I recently signed up for (again), a Google Adsense account. The idea is simple and straightforward, you sign up, inject some code into your web site or blog, and ad's are delivered via Google. Google tracks the click through's from your site, and depending on a number of factors you begin to earn revenue.

The ad's will gradually adjust so that they are relevant to the content of your blog. This is accomplished by some arcane algorithm that Google uses as they index Adsense enabled sites and blogs. At the moment, the ad's on my blog seem to have developed a fixation with my name, "Bob" and I have ad's for "Bob The Builder Pajamas" and "Bob Dylan Art".  And somehow it decided that my blog was the perfect forum for selling woman's underwear last night and I had tall "skyscraper" images of scantily clad women all over my blog. (Try explaining that one to your wife!!!)

As of yet, I have earned a grand total of... Drum roll please.... ZIP, Nada, Zilch! But it has been only a few days. I also signed up for the affiliate program with my webhost, and if someone clicks on their banner ad's on my site, and meets some other conditions, I can earn referral fee's etc.

So if you need a good, .NET enabled, dasBlog friendly webhost, please come to my site, and click on the banner for WebHost4Life, and then sign up for a year of no hassle, worry free, low cost webhosting!  My wallet will thank you!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

I recently updated this blog to the latest stable 2.x build of dasBlog and I also changed the default Theme to the one you see now.

There were some hiccups and a few tense moments when I noticed that several things that I thought should work did not. Turned out that the issues were with IE7/Vista caching and had little to nothing to do with dasBlog.

That being said, if you notice anything unusual please let me know!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

A number of blogs incorporate scrolling blocks of text in their blog posts. This helps keep things organized and neat in the post.

The last time I needed to do this I used JavaScript, but since a lot of users turn scripting off for security reasons, I looked around and found a way to do it with good old CSS.

<div style="overflow:auto; height: 200px; width: 300px;>
<p>Some text to scroll around with.</p>
</div>

See it in action below:

        Dim oInboxAgenda As WFXTENDERLib.WfxAgenda

        Try

            ' Navigate to the Inbox for the Initial Routing Workflow user

            oInboxAgenda = oWFXConnection.Agenda(WORKBOX_TYPE_CLOSED)

            'Clear previous filters

            oInboxAgenda.SetFilter("", "", "")

            oInboxAgenda.SetFilter("Business Process", "=", "Initial Routing Workflow")

            'Refresh data so filter is applied

            oInboxAgenda.Refresh()

            Return oInboxAgenda.Count

        Catch eX As System.Exception

            MsgBox(eX.ToString)

        Finally

            System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ReleaseComObject(oInboxAgenda)

            oInboxAgenda = Nothing

        End Try

    End Function

So in a nutshell, a simple DIV and some CSS goes a long way. An added benefit is that this simple tag is supported on almost every browser.

I am still trying to figure out other ways to do this, I would prefer not having to hack the html view of my posts each time. But this works for now.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

I have finally completed my development environment for dasBlog and managed to update my own site from source without destroying it. (I think!).

Cheers,

Robert Porter

I am slowly getting up to speed with dasBlog, and I have to say I am impressed… and confused! However the confusion is correctable. It stems mostly from not yet being able to get my development environment up to speed. ( I use VS2005 exclusively and dasBlog was and remains written for and in VS2003 and .NET 1.1 )

There are some posts that help with setting your development environment up for VS2005 such as the one here as well as reading through some of the forums and of course just plain hitting Run and seeing what blows up.

What I am impressed by is the fact that unlike several other open source projects the current developers seem to encourage contributions and patches. I can’t say the same for efforts like an unnamed blog engine I used before, where a submission goes unacknowledged and posts to their forums disappear after a day or two with no explanation.

And from what code I have seen, it looks in way better shape than most, so that is hopeful. Some of the rest of my confusion stems from the fact that dasBlog uses flat files for content storage as opposed to a database. And category lists seem to be driven by use not a stored list.

This makes it sort of difficult for someone using an external tool to blog with. I use BlogJet myself and am very happy with it, however either it or dasBlogs implementation of the Blogger interface do not yet support Categories that it does not obtain from the blog engine. In other words the category must exist already before you can use it in BlogJet. So the solution (Clarification: The solution was provided to be my Scott Hanselman not my own discovery, after I sent an email asking about the issue.) was to create a placeholder post and assign it every category I thought of (and periodically have to edit it to add new ones) just so I can use them in my external tool.

But as I get more familiar with the engine and the code, I should begin to learn the reasoning behind these decisions and be in a better position to comment on them then.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

Hmmm