shahine.com/omar/

Graffiti CMS is a pretty awesome blogging tool published by the folks at Telligent. I started playing with it a few weeks ago and immediately fell in love. I knew that others would as well.

Of course I knew that there would be a lot of folks running dasBlog who might want to move to Graffiti, after all, Graffiti 1.1 has built in import for dasBlog posts.

When I learned of this I contacted the folks at Telligent and got a pre-release beta version to play with. After exchanging a few dozen emails with Jayme at Telligent I sent them some fixed up import code that would allow a dasBlog user to import all their posts and maintain their dasBlog permalinks as well as categories. Moving from one blog engine to another is generally a PITA so my goal was to make it pretty painless and since I've spent a few years working on dasBlog I figured it would be pretty easy for me .

Moving from dasBlog to Graffiti is a two step process:

1. Import your posts using Graffiti 1.1 (sorry, if you imported earlier the plugin won't work).
2. Install and configure the plugin I wrote.

You can get the dasBlog301 plugin from CodePlex.

Enjoy!

Scott just announced that dasBlog 1.9.7 has been released.

It's been a long time comin, but this will be the last asp.net 1.1 release. Moving forward we'll release a version that runs on asp.net 2.0 only and will support medium trust. This should make dasBlog run well on a host of providers w/o mucking with security settings.

After that, Clemens has some grand plans for 3.5.

There are a ton of new folks involved on the developer list these days, and it's nice to see the community build up around the little blogging engine that could. I haven't had the time these days to spend on dasBlog like I used to, but I try and sneak in some time here and there.

I'm looking forward to stop using VS.NET 2003 though. I pretty much resort to using Virtual PC these days since it's the only reasonable way to develop for .NET 1.1.

It's no secret that Windows Live Writer is simply the best blog authoring tool out there. What I love is how innovative that team is. Rather than being held hostage to the many blog APIs out there, they have defined awesome ways to provide extensibility and self description of blogging capabilities. From their support of RSD to the latest set of APIs, they keep pushing the envelope by keeping the product fresh and relevant to bloggers. Witness the fact that WordPress and Typepad both have support for this, as well as open source blogs like Subtext and dasBlog.

The best example of this is their recent API support that allows blogging engines like dasBlog to be much better integrated. Scott wrote about this on his blog, and I just updated my blog to take advantage of this. For any existing dasBlog users this is just a drop in upgrade.

Having said that there is one very important bug fix to the blog APIs in dasBlog to support the synchronization of posts to Live Writer. This will be in the upcoming 1.9 release.

BTW, my fav feature of WLW beta 2.... red squiglies. If your app ain't got background spell checking, then it's pretty useless to me. Why? Jeff Atwood says is best:

"People absolutely adore background spell checking. It's one of those rare "you'll get it from me when you pry it out of my dead, cold hands" features that users will switch applications over. Automatic background red-squiggly-underline spell checking in HTML forms is one of the marquee features of Firefox 2.0. In fact, it's feature number two on the feature page, right under tabbed browsing."

After going back to work from parental leave, I've had to carefully pick and chose the things I do that are not 1) work or 2) helping around the house or 3) taking care of a baby. Each have their ups and downs, but all three add up to 100% of my time.

It's been a lot more difficult than I thought. Many of my "side projects" or "hobbies" are progressing very slowly or not at all. However, now that Sarah is close to 7 months, and I'm getting a better handle on work, my energy levels are getting better. I don't feel the need to go to sleep at 9pm every night.

One side effect of this is that I was finally able to update my dasBlog theme. A while back I found a link to this amazing open source design site called Open Designs. I highly recommend them. My blog is now using the Ruby theme by Denise Mitchinson.

They have a lot of amazing stuff there.

At long last dasBlog 1.9 is finally out. Originally this release as a few bug fixes but in the last few months a lot of new folks started to contribute some great stuff and all the small and not so small things that Scott and I did started to add up to quite a bit of stuff .

You can read all about the new features on Scott's blog.