in my code base. Currently, I'm incorporating Chrissy's anti-spam solution into my blog. I'm a developer and I love to code. But I believe there are other bloggers who would like to use all these .Text improvements (at least a newer version of FreeTextBox like Dan did), but either don't want to mess with the code, or just don't know what sources are ;-)
Therefore, I thought about bringing the knowledge and dev power together. We could build and publish a new .Text release, .97 or whatever. I hope Scott or some others don't feel offended, because that's not my intention. As I said, I haven't tried CS yet, so I don't know neither how much of .Text is left in CS, what features are already implemented, and how difficult it is to incorporate mentioned "tweaks" into it.
So what do you think about it?
But maybe I'm completely on the wrong track, and Community Server it better than I fear ;-)
Event though Visual Studio 2003 has been released almost two years ago, there are still some features I haven't seen before.
Today, Tim Schwallie has posted an article at CodeProject, how to set up exception handling in Visual Studio.
Just type Ctrl+Alt+E...
Today Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, and other search operators announced their support of the rel="nofollow" attribute for <a href="..." /> tags. Adding this attribute indicates the search crawlers, that the specific links should not contribute to the linked site's page rank. This might help fighting comment spam, since overwhelming blogs with comments containing links to any pharmaceutical site won't increase their search rank.
Whether this will help to fight comment spam or not, time will show. Anyway, I've written a small plug-in for .Text, which adds the mentioned attribute to all links in comments.
Some time ago Scott Watermasysk has described who to add custom entry handlers to .Text v.96. According to these instructions, my entry handler looks as follows:
.csharpcode
{
font-size: 10pt;
color: black;
font-family: Courier New , Courier, Monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0px; }
.rem { color: #008000; }
.kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.str { color: #006080; }
.op { color: #0000c0; }
.preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.html { color: #800000; }
.attr { color: #ff0000; }
.alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0px;
}
.lnum { color: #606060; }
public class NoFollowFormatHandler : IEntryFactoryHandler
{
public NoFollowFormatHandler()
{}
public void Configure()
{}
public void Process(Entry entry)
{
entry.Body = ReformatLinks(entry.Body);
}
private string ReformatLinks(string text)
{
return text.Replace(
"<a target=\"_new\" href=\"",
"<a target=\"_new\" rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"");
}
}
Afterwards, you have to add this handler to the event handler configuration section in your web.config, in fact after the default handler:
<EntryHandlers>
<EntryHandler
type="Dottext.Framework.EntryHandling.CommentFormatHandler, Dottext.Framework"
postType="Comment" processAction="Insert" processState="PreCommit"
isAsync="false" />
<EntryHandler
type="Dottext.NoFollow.NoFollowFormatHandler, Dottext.NoFollow"
postType="Comment" processAction="Insert" processState="PreCommit"
isAsync="false" />
<EntryHandler
type="Dottext.Framework.EntryHandling.CommentDeliveryHandler, Dottext.Framework"
postType="Comment" processAction="Insert" processState="PostCommit"
isAsync="true" />
...
That's it. You may either download the source code, or just get the compiled assembly and copy it to your bin folder. Add the handler in the web.config, and all links in new comments will have the rel="nofollow" attribute.
Be aware, that this solution targets .Text v.96 only. V.95 does not have entry handlers, so please don't bother me with asking for a .95 version.
Jeff Sandquist (yes, the nice guy who sent me a t-shirt) compares blog citation search engines, i.e. Bloglines Citations, Feedster Links and Technorati. He asks you to test them and leave a comment on his blog.
I've searched for http://thomasfreudenberg.com/blog on all of them, and Bloglines Citations returned the best and most results.
Every now and then my start menu is broken. I.e. the left area
normally showing last used applications is black, and sub menus for
items such as "All Programs", "Administrative Tools" do not open.
Google led me to this forum thread, where they blame the Logitech Webcam Software, so I've uninstalled this. I hope this will help...