-=jowie=-

This site is now on my new host. Please let me know if there are any issues using the contact link above.

It's been forever and a day since I've added a post. Big changes are coming. Jenn and I have bought a house. We have purchased a Quadrant home in their Kentlake Highlands division, new construction, and as such, we get to argue about all the little customizations we want. Its been a fun process, and our final date to make selections is May 19th. After that date, our selections are locked, and construction begins about 2 weeks after that. The house should be completed late August or early September. Just soon enough to get that $8000 credit from uncle Sam.More...

Jenn and I have been back for about 2 weeks now, and I am just now getting around to putting the photos online. My procrastination has mainly been due to the fact that I have been looking for a nice and simple photo gallery application that I could host on my own server. Tonight I finally found one:

http://www.codeplex.com/PhotoHandler

Just drop the app into a directory, add some folders with photos via FTP or however you want, and that's pretty much all there is to it. I have blogengine.net running as the root of my site as you can see, and had some problems getting PhotoHandler running in a virtual directory in the root of my blog, so I just put it in its own website in IIS and did the whole host header thing and added a CNAME record for my domain to point to the new app at:

Vegas Trip '08 

So far just have the photos from the Vegas trip up, but I have some others I will get up there soon.

So, for the past few days I have been messing around with my website. Trying various blogging engines, etc. But for now, I'm back to MT 3.33, so I can continue working on my BlogML Index Template for MT. BlogML 2.0 has been released and I'll need to rework my template over from scratch pretty much. I have looked over the BlogML 2.0 specification this time though, instead of just looking at a sample BlogML.xml file.

I think I know why I was having a problem in SubText with the comments being imported with their date created attribute set as the date the import took place. It appears that the date created attribute isn't handled in BlogML for comments at all. Oh well. I'll look into it further.

On another note, I have redid my simple quick'n'dirty ASP.Net photo gallery scripts to use Lightbox JS v2.0, check it out and let me know what you think!

I haven't been posting much recently, which is quite obvious. Mostly I have seen this blog as more of a chore then anything, mainly because of all the comment and trackback spam I get here. First of all, I have moderation turned on for both, meaning I have to manually come in here and clear out the stuff. Manually because I'm too anal to have the software delete it for me for fear of loosing legit stuff. It's quite annoying, to the point for a while there I completely turned off all commenting and trackbacks. Hell, even on my own custom tagboard I'm getting spam! This is really getting outta control...

Also, for quite some time I have been looking for a new software system to manage my blog, one that includes image galleries so I can replace my hacked together solution. My requirements? First of all, must be .Net based, preferably 2.0. Secondly, must be relatively easy to configure. And last but not least, have some way to import all my old entries created here in Movabletype. Not exactly an easy task believe you me. However, I recently have been playing with Subtext. It's a branch of the .Text blogging engine, with a comparatively easy setup program, geared more toward running a single blog instead of multiples(although hosting multiples are possible with a bit more configuration). The lastest version runs on asp.net 2.0, has image galleries built in, with the ability to upload bulk images in a .zip file. And for the last requirement, has the ability to import using the BlogML format. Seems to meet all my requirements!

The only problem, trying to get all my content from Movabletype into a valid blogml XML file. I've been working on it and so far, have gotten posts and comments exported into a blogml.xml file and then into Subtext. I still need to work on a few things, including ensuring posts I have using the extended entry feature get exported. As currently only the main entry body are exported. I also have categories in the blogml file, but for some reason they aren't importing, so my entries that were imported into subtext are not categorized. Even so, I can live with all my old posts not being in categories. So I may just run with what I've got. If anyone wants to help out, I'll post a .txt file of the template I’m using in MT to get the blogml.xml file. Still very much a work in progress, and right now it only exports the last 10 posts, for testing purposes. Some of the dates and other information are hard coded, as I couldn't find a MT template tag that would return the appropriate information. Oh, and I should note, I am running MT 3.2...

UPDATE 10/28/2006: DOH! I had a spelling error in my template file, the <categories> and </categories> tags were both spelt catagories. My bad, fixed the text file linked above. Now I just have to finish up the template to include extended entries!

UPDATE 10/30/2006: Had a problem where not all comments would get imported. Found that users who left feedback but did not include a URL were not getting imported. The BlogML import engine didn't like the user-url attribute in the comment tag being blank or missing, so I edited the template with <MTIfNonEmpty> tags to inject the <MTBlogURL> tag if no URL was provided. There is still a problem where the date isn't imported, instead the date imported is the date the import was executed. At least the comments get pulled in. I have posted on the sourceforge forums, waiting to see if I should bug it.

Note to self, MT breaks if you change the password for the MySQL DB user for MT, and edit the WRONG config file with the new password. Comments and such have been probably broken for a couple weeks cause I changed the password in my backup MT directory instead of the one that's actually running the site. Ooops!

Just finished updating the site theme. I donno, red on black is just a theme going on with me right now. I recently redid the backlighting of the gauges and stuff in my car from amber to red. I think it looks great. I have tested the new theme in firefox and IE and it seems to look the same and work in both. Let me know if you see otherwise.

Welp, that was pretty painless. All I had to do was uninstall the VWD 2005 Expres Edition, then the .Net Framework 2 Beta 2, then install the RTM version of VWD 2005 Express Edition, which installs the RTM version of the .Net Framework version 2. Only problem I had, was that after the installation, when I tried to pull up my website, I got the error "Unrecognized attribute 'xmlns'.". This was because the ASP.NET version on the ASP.NET tab for my default website in the IIS manager had switched itself back to 1.1.4322. All I had to do was change it to 2.0.50727, and hit the apply button. Didn't even have to restart IIS. Simple!

So what does this mean to me? I have been running the beta 2 version of both VWD 2005 Express and the .net framework, so now to install the release versions, I have to uninstall the betas, and currently my site relys on those betas as I'm using master pages for layout control. So as I'm going through and installing/uninstalling, things will probably break!