I'm generally a private person.  I'm sure y'all see ample evidence of that by the fact that I have a blog, which millions of people can read.  Hmm.

Anyway, I'm a private person...it seems wherever I go, I develop private jokes with people.  I also have quite a number of things that are important to only me (think of Simon's rocks in With Honors).  Campbell's Soup, potato, oranges in California, McRope, sprawling, Buddha, and the list goes on.  They just kind of happen.  For this reason, and a few others more than likely, a single bottle of ketchup became an object of humor.

Here's the story...back in my senior year of high school, I got really sick.  OK, not the kind of really sick that people start hopping on airplanes to see you before you die, but the kind of sick that makes you miss school for a week and gives you just enough energy to pop in a new CD and fall back to sleep (even though you've been asleep for the last three days).  It was a very cold January or February in New Jersey and I was hot and feverish inside.  Toward the end of the week, I was beginning to feel a bit better.

With my fever and the freezing temperature, going outside was less than appealing.  I decided to do a little in house aerobics to get the blood flowing.  I was looking for weights, and the first thing I found was a huge two pack of ketchup (2.5 - 3 lbs. each).  So, I returned to my room and went about jogging and whatever else.  Somehow, only one of those bottles made it back to the kitchen.

My room was full of symbols for things - some personal, some private jokes.  A few times later that summer (yes, that bottle was still there), a few new friends saw the ketchup and assumed it had some meaning like everything else in my room.  The funny part of this ketchup joke is that it never meant anything.

I was very much impressed by a post from Chris Sells about Longhorn.  Here's a snippet:

If you're not a super early adopter, than Longhorn is just going to be noise that you should ignore 'til the beta hits.

Wow.  He then goes on to talk about .NET Framework 1.1 and the up and coming 2.0.  In other words, he's saying exactly what I said in Moo.  I was beginning to wonder if everyone at Microsoft was drunk from Longhorn Kool-Aid.

Last week I switched to the Silver color scheme on my Windows XP box.  The idea of looking at all gray has annoyed me for quite some time now.  Amazingly, though, I think I really like this style.  My taskbar is shiny.  Windows Media Player 9 nicely changes its color (that part was manual) to match.  Mouse hightlights look good.  Office 2003 skins itself to match.  All in all, I'm happy with it.  Yep, I'm happy with it.

A quick edit to the CSS and backgrounds now show up in the intraVnews generated Outlook posts.  The issue?

The CSS had this declaration before:

background-image: url(themes/candidblue/lestexture2.jpg);

now it has an abosolute path:

background-image: url(http://www.lparky.com/blog/themes/candidblue/lestexture2.jpg);

 

The world of blog views is curious.  By blog views, I refer to the different ways in which blogs can be viewed.  For many months, I've read stripped down feeds (mostly black text on white background with no borders, images, etc.) in SharpReader.  I played with RSS Bandit a bit and applied several XSLTs to the XML feeds.  Most recently, I've been reading via intraVnews in Outlook.  Oh, and I can't forget to mention the occasional view in a browser.

The interesting thing is that I designed my blog (OK, so only about 10% of the effort was mine) with the browser in mind.  I haven't tested the XHTML in the RSS feed.  I didn't design the site to appear well when scraped into an intraVnews generated Outlook message (it strips the gray background image).

Frankly, I'm not sure what to do about this.  I think I'll just hope that my words are interesting enough to keep people reading despite the possible bad aesthetics.  Oh, and that my pages are search engine friendly enough, so new readers can find me.

Until a few hours ago, I had three Personal Information Managers.  For the record, I lump blog aggregators into the PIM category.

I had Microsoft Office Outlook 2003.  I had Microsoft Outlook Express 6.0.  I had SharpReader.

I use Outlook for 9 POP3 email accounts, 1 HTTP (Hotmail), and 1 IMAP.  Outlook also processes the catch all account for my domain email.  I have aggressive spam filtering and 42 rules going on.  I have work, budget, and personal recurring tasks.  I have a healthy contact list with recurring items created in my calendar (birthday's, anniversary's, etc.).  Outlook and I spend a lot of time together.

I use Outlook Express for newsgroups, because Outlook is too proud to stoop down and support NNTP.  For some unknown reason, it happily will let you surf with an embedded browser, but it refuses to be a newsgroup reader.  Thanks, Outlook.  If for no other reason, I go to school via newsgroups.  (I'm an online student at University of Phoenix.)  So, right next to Outlook, I also always have Outlook Express open.

Until yesterday, I also always had SharpReader running.  Quite obviously, I used it to read a hundred or so blogs.

I've heard a lot about consumer electronics device convergence.  I'd like to know when we'll get information software convergence.  Outlook 2003 needs a few additions.  It needs to support NNTP.  Period.  It needs to support RSS/RDF/ATOM et al.  Outlook 2003 + intraVnews (which is a 3rd party Outlook add-in) is a good start, but I want more and better.

I don't know how Inktomi works exactly.  It seems to have a different crawl pattern (or frequency at least) than all the other spiders.  It Slurps nearly twice as often as Googlebot.  It's hit me more then three times as often as Jeeves.  I hope it enjoys drinking the Potato Juice and keeps coming for more.

Wo is me!  I love state.  State is cool.  Archives are cool.  Archives with state are cool.  Last night SharpReader robbed me of archives with state.

I was happily reading blogs, when I decided I wanted to mark one post as not read.  I moused quickly....a bit too quickly.  I selected Mark all as unread.  Rather than mark every post for that feed unread, SharpReader decided that I wanted to mark every post (about 8000) for every feed (about 130) unread.

PotatoMan.RssAggregator = new intraVnews();

Good bye, SharpReader.  You've annoyed me once too often.

Google's love is fickle.  In the 24 hours since I posted my ranking for certain search terms, I fell dramatically.  From 2nd to 39th on one!  Ouch!

More than likely, Google spidered and found that content that used to be here wasn't here any more (older articles don't appear on the front page).  Such is life.  I'm not blogging to be googlicious anyway.  That was just a nice side benefit.

This blog is my first (if you don't count a little site I wrote after my mission that nobody read) attempt at Internet honesty.  By that I mean, whenever I posted anything on the net until now, I've done it hiding behind an alias or the name of some corporation (like my clients or my employer).

I came to a startling conclusion not too long ago.  It goes like this - it's nearly impossible for the common man to hide his identity on the Internet.  I'm not the most tech savvy guy around, but I've sniffed out more than one person myself.  I read referral logs.  I read user agent strings.  I check properties on the email and newsgroup posts I receive to see where they come from and, if possible, what email client and OS (even OS service pack) was used to create them.  I read WHOIS records.  I even do the occasional tracert.

I thought to myself, “How hard would it really be to follow this path?”  Look at my email address.  Hmm, that doesn't look like a corporate address, I wonder what it is.  Let's see what's at lparky.com.  Hmm, LEP.  I wonder if that stands for Louis E. Parks.  Let's check the WHOIS record.  Wow, good guess.  Perhaps we should give him a call or mail him a letter.  Perhaps we should check to see how much he paid in property taxes last year.  Yeah, no privacy.  All from a little email address.

With such an easy path, I figured that using my real name was almost as safe as posting with an alias.  So, there you go, security through obscurity doesn't provide much security.  Besides, it's quite a feeling to Google for myself and appear on the first page of results.    Currently, I'm 2nd and 3rd.  Yesterday, I was 4th and 5th.  Last week, I was 8th.  Potato Man isn't doing too badly either.

I've talked about being a tester and a programmer.  I just thought I'd clarify my work history somewhat.

When I returned from my mission, I started school at BYU.  Within a few weeks, I got a job at the MTC testing T.A.L.L. (Technology Assisted Language Learning) versions 2.3 and 3.0.  Primarily I focused on the Russian version.  I also tested associated content creation and management tools, as well as the teacher component of T.A.L.L., Teacher Assistant.

I had a wonderful time testing.  Complain, complain, complain.  Many of my bugs were overruled, but many of them were accepted.  It's quite a thing to look at a product and know that you helped bulletproof it.

I spent about a year testing eventually become head of testing before taking a dual role as tester and programmer.  Keith Borrowman moved on to green pastures, and I replaced him as the programmer for Teacher Assistant.  DJ Dewey then replaced me as TA's tester.  (Ugh, I still remember that almost impossible to fix half check mark bug he found!  I also remember his future wife, Kim, mocking my use of Courier to align some text.  Here's a link to pictures of Deej and Kim.)  Though they'd probably dispute it, I still consider Keith and DJ better programmers than I am.

About four months later, another department snatched me.  Windows DNA, VB COM components, etc.  It was quite fun.  It was also the beginning of my current career as a web developer.

In the years since then, I've developed internal web sites, external web sites, and some desktop apps.  I'm currently a self-employed programmer.  Still, when big companies are nice enough to let me beta test software for them, I get to exercise my testing skills.

OK, so maybe I'm not really a tester at heart.  Maybe I'm just critical and irritable.  I've already said once on this blog that when I judge myself, I lack objectivity.  This would be another one of those times.

Being critical is a curious thing.  It's often regarded as innately bad.  Critical, judgmental, negative, etc.  How many people jump for joy at being criticized or judged?  Right, almost nobody.  Or do they?

I can take a critical look at a thing and in so doing state its good points.  When I say that a thing is good or that I like a thing, I'm also judging it.  Objectivity.  I think the negative connotation of those words comes from a lack of objectivity (that or low self-esteem).

While I'm on the subject, and I'm sure I'll get back to it again, Outlook 2003's rules wizard makes me cranky.  I suppose I should say that I allow it to make me cranky, since I choose how I respond to things, don't I?

I love Outlook's rules. (That was a judgment call!)  I've have 42 of them right now.  Here's the problem I have.

1. Right click on an email and select Create Rule...
2. On the dialog that appears, click the box by the text From (email address of sender).
3. Click Advanced Options
4. Click Next
5. Click the box by “move it to the ”
6. Down below, specify the folder to move it to
7. Notice that after you select the folder, a new rule has appeared: “and on this machine only”

There you have it.  Outlook, just to annoy you, has added a condition.  To remove it, you have to click back and uncheck the “and on this machine only” condition.  If I'd only created one or two rules, I'd probably not be too bothered by this.  Since I have so many, I see this bug quite often.  It spoils my Outlook experience.

I'm a bit lost on a recent Scoble post.  It seems to me that if you don't like something, and you have no obligation to do it, then, well, you shouldn't do it.  If reading Scoble brings you no pleasure, why do it?

I don't buy the popularity argument.  There are plenty of popular magazines and newspapers that I don't read.

I don't really buy the informed-ness argument.  I can stay informed on the tech world without reading Scoble.  (If for no other reason than so many others quote him.)

So, again, if you don't enjoy it, why do it?

Robert Scoble doesn't see that Microsoft is over hyping tomorrow's technology.

I understand that it takes a fair amount of time to develop software.  I know.  I'm a programmer.  I understand that even when writing this version, you are thinking about the next one, and probably the one after that as well.  This is the mark of good design and architecture.  I don't think anybody has a problem with that.

The issue is this: What can we do with the stuff we have now or that we will have pretty soon?  What happens 2 years from now isn't as important to many of us.  The technical details aren't too important to most of us.

We need to know what to do with that we have now, so we can write great code that can ship now.  We need to know what's coming up in the near future, so we'll know if it's better to use the current version or wait for the next one.

For instance, if we understand Whidby really well and know when it's coming, we can decide, based on our project time constraints, whether to use Whidby as our platform or to stick with Framework 1.1.  Information about Orcas and WinFX just cloud the picture for a lot of us.

Here's another thought:  Why has Microsoft released so much information on Longhorn, but next to nothing on the next versions of Exchange, BizTalk, SQL Server (the one after Yukon), Office 12, etc.?  Surely these will also see upgrades in or around the Longhorn time frame.  Surely they are just as important to us as Longhorn is.  Surely we can't develop the best Longhorn applications possible unless we know what the rest of the Office System and Server System are going to offer us.  So much focus on Longhorn ignores our present and near future needs and inaccurately paints the future.

I don't know where I stand on the RSS vs. ATOM debate, but I know that requiring aggregators to support both is annoying.  Yep, annoying, I say!

A few days ago, I got an ATOM feed for a blog I wanted to read only to discover that SharpReader isn't an ATOM supporter.  Ugh.

I Google'd a bit and found a nice XSLT for ATOM to RSS conversion.  It works fabulously.  Thanks Mark Gardner.  I can now read the feed I want to read.

Longhorn, longhorn, longhorn!  I'm very excited about the next version of Windows.  I've seen many of sessions from the latest PDC.  I've played with the 4051 bits.  However, I think I'll add my voice to a few others I've heard lately.  Why don't we spend a little more time looking at what we can do now (or 12 months from now) rather than on what we can't do for at least 24 months?

When .NET was announced at PDC 2000, I was ecstatic.  The beta 1 bits were released that fall.  By February 2001, I was writing my first professional application using them.  All was abuzz in the land of Microsoft about .NET.  I didn't consider this a bad thing, because, even at beta 1, the platform was widely available and stable enough to code against.  You could write your projects on it, and upgrade the code to b2, RC, or RTM without too much effort.

Longhorn, though, is a whole different story.  Microsoft won't even give a firm release date for it.  Many think it won't be ready until late '05 / early '06.  What good is it for the developer community at large to focus on Longhorn, WinFX, Orcas (.NET Framework 3.0) now?  I think it isn't too useful.

Whidby (.NET Framework 2.0) will be released, it seems, within the next 12 months.  SQL Server Yukon (SQL Server v.Next), will be released in the same time frame.  Why don't they get the attention the deserve?  Why don't we focus on what will be in Whidby in 2004, and focus on Longhorn, Office 12, and Orcas in 2005?  Doesn't this make a bit more sense?

I happen to have the PDC bits for Longhorn and Whidby, but many developers don't have them.  How annoying do you (Mr. Microsoft) think it is to have Longhorn dangling in front of your nose all the time, when you can't even play with it?

In the latest .NET Show, Robert Hess said:

With this episode, we're gonna take and start embarking on a fully new direction and that is focusing on a new operating system that inherently involves .NET under the covers. That's the new operating system coming out of Microsoft called Longhorn. We released it first at the PDC a couple months ago. In the last episode we talked briefly about it; in this episode we're gonna focus on an overview of what Longhorn is. Talk about individual pillars, WinFS, Avalon, Indigo, fundamentals, showing you some application code of what it looks like to write a Longhorn application. Then in the follow up episodes following this one in the next several months, we're gonna focus on the individual technologies of Longhorn, whether that's the Windows Identity System, security, Click Once, writing code in XAML, and other further technologies like that. But in this episode, it's gonna be a primer to allow you to understand what Longhorn is so you can understand it from the ground up and seeing how it might take and affect your applications that you are gonna need to be developing when Longhorn comes out.

I find it very interesting that the .NET show, for the most part, ignores .NET Framework 2.0 and skips right on to 3.0 and WinFX.  Maybe Microsoft simply forgot to reveal the details of Whidby and Yukon in 2002.  Perhaps they were supposed to be the focus of 2003, but someone forgot to talk about them all last year.

There's a little history here.  From September 1996 to September 1998, I was a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  I served in the Russia Moscow Mission.  Since I was a native English speaker, I had to learn Russian.

It just so happens that the Russian word for park and the English word for park are cognates, that is, the sound the same in both languages.  In plural, they are slightly different.  In English, you pluralize park by adding an “s.”  In Russian, you pluralize by adding an “ee” (long e).  So, my last name translated into Russian is Parky (“ee”, “ey”, or “i” didn't suit me, so I opted to use “y” for the transliterated form).

Instead of calling me Elder Parks, I was often called Elder Parky or just Parky.  When I got home, the name just stuck.  When I registered my domain, lparky.com (Louis Parky) was the most logical choice (it was also available!).

OK, I feel a bit foolish now.  I spent a good few minutes thinking about how bothersome it was that dasBlog wouldn't let me obfuscate my own email address in the footer (since removed entirely) of my blog pages.  What I'd forgotten was that I placed a non-obfuscated email address in the footer of every other page on lparky.com (this is my domain, by the way).

The issue now, though, is what to do about it.  I had a good reason for putting a real email address in the footer of lparky.com.  It's meant to be a somewhat professional look at my company, LEP Consulting.  I didn't want to hinder anyone from reaching me.  On the blog, however, I figure it's very easy to reach me by leaving comments.

As a software tester, I hate inconsistency.  If the programmers can come up with a good enough reason, I'll usually concede.  Since I'm having this argument with myself, I'm afraid I don't have the same objectivity that I have when I'm not both the tester and the designer.

I just found myself in a situation I was in about 12 months ago, but I couldn't remember how I solved it then.  Piece by piece as I fixed the problem, I remembered each new issue but not its solution.  How annoying!

If anyone ever recommends running a web site, even a small departmental site, using Microsoft Access...ignore them and install MSDE.  It's just not worth the fight with Access.

Back in 2000, I wasn't too sure they'd make it.  Three years later, after a few profitable quarters here and there, they have their first profitable year.

I never send an email to more than about three people.  I almost never forward things.  I just don't do the “this is half an ounce of interesting, I'm sure the rest of the world (e.g. my address book) would love to know about it” thing.

Well, I never do that until now.  I just announced my blog to everyone in my address book, whose email address I think is probably current.  My AV scanner even warned me that I might have a worm, since I was sending to so many people.  At least I did a nice thing by BCC'ing everyone.  This way, your privacy is ensured (that is, only you and I know your address not the hundred other people to whom I sent the same message).

All is well, no worm, and if you received my email, you're not likely to receive another one like it from me.  If anything really interesting happens that everyone and their dog should know about, I'll post it here long before sending another email to more than three people.

I bought the Brandenburg Concertos a few years ago, but I never listened to them.  I altered that behavior last week.  I really like them.  Go Bach!

Obviously, Louis Parks is Potato Man.  Where did the name come from?

Potato is a double-edged sword for me.  I wrote a parable back in '96 about potatoes.  Rather than accepting the status quo, the potato was trying to be the best he could be and rise above his surroundings.  I wrote it to a missionary, trying to explain my thoughts on life.  A few months later, I told it to my companion at the Missionary Training Center (MTC).  (I'll blog about being a missionary a bit more some day.)  Since he was about 6'2" and I'm 5'7", he used to call me spud.  It was very complimentary, meaning that in his eyes, I was trying to be the best friend to him and the best missionary I could be.

Potato also refers to a sarcastic comment I made a few months ago.  Jeremy Field and I were taking a class together at University of Phoenix.  He's a good friend of mine, so I spoke very candidly about an issue we were both having with the class.  I choose the first word that came to mind, potato, for an analogy I was making.  So, when I use potato referring to UoP, I'm covertly showing off my cockiness.

Using the two definitions together, I suppose Potato Man means that I'm a cocky guy, but that I'm always trying to do the right thing.

I realized that I identifed a few issues with dasBlog, but that I didn't post how to fix them.  Well, I kind of did talk about how to deal with the bugs but not in a very direct manner.  Anyway, I'll address them directly now.

The “Illegal characters in path” bug (Google, please pick up on this, since nobody else seems to have addressed this that I could find) is the result of a missing file.  The problem occurs when you select the dasBlog theme for your site.  The blog engine will in the /[blog root]/themes/dasBlog directory for a file called homeTemplate.blogtemplate.  If it's missing, you'll get the error I described.  You need to copy this file (you should also probably grab copies of dayTemplate.blogtemplate and itemTemplate.blogtemplate) to the dasBlog directory.

This will eliminate the bug.  However, this won't display the real dasBlog theme.  An alternative is to remove the dasBlog theme from your themes list.

The other bug I talked about was requiring a valid email address for the site owner but not obfuscating it.  One workaround is to edit the site.config (it is found in /[blog root]/sitconfig/site.config) file by hand and edit the Contact element with an obfuscated email address.  This has the benefit of making harvesting your address more difficult.  It has the drawback (it seems) of breaking an email notifications from your site.  It seems that the notification engine uses the Contact element as the From address when sending email to the email address specified in NotificationEMailAddress.  If the From address is invalid, the email won't send.

Another option is to edit the template(s) (/[blog root]/themes/[theme name]/homeTemplate.blogtemplate) that produce your blog's UI.  You can simply remove the email link.  This makes contacting you a little more difficult, but not too difficult.  If you want folks to be able to contact you, just make sure that you use your email address, which will be obfuscated, when replying to comments.  Optionally, people can post to your commets section to contact you.

Another bug that I haven't mentioned is in the web based entry editor.  Sometimes the screen will seem to freeze.  To correct this, you need to mouse over the area where the editor text box is.  All will flicker back to life immediately.

I've altered things a bit, most import was is the nifty gray background on the right side.  This is the same background used on the rest of the site.  Jon Hoffman, an aspiring artist friend of mine, made it for me last year.

One thing I'm stuck on is the location of the calendar.  It currently is aligned with the links under Navigation, Categories, and Blogroll.  I'm thinking it should stay there.  Still, I can make a case for left aligning it with the Navigation, Categories, and Blogroll headings.

If I have any readers, feel free to let me know what you think and what would make the site better.

I just visited a site with a link that would close the browser window.  When I clicked the link, IE said, “The Web page you are viewing is trying to close the window.  Do you want to close this window?”  It seems odd that IE cares more about when a window is closed than when it is opened.  The issue with popups/popunders that has caused many (including the new version of IE) to make popup/popunder blockers might have been avioded if IE had simply produced a dialog saying “The web page you are viewing is trying to open a new window.  Do you want to open a new window?”

I'm really big on consistency.  One thing about dasBlog that I don't understand is this - in the site.config file you can specify that you want email addresses to be obfuscated.  This converts them from the form

<Username>@<Domain>.<TopLevelDomain>

to the form

<Username>AT NOSPAM<Domain> dot <TopLevelDomain>.

The issue I have is that this works on all comments left by visitors, but it doesn't work for the email link at the bottom of every page (right next to the syndication links).  I had to manually edit the site.config file to give create an invalid address there.  Yeah, I'm a bit wary of address harvesting agents.

I'm not just picking on dasBlog here.  Worse, in my opinion, is the system at Scoble's blog.  To leave comments on his blog, commenters have to give a valid address for the comment to post.  Why are valid addresses required?  They don't seem to show up on the comment board.  Is this how he foots the bill for his blog?  Perhaps it's something benign like he wants to be able to contact his visitors privately.

On blogs in general, it seems a bit odd that real address are required.

The Human Aggregator of Geek Life has linked to me.  I figured that linking to him yesterday was a long shot to help get me on the map.  I'm stoked that it worked.

What I wonder is this - how does he have time to go through all of his referral logs.  My blog's been up for under 24 hours and already I have quite a few hits from spiders, bots, sites, etc.  I wonder what his log looks like and how he manages to post as much as he does and go through his logs.

Yeah, I think I definately prefer dasBlog's interface.  Anyone know of a way to add in the current track from Windows Media Player using dasBlog's interface?

Here's my attempt with Zempt. So far, I think I prefer the web interface of dasBlog to either this or w.bloggar.

Thanks to some helpful instructions from dasBlog, I'm experimenting with posting via w.bloggar. Also, I've installed a plug-in from Microsoft to add the music that I'm listening to as I post. Am I missing something, or can you not use w.bloggar to write posts with titles?

I'm not sure that I'd characterize myself as the most mellow of people.  I've posted under the alias BobSmith over at ActiveWin for a few years now, and any who frequent the site know that I'm very opinionated.  (I'm hopeful that the opinions I express are also rational.)

CNet reported today about yet another worm.  It's a typical mass mailer with a twist.  Instead of attacking Windows Update we saw with worms last summer, it's set to attack SCO.  For those who are upset with SCO, I don't see that this as a very wise way to vent frustration.  It's immature at best and destructive at worst.  It reflects poorly on the OSS community.

I'm half assuming here that this was written by some OSS advocate.  It may have been some OSS antagonist, who wanted to harm OSS's reputation further.  Either way, I find it deplorable.

Please, update your AV software and don't open attachments that seem even close to questionable.  Microsoft has more information on a few easy steps to protect your PC.

Good luck, Daryl!  Don't let the naysayers get you down.

OK, the Internet is cool.

I've had this blog up and running for under 12 hours and Robert Scoble has already found me.  I remember reading a post of his that talked of setting up a blog and having 10,000 readers by the end of the week.  Perhaps we are closer to that reality than I previously though.

I'm a little late with this, but, hey, I just started.

Rory makes me laugh, and this entry made me laugh more the most.  I hope to have as much fun as he's had with my own referral logs.

I think the “candid blue” theme works best for me froma visual perspective.  Still, I love to complain.  I think I'll have to make some time to learn the dasBlog template format and work some visual magic.  I guess that means I'll have to learn some visual magic first...

One thing that bothers me is false claims.  I'm claiming to be CSS compliant (and I am now), but the default install for this theme has a CSS bug.  I had to fix it!  In the Description class, letter-spacing is set to .none.  This is an invalid value.  I changed it to 0 and now the site validates.

Scoble seems to read everyone else on the Internet.  I wonder how long it'll take him to find me.

I've been reading blogs for a few months now, but this is my first time writing.  What are the do's and don't's of blogging?

Last night I began shopping for .NET blog software.  I had a less than pleasant experience with .Text.  I'm sure it's a great platform, but it didn't seem to like me too much.  It kept giving me date parsing issues.  Oh well.

So, I moved on to dasBlog.  Hmm.  I was hopeful when I had it up and running locally in about five minutes.  I was less than hopeful about two minutes later, when I got an “Illegal characters in path“ error.  I was sure that http://www.lparky.com/blog/ contained no illegal characters, but dasBlog was unrelenting.

I was determined to have a blog, so I downloaded the source to dasBlog.  I set a few breakpoints and quickly discovered that my trouble was due to a missing template file.  Ugh!

So, here's part of the bug -

C:\Program Files\newtelligence AG\newtelligence DasBlog 1.4 (Source)\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web\themes\dasBlog should have a file called “homeTemplate.blogtemplate” but, it didn't.  Now it does and all is well.

The second part of the bug -

The error handling code to deal with the missing template was less than adequate.  Line 217 of Themes.cs in newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.Theme has this line:

return new StreamReader("<p>no template</p>");

I don't know about you, but I don't think that's a valid path.  System.IO didn't think it was valid either, which is why it kept telling me I had invalid characters in my path.

If anyone in the dasBlog world is listening, you can recreate this with a default install of the current 1.4 code.

All in all, I'm happy to finally be blogging.  I still believe that open source software is only free if your time is worth nothing.  This experience underscored that reality for me.

Louis becomes a blogger.