Well, it has been a very long time. Lots has happened. I keep wanting to blog about things, but I keep hesitating, as I don't want to take the time to write the seemingly obligatory "I'm back" email. So, I finally got sick of waiting, and I'm just going to say hello again.

I'm updating dasBlog to 1.7, and I seem to be having some problems getting all my content folder to show up, so the latest post is 1-1-2004. Strange. Looks like I've got some work to do on it.

Good to be back, expect to hear from me more now.

Oh, and, I'm going to TechEd2005!

[Update] The posts seem to be back. Hurra! Looks like the upgrade wasn't totally painful. I did have some troubles with the upgrader because of duplicate keys, but I dealt with that.

It is about time. I've gone around the web reading stuff he's written on a variety of topics, so it is good to see him start a blog. [via Google] :)

[Update: I'm now getting an overflow dialog box when I try to post into my entry. Admittedly, the entry is huge (44KB), and it has quite a bit of HTML in it. So, something is overflowing. I put a message on the wbloggar forums with a link here to get the file. wbloggaroverflow.post.txt (44KB) (I had to add a .txt to it, as my webhost didn't feel like serving up a .post file. Rename file to .post and load it into w.bloggar)

[Update: This overflow exception is quite a pain in the ass when you are working on a larger entry. I can't paste into the file anymore. It is almost to the point of unusable for large entries. Okay, the entry in question is around 11 pages long, but still.]

[Update: I'm also running into a problem with editing an existing entry. When I choose it in w.bloggar, it downloads the entry text and title, but not the category. When I make a change and post it, the changes don't show up on here.]

Does anyone use w.bloggar to post to a dasBlog-based blog? I'm having trouble with linefeeds not being transmitted. I've both check and unchecked the “Convert Line-Break to <br> tags” box and neither of them work. I've tried putting two carriage returns, instead of just one, still no good. Anyone help?

It appears that the “Convert Line-Break...” option is just for the preview, so it doesn't do much good for publishing.

[Update: After fishing around quite a bit, I did the obvious and put a <p> in my post. Wow! I posted, and, sure enough, it worked. Stupid Corey!]

The .Net Languages blog pointed me to the specification for G#, (G# for generative), which, according to the post, wants to be an AOP-based language. I printed out the spec to read tonight, but I've been interested in AOP for a little while now (my system at work is incredibly attribute-heavy, something I got from AOP), and this looks interesting. I like that Ernest (the guy who wrote the G# spec) got the idea from Don Box's Essential .Net Volume 1, which is also part of what spawned my interested in using attribute much more often (along with the excellent Applied .Net Attributes).

In any case, I've subscribed to his blog to keep tabs with what he is doing.

It looks like I'm getting bombarded from the radio news aggregator at http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/news

It appears to have hit my blog today a few hundred time already. Are you reading this on a radio news aggregator? Are you set to hit my blog once a minute, or something? If so, could you cut down the frequency? I don't blog that much. :)

I've been getting a few referrals lately from Kent Tegel's weblog, Enjoy Every Sandwich. So, naturally, I checked it out. It is pretty good, worth adding to my opml for sharpreader. I especially like his Take Outs where he aggregates the posts he finds interesting and puts little comments after them. The format he uses for it is great. As it with most of the blogs that I read regularly, he has a mix of technical content and general blogging content.

There is something (a lot of things?) about the whole blogging thing that differentiates itself from just reading people's websites. I'm talking about the fact that I'll gladly read someone's blog wherein they outline stuff that they do with their life, rather than just technical stuff. On a website, though, it is kind of annoying to go back and see a blurb about their dog, for example. I guess the whole website paradigm seems to me like a newsletter or magazine, whereas a blog (especially the RSS feed) seems much more like a community and conversation.

Did you know that you can find out web pages that Google thinks are similar to yours by putting the command related: in front of your domain in Google? So, for example, to find sites similar to mine, you can put related:www.coreyhaines.com/coreysramblings into the search bar. If you want to find sites that link to yours, you can put link: in front, like link:www.coreyhaines.com/coreysramblings

Yeah, perhaps not that interesting, but, hey, what do you want?

[Update: I stumbled upon a feature of dasBlog that I didn't know about regarding date ranges. You can put a date in the query string of the main page (example, default.aspx?date=2003-12), and it will show only the entries from that date range. This works on both days and months; I haven't tried it for year. This is a good first step. Now, I need to figure out how to make it use a different template, so that I can have the archives just show the title of the entry.]

Well, before I moved to webhost4life (if you are thinking of moving to it, let me know, so I can be your referrer and get lots of money) and switched to dasBlog, I was using Blogger to keep up Corey's Ramblings. I had a grand old site back then, not just a blog, but pictures and links and contact information and random research projects (such as the history of twizzlers and whether high-octane gas really does any good for your car) and lots of good stuff. I've been promising to redo the site using either DotNetNuke or Rainbow, but I haven't got around to it. Oh, the plans I have!

Well, I have a lot of posts and archives over at my blogger version, so I was thinking about how to bring them into my current, dasBlog-based version. Now, converting them wouldn't be too hard, I could just have blogger spit out the posts in a nice xml format (perhaps rss), then write a small conversion utility to get them into the dasBlog format, but here comes the kicker: how do I get around to showing people them. I mean, I wrote a few good things on there, and I'm sure there are people out there like me who will go to someone's blog and read through their old posts. How do I give access to the old posts? This brought up an apparent missing part of dasBlog: an archive page. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to publish your archives through dasBlog. I haven't done a bunch of research on it, yet, but I was thinking that I could write a different theme which would display monthly views of my entries, rather than the last 10 entries).

So, here are the steps for my archive idea:

1. Create a new theme for my site that contains short title-based views of the posts, similar to Rory's archive and make a new page in dasBlog that will show posts based on a date range (perhaps monthly to begin with) and apply the new theme to that page.
2. ??????
3. Profit.

Anyone else have any other ideas? Perhaps some dasBlog user out there already has done this?

Looking at the message board on gotdotnet workspaces for dasBlog, it looks like they are starting to work on having “articles” on your blog, which are special entries that can be pinned into a list somewhere, so people can go back and find them. I used to spend time research silly things and posting them to my blog, so this would be a great place for them.

Well, I've started getting some search referrers looking for things like “i'm just corey pictures,” “corey's got a gun,” “listen to corey's music” and “where is corey's package.” So, I started getting curious and did a little research. It turns out that there is a hip-hop kid named Corey, apparently a friend of Lil' Bow Wow. The reviews on amazon are pretty funny.

So, I thought, why not try to bring all the little teeny-boppers who are looking for this kid here. So, my request to everyone who reads this is that, if you have a website or post in comments or something like that, try to put a couple links for “I'm just corey” to point to www.coreyhaines.com/coreysramblings.

Oddly enough, I'm ranked number 4 in google for “corey's got a gun.”

Currently, the feed translator uses straight xml parsing to read the rss feed and generate the atom feed. Personally, I'd prefer to use a more object-based approach, so I looked around at some of the rss frameworks, such as Jerry Maguire's RSS 2.0 Framework or RSS.Net. These appear to use the same idea I had, just putting them into objects.

I thought a little more about it, and had the idea of just using an xmlserializer instead. I mean, the feeds are xml, they should conform to a schema, whether it exists, or not, so why not just read the rss feed in, then deserialize it into an object graph. I could then do an object mapping into a different format, such as ATOM, then serialize it out.

All I need are schemas for the different formats. Hmmm... A little searching on the internet shows that there aren't any schemas for RSS. Interesting. What I needed to do was to generate an xsd from some example rss files, such as mine, Ian White's, Rory Blyth's and Dave Winer's. But, how to do it? XMLSpy has this capability, but I don't want to install that nastiness onto my computer. So, a little further searching on w3c.org yielded Microsoft XSD Infererence 1.0. Downloading the appropriate rss feeds, then running the command-line utility gave me an xsd. I then used XSD.exe to generate a cs file containing the types. After including it in my project and putting the following code in:

XmlReader reader = new XmlTextReader(url);
XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Com.CoreyHaines.RSSTypes.rss));
Com.CoreyHaines.RSSTypes.rss r = (Com.CoreyHaines.RSSTypes.rss) ser.Deserialize(reader);

I was able to deserialize the feed. The one problem I ran up against was the the inferer utility generated a schema for the elements. I don't have the best experience with schemas, so I'm trying to figure out how to get the element to just map to a string. I tried altering the element in the schema to be a string, but that yielded a null value in the deserialized graph. Anybody know how to do this? Please let me know in the comments.

[Of note: I went through the trouble of finding a utility that would infer a schema from a set of xml documents, then, when I tried to run xsd, I realized that it could do the same thing for me. Doh!]

Well, I upgraded to dasBlog 1.5. I haven't had a ton of time to look around at what is new, but the first thing I saw was that the admin bar along the top is now in an unordered list, rather than the way it was. Also, the activity links have been separated out. I don't think I like it too much. I started fooling around with the server control (adminNavBar.ascx), but I haven't found the way that I really like it, yet. I was thinking of having it just be spans, then you could format it through CSS. Also, the activity links (referrers, click-through, etc.) have been separated into a submenu of Activity. Hmmm... Not sure I like that, either. We'll see.

In any case, the one gotcha that I ran into is with regards to the web.config. In the upgrade instructions, Omar mentions to not copy the web.config file, but just in passing. Silly me, I copied the web.config and ended up losing the link to my theme, plus crashing the whole site. So, if you are upgrading, let this be a lesson, DON'T COPY YOUR WEB.CONFIG file!

I spent all day working on it Saturday, then was having trouble deploying it. To top it all off, I came down with some sort of painful death disease Saturday night and spent all day sunday moaning and groaning (much to the consternation of Mary) and watching football. Today, though, I'm taking the day off of work to rest and recover totally. One of the benefits is that I can work on the feed translator a bit. So, it is working now! Hurra!

http://feedtranslator.coreyhaines.com/feedtranslatortest.htm

Right now, it only supports a subset (basically my dasBlog RSS feed to the dasBlog Atom feed) of RSS to Atom. It is also pretty slow.

For more information, here's my original post with the idea behind this and a follow-up.

If you try it and find any problems, please let me know in the comments for this entry.

So, I've been grappling with the idea of the comments feed on my blog. To be honest, I don't think I write too many entries which will lead to a large comment thread discussion, yet there are some that people still comment on (and rightfully so). I have experimented with replying to the comment in an update of the blog entry, as well as replying to the comment as another comment. Replying as another comment maintains the consistency of the thread, but will anyone go back and read the new comment I wrote? I just don't know? Then, there is the idea of people leaving comments by writing in a link to their own blog and putting an entry there. I've seen some discussions around this in the blogosphere, but most of these are on the blogs of people who have many many readers who leave large comment threads. Hmmm....

For further explanation of what I'm talking about here, please see this post.

I'm almost done with the Feed Format Translator web service. Currently, I have it running on my local box, but I'm having trouble moving the webservice up to my web server, which is hosted at webhosting4life.com. I tried setting a web application and a subdomain, then had my web.config have customErrors mode=”Off”, but it didn't help, so I can't seem to get information about the error it is having. Frankly, I've not too much experience elevating asp.net application, since the majority of what I write are components and winform apps.

Here's the URL for the test harness, maybe someone would want to help me. http://feedtranslator.coreyhaines.com/feedtranslatortest.htm

The code is very brute force right now, doing a straight translation between my RSS feed and my ATOM feed from dasBlog. I'm planning on getting down and dirty with the specs, themselves, and writing a more generic mapper. But, that is for later.

Well, I was looking over IanW's blogroll and came up with this guy's blog, which I think I'll start reading, especially considering his southpark entries and this entry about Robert Tilton.

The odd thing was that I was reading his blog, then couldn't remember where I had found it. Finally noticed that he had Ian W on his blogroll. I guess from there. But, then, I couldn't find a link to his site on Ian's blog. Stupid me, I wasn't looking at his blogroll. What a dufus I am.

(P.S. And what an uninteresting post this was)

[Update: I've got a proof of concept of this working, here's the post about it and a follow-up. Or, go directly to the proof of concept test page: http://feedtranslator.coreyhaines.com/feedtranslatortest.htm]

[Update: Doh! For some reason, my post on this topic got lost and the permalink pointed to my post about Google's answering of the "What is the matrix" question.  I guess I'll have to rewrite my RSS vs. Atom idea].

Scoble points to Evan William's blog and points out that Blogger now supports the Atom syndication format. He asks the question about why Atom instead of RSS. Going further, he, rather facetiously, I hope, asks whether Microsoft should create its own syndication format. :) Currently, MS is supporting RSS 2.0.

Personally, I think the whole RSS vs Atom debate is starting to sound like the HTML standardization debates between IE and Netscape supporters. People are talking about making a standard and having everyone support it, but we all know that human nature isn't like that. Everyone is going to make their own format. Here's my solution to the whole problem:

Create a web service that sits in a central location and is responsible for transforming between formats. If I use a reader that only reads RSS formats, and I want to read an Atom feed, I will point my reader to this web service instead of the Atom feed. The web service will be responsible for taking the URL, reading the feed, then transforming it into the requested format (in this case, RSS). Now, if someone much smarter than I am decides to come up with a totally ass-kicking new syndication format, a transform engine can be written between the new format and other ones. Now, if this web service also supports a rich API for plugging into it, also allowing the transform engine to be a web service, then the author of the format could simply write a transform web service and point the central service to it.

So, to summarize:

• People are selfish, standards fragment and split.
• We need to have a central place to transform between formats so that each individual blogging system can choose to support whatever format they want and not have to worry about supporting all of them.
• Web Service which controls transformations from one syndication format to another.
• Well-defined plugin API, so syndication authors (or others) can write transform engines between their format and others.
• Plugin API should support both component-based and webservice-based.

In one word, BabelFish.

[Update 2]

Dare Obasanjo has a take on this which I don't totally agree with. His idea tends toward moving from RSS 2.0 to a newer, standard syndication format. Again, I think that working on a global standard is only leading to more turf wars, rather than working towards working in our diverse world.

For all the web developers out there, wouldn't it have been great to have a service that would translate your web page to support netscape and ie and opera and all the others? Admittedly, HTML was a bit more complicated, especially when you started adding dynamic stuff with javascript. A syndication format, though, is definitely much simpler than a layout language, so I think this could be possible.

dasBlog supports trackback url's, but I can't seem to find the url for some blogs, especially those that are blogx-based, like IanW's. RoryB's blog is .Text-based, but that doesn't seem to have it, either. Maybe you just have to turn it on? Do I use the perma-link? I guess I could just try and see if it shows up on their comments as a trackback.

Anybody happen to read this and know the answer?

[Update: I tired putting in the blogx permalink, but that didn't work.]

[Update2: I tried looking at the workspaces for .Text and BlogX, but neither of them have anything about it.]

IanW has been talking about different ways of using his blog to host his picture galleries. The original idea of having each picture be one post isn't working out too well, which makes perfect sense, especially from the point of view of storage and comments.

I like the idea of posting all the pictures together as one entry, then having the entry be included in a “pictures” category. The only thing really left is to have the “pictures” category page actually show the list of the galleries available, rather than the thumbnails. Then, when you click on a gallery, it shows the thumbnails. I guess if you had the category page show the descriptions, rather than the content, then you could give each gallery a description, and the body of the entry could be the thumbnail table. The problem I see with this is if you want your other categories to show the full content, rather than just the description. This would put a requirement out there to have the “category view” be configurable on a per-category basis.

I imagine this wouldn't be too difficult, although in dasBlog (which is what I use), there isn't really a category configuration option. Looks like something to add, maybe. I've look a bit into the code for categories, as I'm working on adding the ability to display multiple categories in one feed, and I think it would be feasible to make a couple small changes to include a category-level scheme for what to show on the entry list.

I'm thinking that I could change the item template to check to see if the item contains a certain category, then either display the whole entry or just the description. Hard-coding this will be easy, making it configurable will take a bit more thought.

The last hurdle I see with implementing this in dasBlog is having the item template adjust to show the thumbnail table if you click on the permalink to see the whole entry. I'm guessing that I could probably have a flag set to see how this is being rendered. I've only started thinking about the implementation details, so I guess I've got some more thought to put into it.

One of the original ideas was to have a separate blog set up for pictures, which would definitely make this a lot easier. Integrating it is a bigger issue. OmarS (the author of dasBlog) has a thread in his gotdotnet workspace's message board about integrating this functionality into dasBlog. I haven't really studied his final idea (extending the entry class to Picture), so I don't have too many thoughts, yet.

I know I sound like a little fanboy, but I guess I sort of am right now. So, I got a link from RoryB. To tell you the truth, RoryB and IanW are some of my favorite blogs to read, so getting links from them is a big thing for me.

Now that I've gotten it out of my system, I won't be posting every time I get a link from someone. :) I'll just sit quietly and bask in my happiness.

Wow! I got my first link from someone today. Ian White took a suggestion of mine that I put in his comments about using a blog as a photo gallery and mentioned me in his blog.

I was pretty geeked out and excited, especially since I do read his blog all the time. This is sort of like when Rory got his first link from Don Box (sorry, can't seem to find the permalink). He was super psyched, totally geeked out about it. I feel the same way. I went upstairs and told Mary (she was in the shower) this morning, when I noticed it. It is kind of a cool feeling, as I read all these people's blogs, enjoy their thoughts, enjoy reading their programming stuff, sort of feel like I know them. I guess that is what the whole blog thing is about.

In any case, I'm going to be blogging a lot more, keeping up with my Reluctant Handyman stuff, start putting up more things about programming, just generally keeping things going.

Mary mentioned that she might want to start a blog; I think it is a great idea. I told her that she should start writing about her teaching ideas, posting lesson plans and the like. She definitely has some good stuff that she does with the kids. Just this week, she had some of them making potato turkeys. Odd, quirky, but super cool.