shahine.com/omar/

I just received my Creative Zen Micro. I am preparing to put together a Zen Micro vs iPod review as I have done for the Rio Carbon and the iRiver H320. For those of you that don't know, I have been evaluating various devices in the pursuit to find something as good as or better than my iPod. I outline this quest in my post on iPod Replacement Criteria. For the past few months I have been fairly happy with my Rio Carbon, however I found the Zen to be appealing because it has an FM Radio and a better User Interface, as well as a removable battery. Recently Creative released MTP firmware, which gives it PlaysForSure audio support. They are currently working on firmware that will give it Subscription support for NapsterToGo and have a beta firmware release.

So far my Out of Box experience was phenomenal when compared to the Rio Carbon. Furthermore, I found that it was almost as good as the iPod. Creative is really paying attention as the Zen Micro comes with a white usb cable, a white charger, a sleeve, white headphones and a stand that doubles as a belt clip. Very slick packaging and it made me very happy when opening my new toy. You can see some of the Out of Box pictures below (more pics).

Wow, I didn't realize how I've learned to start almost every sentence with "So..." and boy do I say "Um..." a lot. Well, if you want to see for yourself, I'm on Channel9 talking about Hotmail. Scoble was down back in November and he ended up interviewing me.

Next time we'll have to get more folks in there. Especially some of the folks on the Backend team (the guys that handle the 2 billion inbound messages, as well as the gobs of storage). Just to be clear, I am not The Lead Program Manager for Hotmail. I am A Lead Program Manager. We have 4 of us, and we all do various things. My team happens to own the "Hotmail Front Door Architecture". That means the code that spits out HTML, DAV, POP, SMTP, and a few dozen other kinds of servers. Aditya is also a PM on my team, and he is driving a lot of the new stuff we are building. There is also a User Experience Team that Reeves runs, a Business team and a team that managed the live site (not operationally) that Gil runs. For a while I was doing both the Architecture stuff and the Livesite stuff and it was kicking my butt. Hotmail is a complex system and there are lots of moving parts and lots of new code shipping to the site (most you won't notice). Each and every day we try and improve site efficiency and performance. The key is making those changes to a system with lots of moving parts w/o impacting any of the parts from being able to accept and deliver mail while processing user requests.

The other day an anonymous person sent me this email:

"You are a manager on Hotmail and you say nearly nothing about it. You talk of other things always. Well, it is interesting what you talk about but I would have liked much more about Hotmail as well. Currently Hotmail is not well regarded due largely to the advent of Gmail. Google have the touch of an innovator and atracts public opinion. Why don't you fix this? Make Hotmail better again please. Aren't you going to make some announcements for Hotmail. A better interface perhaps? An interface which is faster and allows better e-mail searches?
We want more info from you on Hotmail. If we don't get info from you who is a Hotmail manager, from whom are we going to hear about Hotmail. How are we going to love Hotmail again? Do you care ore about you programming projects? Or is MS happy that Hotmail is still popular and does not wish to improve or even talk about it?"

Since I obviously can't comment on what we are doing right now, all I can say is "Stay Tuned"... . I haven't been talking about Hotmail a whole lot for obvious reasons. 

In life there are always at least two camps. When I was a kid it was Nike vs Reebok. For some people it's Audi vs BMW, for others it's iPod vs everything else. I feel that I am in many camps, but when it comes to Apple vs Microsoft, MCE vs TiVo, iPod vs Everything else I feel that I have as an objective point of view as is possible. How? Well I have owned or own both, and love each for what they bring to the table. I worked on Mac software at Microsoft, loved the Mac OS and the products I work on, but I also love the products my company makes.

I've seen a lot of activity over the last few days both in the blogsphere and inside Microsoft in reaction to this Wired Article. First and foremost, this article was silly. There was no story here, and it was sensational at best. For heavens sake I carried a PowerBook around at Microsoft for 4 years and no one ever said jack to me. The notion that people at Microsoft are offended or care that I might use a competitors product is ludicrous. The notion that you can build a better product than your competition without using and loving that product is silly. You cannot build a better product than your competition unless you are intimately familiar with the competition. The only way to do that without fooling yourself is to use it, day in and day out. I wish everyone in the Media Group at Microsoft had an iPod.

What some people fail to understand is that there is a fundamental difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple creates the hardware for their end users. They start with an end to end scenario. That is, they come up with a compelling idea, and they design the solution. From the Apple Store to the experience at home opening the item, taking it out of its packaging, and installing the software then using the device is a well orchestrated series of events. Apple has spent months if not years thinking about how to perfect this experience. No other company does this in the consumer space, and it's not possible unless you own everything in the scenario. In this case Apple owns the store, the hardware, the music store, the software to connect to the device, the software to download from the store, and the relationship with all the record labels who provide the media. This is incredibly powerful when you are trying to solve specific scenarios, and when it comes to things people have always been incredibly passionate about (music) it matters.

Now contrast this to Microsoft. For the past few years the focus has been on building a world class platform. From the codec's, to the encoding technology, to the protocol for moving bits from the computer to the device, to the encryption technology, policy enforcement of digital rights, and servers to manage those rights it's all been spec'ed and delivered in a manner that any software developer can utilize. You can create your own Music Store and sell content to anyone with a compatible device. You can build a device that can play rich video and audio. You can build software that can manipulate that music, and organize it for users, or even a new shell that can present that media to the user who is sitting on their couch and interacts via a remote control. You can even buy a cell phone that can consume these media files! Talk about a rich eco system. But that's what it is; a platform for anyone with a desire to build on. Microsoft participates in this eco system via the MSN Music Store, and other various properties, but we do not dictate how much you will pay, and what device you will use. We give you choice, and history has shown time and time again, that choice is always more powerful. Choice and flexibility always wins. Consumers want choice.

However, that choice comes at a huge price in this case. The cost of doing this is that until Microsoft starts to make audio devices, or an OEM can produce a product that delivers on a totally solid end to end experience, we'll always be in an us vs them state of affairs. A music device these days is a form of personal expression. Like a phone, or a watch, it's part of your identity and something which brings you joy. I think this is why people are so interested and opinionated in this debate. They feel like they are being attacked personally, and well, most folks don't like that. However, I respect both the iPod and the platform Microsoft provides for their own qualities. I absolutely love the out of box experience you get with the iPod. Everything about it has been designed to work. If you buy a Creative Zen Micro you have to install firmware before you can even take advantage of the technology platform we have built to provide a seamless synchronization experience with Windows Media Player. Where is the value proposition there? When you purchase a Rio Carbon you need to use a sledge hammer to get the packaging opened before you can use your device! Not so with the iPod, as you are greeted by a friendly and happy white box that opens like a well engineered package should. It says "Designed in California" and has a beautiful stainless steel and acrylic build that you don't want to tarnish. My Rio Carbon has a cheap coat of paint on it that is pealing of. How can you compare? How can you convince OEMs to care as much as Apple and spend as much time and money caring?

Well I don't know the answers to all these questions but I do know this. I love the iPod; it's fantastic. However, I don't purchase any music from iTunes because I love my Windows Media Center and I want my music to work everywhere that my ears can listen. That means my from my living room couch where I can control my Media Center, from my portable device on the train where I spend 2 hours a day, from the speakers of my car when I spend time on the weekend, from my office computer and from my laptop. I want full fidelity at home, which means lossless audio, and I want as many songs as will fit on 5 GB w/o a significant loss in audio quality (128 K WMA VBR). I also want to manage all this music from a single music library, and I want to be able to move all my purchased audio around to all these device. This is my end to end scenario, and for me Windows provides the platform to do all this. The iPod is still a better end to end experience for a portable device, I will not deny that. However, the OEMs are getting better at delivering hardware. That takes lot of work and evangelism on our part. We don't make the hardware, that's not what Microsoft is about today (I'm not arguing that we should or shouldn't). However, we are awesome at making a killer end to end technology platform and placing choice in the hands of the consumer. That choice comes at a cost of using our file format, but that file format is public, available, and licensable. FairPlay is not. iTunes is not open, and there are no other choices but the iPod on the Mac. Once upon a time there were third party music players, but Apple has taken away the incentive to stick around. As we continue to improve the platform and work with the OEMs the end to end portable device scenario will get better. If you need examples just look at where the Mobile Devices division has come from and where the Pocket PC and Smartphone are today. Look at the Portable Media Center; there is nothing in it's class that is as good. It will get smaller and the OEMs will create more unique form factors to address user needs. And for something where we aren't following, but leading, look at the Tablet PC. You may not need or want one, but it's an incredible testament to what is possible with time and investment in our part. The rest of the story continues with investment in helping the OEMs build a variety of products, with great experiences that give people more choice in what they can buy. People like choice.

If this thing is real... I want I want

A quick look at Amazon Prime and I've signed up. Why? Well I order at least 12 shipments worth of stuff from Amazon every year (and my wife a bunch as well). Free 2 day shipping and overnight for $3.99 seems like a good deal, especially when I need that instant gratification. Even better is that I can share this benefit with household members (my wife).

The Benefits of Amazon Prime
Enjoy free second-day shipping on every order or overnight shipping for only $3.99 per item to addresses in the continental United States, and the convenience of 1-Click ordering. Items in multiple-item orders are shipped as soon as they're available—at no extra charge. And you can invite family members living in the your household to share the benefits. As an Amazon Prime member, you won't have to think about shipping charges when you order.

Next year I'll see how it fares and re-evaluate if it was worth it, but me thinks yes. If I order one thing per month from Amazon, that works out to $6.58. That's about the cost of "standard" shipping. While I am loathe to pay yet another "subscription" fee, this one seems like a good deal since I can now shift more of my "play money" purchases from BestBuy, Fry's etc to Amazon and not have to wait a long time for the free super saver shipping. A lot of the time I buy from brick and mortar simply because of the instant gratification.

Agrhhhhh! This is why I hate computers sometimes. Based on this post that I saw a few days ago I enabled the Indexing Service on Windows XP. Well all of a sudden I started getting:

Parser Error Message: Access is denied: [name of .dll here]

When debugging dasBlog. For 2 freaking hours I tried to figure out what was wrong, and then thanks to google found this.

"If you use Index Server, you can exclude the Temporary ASP.NET Files directory from the folders that the Index Server scans. To do so, follow these steps."

Lets see, the Indexing service is disabled by default. I enabled it so that I can use it. Why else would I do this? And why can't aspnet_regiis exclude this directory from the Indexing Service? I hate computers sometimes.

It's so weird how a small black book and a nice pen can change things. Since graduating from college I have increasingly gone "all digital". No more paper, vacuum tubes, tapes etc etc. However, in this process I have tried to cram the needs of my life into a set of rather restrictive tools, at least when compared to paper. While Getting Things Done has really helped me to manage my life using digital tools, I feel that I've arbitrarily limited my own success because I never even allowed myself to consider paper as a tool for helping me. Kind of short sighted looking back.

The PDA

When I first red Steve's post about the 21st century PDA it really made me think. In school I used to take lots of notes, I mean lots. That is how I learned. Since then I use the computer for everything. I have owned a few PDAs over the years, and looking back on my experiences I can't say that any single one has really done a better job than paper can do for some core things. I think the PDA was initially attractive to me because I could have my contacts and calendar everywhere I go. However, now my phone provides that functionality, as well as e-mail and wireless synchronization to our corporate exchange servers. Whether it's Smartphone or Pocket PC Phone Edition, they both do this well. However, the Smartphone is to much of a read only device, and the Pocket PC is to clunky for taking notes. To this day, I have yet to find a better note taking experience then paper. The Apple Newton came dammed close, and since then no one has bothered. My Tablet PC and OneNote has an amazing writing experience but my laptop is to big, heavy, and runs on batteries making it non ideal for note taking. Until there is a small slate like device that can capture ink like the Tablet PC, I will probably never feel that it's suitable for the kinds of things my Mokeskines are.

So, what does a guy who has a SmartPhone, Tablet PC, OneNote, and 3 computers need a Moleskine for? A lot of things, and I'll explain them based on the notebooks I purchased.

Moleskine Large Ruled Notebook

I use this notebook exclusively at home for taking notes when I read computer books, photography books etc. Basically anything where I am learning something that I want to commit to memory, as well as have available for reference later. This was basically how I worked in school, so why not in life? I also check a lot of books out of our library at work, and once I return them I pretty much lose whatever I didn't commit to my brain. Cuddling up with a book and my 5 pound tablet with 3 hours of battery life ain't going to suffice in these cases.

Moleskine Pocket Ruled Notebook

This notebook goes everywhere with me. I've obviously read all the Hacks out there, and have taken some and applied them to my notebook. This notebook is primarily for my "Life" since I use my PC so heavily at Work, and use the Outlook Task list for my Actions. I've organized the notebook into 4 sections. I divide the book in half and I place the first  Avery Write-On Tabs there. The first section of the notebook is for Next Actions. In the Next Actions section I label pages with Contexts like @Calls, @Home etc. From the middle and for the next 10 pages I have Projects, then Someday List, then Reference. In the Someday section I have a page for my Wish List and then my Blog Post list. In the Reference section I place any reference info like the Caltrain schedule, our Microsoft shuttle schedule, a map of the Redmond Campus, Flight info etc.

Then I turn the notebook horizontally and vertically and that is where I write my generic Notes or where I dump stuff. Things I would normally write on a post it and then lose track of later. So think of it like this:

1. (1 - 96) : Next Actions
   1. A page each for @Calls, @Errands, @Home etc. I use one page per context, and then I move to the next free page when it's filled.
2. (97 - 107) : Projects
   1. For a list of all my active projects.
3. (107 - 117) : Someday
   1. A page for my Wish List
   2. A page for my Blog Posts list
4. (192 - 127) : Notes/Dump
   1. this section starts from the back of the notebook and works it's way in.

I can't tell you how amazing it is to just have this thing around to immediately write things down. It gives me a lot of control in my life and makes it quite fun. I use a Fisher Space Pen Bullet in Matte with a Clip.

I keep the pen strapped to the top of my notebook. I also keep a Bart card, a New York metro card, some stamps and a $20 bill in my secret hidden Moleskine pocket.

Moleskine Large Squared Notebook

I keep this at work and use it for meetings where I don't want my laptop, for my weekly One on One's with my direct reports, and for an ideas that I have. It's divided into 3 sections:

1. (1 - 120) : General Notes, Meeting Notes etc
2. (120 - 130) : Projects
3. (130 - 240) : People
   1. This is for any One on Ones, Interviews or an discussions I have with people.

Technology

At first I was worried that I would have a hard time integrating analog and digital. However, what I have found (like Brian Johnson) was that I became a better OneNote user. I love OneNote, but because it was so easy to create sections, pages and the like my Notebook had this crazy complicated taxonomy that I could never figure out myself.

When you start using paper again, you are limited by some fairly basic things. One you write you can't erase, when a page is full it can't be moved, and you can't search your notes with a computer. However, this isn't so bad, as this is how I did things for most of my life and it tended to work fine. Digital has introduced so many options that I never knew how to use them. Some of the things I have noticed doing the past few days are:

• I like taking notes in my Moleskine at work. I am not distracted by Outlook, and I can focus on the meeting rather than bury my head in my laptop.
• I transfer important work items like next actions to Outlook at some point, and then cross them off.
• When I am using OneNote to take notes, I mark Next Actions using the Todo flag, and when the meeting is done, or I am finished taking notes, I send these tasks to Outlook from OneNote. 
• I take all notes from my One on Ones in my Large Moleskine.
• I keep the number of sections and folders in OneNote to a minimum.
• I separate a Work and Personal section in OneNote.
• My personal stuff is mostly in my Pocket Moleskine since that's what I have the easiest access to at home, on the weekends etc. It doesn't run out of batteries and doesn't require that I boot it up.

So the bottom line is that I use a mix of my Large Moleskine and OneNote at work. I like to think on paper, and take notes in some meetings (the ones where I am learning new stuff), and use it for ideas. Stuff that is actionable I move to Outlook later. I use OneNote for all my other Meeting Notes, as well as putting small snippets of reference data and such.

Here is what my OneNote looks like:

• Side Notes - screen clippings, etc
• Inbox - dumping ground for all unprocessed stuff
• Personal
  • House - House related notes
  • Journal - Journal for when I travel
  • Notes - General notes, dump, ideas
  • Programming - Stuff I learn about programming
  • Reference - General reference info
  • Restricted - Password protected for personal notes
• Work
  • Lists - my GTD lists that I manually transfer to Outlook later
    • Next Actions - things I can think of before I move them to Outlook via OneNote.
    • Projects - A list of all my active work projects
  • Meetings - a place for all my meeting notes that I don't use the Moleskine for
  • Notes - General notes, dump, ideas etc
  • Classes - for classes I take at work

As you can see my work Section has Lists for my GTD stuff, but all my personal Lists are in my Moleskine Pocket notebook. I've found that this is just the right balance of digital and analog to make me more productive. My work notebook is more temporal/transitive in nature, where my pocket notebook is not as in many cases it's the primary life task list.

I'm still tweaking the system, but so far I like it.

If you are interested in any relevant links that I find as I learn more you can read or subscribe to my del.icio.us link blog.

Scoble just mentioned that he'd fallen off the Getting Things Done wagon. This is dangerous. Since I started last march I have never fallen off the wagon. I have been bad about my weekly review of the task list, and I generally add more tasks to my task list then I complete, but I have stuck to it because I know that my life before it was a stressful mess and I want no part of that. I religiously file things at home, use my Brother label maker to label my manila folders, and keep all unprocessed things in my real "inbox" to be dealt with when I have time.

An inbox full of stuff directly correlates to stress. Stress gets in the way of work, AND life. I don't want to be stressed, so I am religious about making sure that my Inbox is fully triaged by the end of every workday. My inbox is by no means ever empty, cause that's IMPOSSIBLE. My inbox always has less then one screen full of emails in Outlook (translation, under 20 messages). Usually I have 5-10. These are just things that are in the queue. They get dealt with and I don't ever stress about them. Because of ClearContext I know that anything important is red, and catches my eye so I know in what order to deal with things.

I have added one valuable tool to my Getting Things Done system, and that's my 21st Century PDA. I love this thing, and I can't begin to explain how it filled a big void in my life. The Moleskine is like the Brother label maker + Manila Files. Because of its simplicity and ease of use, it's a motivation to write things down. Stuff that I used to store on my scratch disk (the brain) and stuff that I always forgot because I wasn't in front of a computer with OneNote or Outlook. It's made me so happy. I feel even more in control of the things I need to do, and I really enjoy knowing that they are all in one little black book.

I have owned the Bose Noise QuietComfort I and II for a while now. A few weeks ago (at Macworld) I purchased the Etymotic ER 6 isolator earphones for $99. I seriously love these headphones. I did not get the white ones (ER 6i) because they were designed to compensate for deficiencies in the iPod (from what I understand). These are also deficiencies common in other MP3 players although I don't know which ones.

"6i isolator earphones are designed specifically for use with the Apple iPod and other small portable players, offering 8 dB higher overall sensitivity and slightly more bass than the ER-6 isolator earphones." [link]

I was lucky enough that I could try both the black 6 and the white 6i. The both fit in your ear a bit differently, and I happened to like the black ones better because they use the 2 flange eartip rather than the white 3 flange eartip. Plus they were cheaper. I also tried out the Shure E3c, but liked the ER 6 much better. I also happen to have a great interaction with the people in the Etymotic booth at Macrworld... much better than my experience in the Shure booth. To top things off, the Etymotic people were selling their product in the booth for a nice big discount and they gave me a free Sumajin, which is a genius invention and a must have for all portable music player owners. I like companies that sell their stuff at Macworld... instant gratification + big discount is king

I have yet to get on a plane since purchasing them, but when I do I'll let you know how they fare against the Bose. Scoble says he is going to buy the white ones, but if he doesn't have an iPod I'm not sure why he would. Buzz first pointed to these a few months ago, and of course planted the seed in my head that I must buy them to replace my white Sony Earbud headphones.

This has to be my favorite feature (I don't really use FireFox, but just started to play around with it). I am always looking for specific text in a web page, and I hate doing the Control-F, rinse, repeat mechanism to find something. FireFox has this nice feature where you can just start typing the text and it will automatically find it in the page.

I do this A LOT when clicking on results from a search query, and looking for the string I searched for in the page. Love it.

FireFox is pretty slick. It has lots of nice small usability and productivity enhancements.

Everything you wanted to know about the Office 2003 Primary Interop Assemblies (ignore if you aren't writing a managed code for Office).

"Learn how to get and install the Office 2003 primary interop assemblies (PIAs), and how to reference and troubleshoot them."

Of course it won't address the issues Josh raised.

I can't believe I just found out about this! SmugMug is an online photo site like Shutterfly or Ofoto with some BIG differences. For $29.95 a year you can store unlimited photos! That's right, simply start your uploads, and they will store full resolution versions of your pics as long as they are around. For the standard account I believe they limit you two uploading 2 GB of data a month. Still that rocks.

I was just lamenting at work about how I'm pretty bad about archiving my pictures offsite (I do back them up to DVD and place them in a FireSafe). This totally solves the backup/sharing problem all in one place.

To top it all off, they have an XML-RPC based API for manipulating your stuff, creating albums, and uploading. Badass!

If you signup and feel like it use my email address, omar at shahine.com (replace at with @), or this coupon code (hDBXAc8lccGdQ) to get $5 off (I will get a $10 credit). Or click here to signup.

Here are the features you get:

• Shoot a million photos — it's unlimited!
• Upload 100s of photos with a click
• Organize at light speed
• Liberate yourself from spam and ads
• Make it easy on your friends with 1-click sharing
• View more pics with less clicks
• Buy top-quality prints and gifts
• Sleep well with backup CDs & DVDs
• Retrieve your original, high-res photos
• Post photos in blogs & forums
• Upload from camera phones
• Create your own vanity URL
• Track visits and watch your popularity grow
• Be notified of comments
• Crop the bad parts
• Enhance the good parts
• Password-protect the embarrassing
• Create private ShareGroups
• Create a bio
• Flaunt your friends and family
• Program it!
• Just $29.95/year

Scott recently posted about his new WRT54G, and at the bottom of his post he stated:

Flakey: This is a flakey router. I have to reboot it once or twice a month. Also, when I flashed it this evening with the new Alchemy build (I was upgrading from Satori) I had to hold the reset button for like two minutes. Also, the power light wouldn't stop flashing (a bad thing) until I disconnected and reconnected the Internet cable (a weird thing) then everything started working again (a good thing.)

I was a very first customer of yours, and purchased your first router at Fry's. I loved this router. It was stable, never required reboots, and generally worked. Since then your products have gone down hill. For one thing, you never know what you are purchasing. You have devised a tricky scheme whereby you version your hardware, and your firmware. On your web site it never states what is what. When purchasing at Fry's it's a challenge to find a single box that was not returned, and different boxes state different version numbers such as v 1.1, v 2.1, v 3.2 for the same product line. To make matters worse, the firmware downloads on your web site never state which goes where. Finally, your firmware has a tendency to destabilize the product requiring numerous reboots.

The last time I bought something from you was last year. It was a Wireless Access Point, and it required reboots every 2 days. Every firmware version released made matters worse, and finally you gave up releasing firmware so you could release new versions of the hardware (see above).

To make matters worse, companies are charging $20 a year to send you firmware to replace your crap firmware. Can you believe this? That's right, people are making money on your deficiencies, and they are happy about it! I guess that is why you give away your source. You should consider getting them to do all your firmware development.

I hoped that when Cisco purchased you their first priority would be to clean up this mess. Seems it will take longer than hoped since your brand new flagship 802.11g router causes Scott Hanselman grief. And if it causes him grief do you think I'm going to place such a product in my home, or my family's home? No thanks. Instead I use the Microsoft Broadband routers which were discontinued. I know people that still scour the Internet for this product because it's the only thing that doesn't require a reboot every few days.

And finally, to illustrate my point. The only routers you should ever purchase are the ones on this page. This ensures that the router meets some decent level of quality. The Linksys WRT55AG that Scott has is listed there, but like this:

Linksys WRT55AG Dual-Band Wireless A+G Broadband Router Ver. 2

That's right, Ver. 2. How do you know if you are buying Ver. 2 when purchasing online? Beats the heck out of me. If you were at Fry's it's the one w/o any Return Stickers, and if you look closely, it will probably say on the side of the box.

What do I do about all this? I have a stockpile of Microsoft routers (2 MN-700s, 1 MN-100), my parents and sister each have MN-500s as well as Apple AirportExtreme for wireless bridging.

As I promised, here is the code for the MovableType Blacklist that I wrote for dasBlog.

There are three pieces to it:

1. the IBlackList interface
2. The MovableTypeBlacklist class
3. The Factory Class that holds an instance of the MovableTypeBlacklist and the ReferralUrlBlacklist

Feel free to use in your ASP.NET application.

First of all, the community reaction to dasBlog Community Edition 1.7 has been great! I’m delighted that people have been able to move with little trouble. However, a number of folks have asked some questions and I’d like to answer some of those.

Question: What happened to the Attachment feature, and what is this new Enclosure feature?

Answer: in previous versions of dasBlog there was a way to Attach files etc to a post. However, all this did was move the file from your desktop to your /binary folder and adds a link to the content of an entry. I never thought this was very useful. Furthermore, dasBlog never utilised the enclosure feature of RSS. I decided it was high time we actually make this feature useful, and support RSS enclosure. However, RSS enclosure only allows for a single enclosure per RSS item. My goal was to also allow the old functionality, and support a true n number of attachments but only expose a single one as the RSS enclosure, but I never finished this work. Expect it in the next version.

Question: What happened to the image upload feature?

Answer: Since FreeTextBox has a nice image upload feature via the Gallery I assumed this was good enough for folks and I removed the duplicate functionality in upload image. Well, a number of folks have expressed that they miss the old feature. Expect this to come back in the .2 version of 1.7, and in 1.8 expect a better image upload feature that allows you to store all the images/attachments per Entry in a guid based folder in the /binary folder. I’ve wanted this for a while as I have tons of stuff in my /binary folder that’s orphaned.

Question: The directions for uploading are a bit confusing, can you clear this up?

Answer: I reworked them a bit as I got plenty of feedback that it was confusing. I’ve placed them in the Release Notes.

Question: How do these new anti-spam feature work, and how do I turn them on?

Answer: dasBlog 1.7 has 4 major anti-spam features. They are all disabled by default, and you need to enable them in your Configuration. When enabled there is an additional option to send an HTTP 404 Status Code to blocked referrers, dropping the connection and not wasting any server resources on the referral.

1. CAPTCHA for Comments

This feature will force users to prove that they are human via a proof. The proof is that you mist enter a 6 character series of digits and numbers in the CommentView page before the Comment will be accepted. The aim of this is to prevent automation of comment entry.

2. MovableType Blacklist Support

dasBlog includes support for the MovableType Blacklist by Jay Allen. This will prevent referrals and comments from any domain that is listed in the blacklist.txt file. When enabled, dasBlog will attempt to download this file in the Application Start method, or when enabled from the Configuration page. At most the file is downloaded once per day, and will also be downloaded whenever your ISP sets your ASP.NET worker process to recycle.

3. Content based Blacklist

dasBlog will also filter out any domain from referrals or comments based on keywords that you can enter in the Configuration Page. You should place the entire domain, or any subset of that domain separated by a semi-colon. For example, “foo;bar;foo.com;bar.com”.

4. IP Blacklist

The IP Blacklist must be enabled from the Web.config section (httpModules) since it operates as an HttpModule. The list of the IP addresses to block is located in the blockedips.config file in your SiteConfig folder.

Question: Will you add support for rel=nofollow?

Answer: Yes, this is checked in and will be in .2. It will only be used for Referrals, not for Trackbacks or Pingbacks. If it becomes a problem for Trackbacks and Pingbacks I will add support for this as well. dasBlog does not render html tags from comments so there is nothing to do there.

Question: I’ve found a bug or have a feature request, where do I send them?

Answer: Please enter them into SourceForge

• Bugs
• Feature Suggestions

Question: When will bug x be fixed?

Answer: In about a month we will fix the highest priority bugs in a Service Release. This will be the .2 version of 1.7.

Question: I have some code I would like to contribute, but I don’t want or know how to join the project.

Answer: Just zip the code and send it to me. You can get the code from CVS Anonymously.