CodeClimber

As I already anticipated a few days ago, Subtext was on its way to be released. And today Phil just announced it: Subtext 2.0 has been released, one year and a few months after the previous version 1.9.5. I already explained a some of the new features of Subtext 2.0: Publish in the future JS and CSS performance optimization Enclosures but Subtext 2.0 also brings to the table: Enhanced MetaWeblog API implementation Enhanced WLW implementation ...

In the last two days I wrote about two new feature of Subtext 2.0: Enclosures and performance optimizations for skins. Today I’ll talk about another new feature of Subtext 2.0: Future Posting. I already anticipated this feature while I was testing it last week: posting in the future allows the blog’s author to write a post either with the post editor online or with any offline blogging application (like Windows Live Writer), set the date and time, save it on the server as published (not as draft), and have it automatically published both on the blog and the RSS feed at the...

Yesterday I wrote about the support for enclusures that has been introduced with Subtext 2.0. Today I’m going to talk about the improvements we introduced to our skinning engine in order to reduce the number and the size of HTTP requests. And we added support for mobile browsers as well. Web Performance Optimization It all started last year, when Yahoo released YSlow, an add-on for Firebug that measures the performance of a web page based on the best practices evangelized by the Yahoo’s team for Exceptional Performance. Pushed by Mads Kristensen I improved the performances of my own blog with some...

One of the cool new features of the latest version of Subtext is the support for enclosures. What can a enclosure do for you? You can use it to: host a podcast host a webcast/screencast to have photoblog or just to include a downloadable file to your post, like a code archive, a pdf file or a PowerPoint presentation How to add a enclosure At the bottom of the post page you’ll find...

As you might have noticed, a few weeks ago Subtext entered the QA phase of the development process, and the new version, v2.0, is going to be released in a short time. In the next days I’m going to write a few posts about the features I implemented for this new release, with the description of the features, and a little bit of “internals” how they were implemented. Check my blog during the weekend, or subscribe to the feed to get the new posts with the new features of Subtext delivered automatically to your feedreader. Technorati...

As I did last week, this evening I upgraded my blog to the latest interim version of Subtext. As you might see, the time of this post is 5:00AM. No, I didn’t stay up till late, but I’m using one of the new features of the soon to be release 2.0: the ability to post in the future. So, if this post popped up in your RSS reader at 5:00AM it means the new feature is working… otherwise, it means we have a bug to fix before we do the release. We also created a custom manifest for Windows Live...

You might have noticed a short period of downtime at 8:30 this morning (CET): that’s because I woke up and decided to test on my own blog the soon to be released next version of Subtext. As usual the upgrade was pretty simple, and just a matter of changing the values that need to be customized in the web.config file (connectionstring, email addresses, and gravatar url), copying all the new directory tree over the old one, and running the upgrade wizard that appears the first time you reload the site after the files have been changed. And here...

Just found via Twitter thanks to Matt Hawley: SubversionFeed. This service takes any SVN repository with anonymous access enabled and transforms it into a RSS feed with the latest 10 changes. I just subscribed to Subtext SVN RSS feed: http://svnfeed.com/convert?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsubtext.svn.sourceforge.net%2Fsvnroot%2Fsubtext Technorati Tags: RSS,SVN,Subtext

If you subscribed to subtextbuild twitter feed or added Subtext build server to the list of CI server you are monitoring with CCTray, or better, the CCNET Monitor gadget for Vista you might have noticed that the number of builds raised a bit in the latest days: the reason is that finally the Subtext team is having a bit more spare time than before and we are planning to release Subtext vNext pretty soon with some exciting new features. subtext

After all those months where my main community related activity was writing articles, this weekend I decided to go back into coding: Subtext is approaching a new release soon, with tons of new features, so back on the project to make it happens I started having a look at CodeCampServer and already submitted a tiny little patch Processing: my wife and I are working at a video for an exhibition at the end of April... let's see if I we come out with some cool generative art ...

Today I was hit by a massive spam attack, both here and on my Italian blog: here I received almost 1000 spam trackback in one day, and on my Italian one I reached the incredible number of 30.000, and almost all passed as approved. I guess Akismet is having some problems these days. Technorati tags: Subtext, Akismet

While I was leaving for Barcelona to visit a friend and to enjoy Les Festes de la Mercè, a user of Subtext found a security problem in our integration with the WYSIWYG editor FCKeditor. And only one day after it has been discovered Phil released a security patch that fixes the problem. The vulnerability allowed a user to upload files in the images folder of a blog without being authenticated. To secure your installation of Subtext just download the secured version of the FCKeditor provider dll, or, as workaround, remove the following folder: Providers\BlogEntryEditor\FCKeditor\editor\filemanager Technorati tags: FCKeditor, Subtext, security patch

A few months ago I released a rough first version of an ASP.NET control to display text-links served by LinkLift. Since then the control became the "de-facto" official control for ASP.NET (Italian, German, French and Spanish). Today I found quite a subtle bug that never showed up before (since I never really had the control on my site for more than a few hour): I used the FileSystemInfo.CreationTime to keep track of the last time the local copy of the XML was saved. But the CreationTime is the first time the file was saved, because all the subsequent saves are...

What is the Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM)? Every Unicode string starts with a "zero-width no-break space"; depending on its actual byte representation, a text processor understands the endianness of the characters that follow the BOM. For example, in UTF-16, if the first character of a string is represented as FE FF it means that the bytes in the string are represented using the Big Endian order, while if the string was using the Little Endian order, the first character would have been represented as FF FE. This rule apply only to UFT-16 and UTF-32 encoded strings, and not to UTF-8 (since there is just...

Mads Kristensen, after reading my report about the score given by YSlow to his and other blogs, improved his score and challenged me to do the same. After 20 days, recovering from the time zone shift, and after a few days of holidays, yesterday evening I finally managed to try and improve my score: with some manual tuning to the CSS, the JavaScript files and Subtext masterpage I improved my score by 77% (28 points, from 36 to 64). I didn't beat Mads's score which is 67 (was 71 at the time of the challenge), but his improvement was 15 points, which is almost...

As I anticipated yesterday, I implemented the YUI JS compressor inside Subtext's build process, and since it took me a while to understand how to specify the arguments for the NAnt <exec> task I wanted to share the snippet of the build file I created: <target name="JavaScript.minify"> <echo message="${filename}" /> <exec program="java" workingdir="${YUICompressor.dir}"> <arg value="-jar" /> <arg value="yuicompressor.jar" /> <arg value="-o" /> <arg value="${filename}.min" /> ...

Last week the UGIdotNET community blog portal migrated to Subtext, and yesterday, another Italian .NET blogger, Michele Locuratolo, C# MVP and co-founder of a regional .NET UG (dotnetside), moved from Community Server to SubText. Seems like he had a few issues exporting his blog from CommunityServer to BlogML, so he had to transform the DB schema from CS to Subtext manually. Happy blogging Mighel! Technorati tags: Subtext, UGIdotNET

In the last weeks there has been a lot of talking around YSlow, the tool that the Yahoo! Developer Network released to check sites against their 13 rules of High Performance Web Sites. Last week I used it against various blogs and I found out that my blog is rated only 36/100. So, also after the challenge started by Mads, I decided to try and improve my score. The final score is a weighted average between the scores for each of the 13 rules. This means that some rules are more important than others and to increase the score of a site...

 goes to   After GeeksWithBlogs, also UGIdotNET, the Italian .NET user group, migrated from .Text to Subtext. Andrea, the president of the user group, waited for the week of "Ferragosto" when almost all the Italians are on holiday, to minimize the down time of the blog portal. The first comments are positive, users like the new RichTextEditor, or the possibility to close the comments after N days, or to use Akismet to filter the spam. A lot of the very old skins are not available on Subtext, so most the personal blogs changed their skin, and I'm happy to see that most have them have...

Ivan, the Belgian .NET developer and member of the Wellington.NET user group just moved his blog from DasBlog to Subtext. He is a very smart guy, with lot of interesting opinions about development, not only .NET but also Ruby and other "cool" languages, so if are not already subscribed to his blog I encourage you to do so. He also decided to stop developing nBlogr, his own blogging engine: it's always sad when someone decides to stop developing his own project for lack of time. Hopefully Ivan will contribute to Subtext, and with the plugin framework we are adding to Poseidon, he will...

A few weeks ago I received a message from Valentina Baraldi, the Italian Country Manager of LinkLift, asking me if I wanted to take part in the beta testing of their Text Links. At the moment they are hitting the Italian, German and Spanish markets, but they are delivering Text Links also in other languages (English, French, Polish and Portuguese) Text links are a new way to monetize your blog, that should be more targeted then Google AdSense: the most famous company that delivers these kinds of links is text-link-ads. So I decided to give it a try since at the moment...

Tomorrow I'll be at SuperHappyDevHouse Aotearoa, the NZ version of the US SuperHappyDevHouse held monthly in the SF bay area. I still haven't grasped what it is about, so I just report the "official" description: SuperHappyDevHouse Aotearoa is inspired by SuperHappyDevHouse, a monthly hackathon event in the US, combining serious and not-so-serious productivity with a fun and exciting party atmosphere. The whole thing is about rapid development, ad-hoc collaboration and cross pollination. Hardcore coders, l33t hax0r, passionate designers, and other types that enjoy software and technology development will be at home in the SuperHappyDevHouse. This is...

Sometimes I receive mail from people asking how to install Subtext and how to move their old contents from their old blog. Probably the "official" docs are a bit hidden, so here is quick list of all the resources available: Official step by step installation guide Installation screencast How to install Subtext on GoDaddy (which requires a few manual steps) How to install Subtext on Aruba, an Italian hosting provider (this doc is in Italian) And now the migrations docs: Screencast on how to migrate old...

Today I published the 3rd article for Subtext plugin SDK quickstart documentation: Create a custom settings page. This article explains how to write a web user control to collect data for the configuration of the plugin. Here is the toc: Create a Settings page Load and store settings Installing the plugin What’s next Now that the plugin framework API are pretty stable you can start write plugins for Subtext and help us with your feedback about the API. So, go and grab the latest code from SVN, read the Quick Start guide, write your plugin, if you have problem...

Thanks to everyone that nominated Subtext for the SourceForge Community Choice Award. Nominations Subtext has been nominated for 2 Awards: Best Project for Communications: The best project for talking to your friends or sharing information (together with Miranda, Pidgin (ex gaim), FileZilla and others) Most Collaborative Project: The project most likely to accept your patches and value your input (with Azureus, XOOPS, Zimbra, ADempiere) This is already a big achievement for Subtext, but maybe we can do even better then just being nominated. A it is the only .NET project nominated for the final award. How can you vote? This...

Steve Harman and Phil Haack both posted a request to nominate Subtext for a SourceForge 2007 Community Choice Award. The SourceForge.net team is proud to present our second annual Community Choice Awards. Winners are selected by community members like you, and it’s that time again! Cast a ballot for your favorite projects now and make your voice heard. To nominate Subtext just click on the following badge: Nomination are accepted till 29th June (Pacific Time, so almost 30th June here in NZ). I think the best categories to nominate Subtext are: Most Collaborative Project: The project most likely to accept...

Almost one week after the Introduction to Subtext plugins, I just added to the subtextplugins website a new document: How to mange plugin settings. This article explains the differences between the 3 types of settings available to a plugin and how to read and write them. Here is the ToC: Introduction Settings available to the plugin How to read and write settings Application-wide settings Blog Settings Entry Settings What's next Next article will explain how to add to the setting page inside Subtext admin a panel to collect settings from the blog author. Technorati tags: Subtext, Plugin, Red...

This morning, going through my weekly ego-search, and I found a blog by Simon Philip, a snowboarder and .NET developer living in Scotland. We share a lot things: same name, passion for mountains, same job. He moved to Subtext a week ago, and has a very nice looking skin. I love the random mountain images he has in the header of his blog: something I might add to my skin in the future. Technorati tags: subtext, blog, egosearch

Thomas Freudenberg, an active blogger and CS MVP from Germany, just released a very useful CC.NET publisher task: Twitter publisher. I joined the Twitter band-wagon more or less one month ago, and I'm using Twitteroo to receive my "friends" notifications on the desktop, so I think it will be a good idea to receive a notification every time a build is triggered on the Subtext build server. I downloaded the publisher, installed it on Subtext build server, added 2 lines of configuration in the ccnet.config file and in 5 minutes I had the twitter publisher up and running. After you change the...

Less then a week after the official announcement of the SubtextPlugins website, today I added the first tutorial on writing a Subtext Plugin. The first document covers the basics of building a Subtext plugin. This the TOC of the article: Introduction to Subtext Plugins How to develop a plugin for Subtext Download and install the latest Subtext v2.0 Create a new VS project Extend PluginBase...

One month ago a new Red Moon was rising... Red Moon is the codename for one of the most important new feature in Subtext "Poseidon": Plugin Framework. Today the official web site went online: subtextplugins.com At the moment there are not many information on the site, but I'm planning to add some docs in the next week. Just a quick overview on the Plugin Framework: the plugin model is event based like HttpModules and Community Server plugins plugin can store their own settings on the DB, both for a per-blog and per-entry basis for the first release, plugins must...

BlogML is an XML format for storing the entire content of a blog. You can use BlogML as a way to archive the contents of blogs or to act as a standard format for transferring content from one blog to another - this could include migrating a blog from one blogging engine to another. To create a BlogML archive, you must: have a blog engine that can export to BlogML, as core feature or with an external plugin the latest version of your blogging engine or the export plugin must be installed on...

Even if took longer then expected (probably Telecom NZ uses hamsters or cats to move data), the upgrade is complete, and now CodeClimber is running on Subtext 1.9.5. The most important upgrades are: on the left you can see a tag cloud with the top 20 tags a full tag cloud with all the tags used in my posts Identicons and different background to identify more easily the comments written by the author of the blog (that is me): you can see both in action in the comments of my top post How to make a Gmail-like loading indicator with...

The guys at Mindscape just started a series of video blog posts: BrainDump. Every now and then they will be interviewing a member of the .NET development community in New Zealand. Last week they knocked at my door, and I was very pleased to be part of the first episode of their BrainDump, speaking about my involvement with Subtext and my last project, the CCNET monitor gadget for Vista. Watch the video here: BrainDump #1 - Simone Chiaretta Now I understand how Phil Haack felt when he was interviewed at Mix07.Being interviewed is not easy at all: you make plans...

I started this blog back in last December, so I didn't bother about the spam problem at the beginning. But last month I started getting a lot of trackback spam, some days even 30-40 per day: I guess this is the new way of blog spam since comments are being filtered by all the CAPTCHA controls or other dictionary based comment filters. I decided to give Akismet a try: and in the first week after I enabled Akismet I have no more spam on my blog. All the trackbacks are being checked against the Akismet web service and eventually...

The QA department just finished testing the version we were working on, so I'm pleased to announce the official release of Subtext 1.9.5, this time with no codename. New Features This version adds a lot of new features, bringing Subtext One Step Closer to my ideal blogging platform. The most interesting new features, IMHO, are: Content Tagging and Tag Cloud: for more details Tagging In Subtext Identicon: if you don't know what they are, here you can find a good explanation Lightbox v2: in my previous posts how to migrate a custom skin and how to use...

Subtext 1.9.5 is being tested by our QA department and hopefully will be released soon. One of the new features of the new version is the upgrade of the code scripting library for image display from Lightbox v1 to Lightbox v2, but unfortunately this introduces a breaking change. Lightbox v1 requires only the lightbox.js file, while version 2 requires 2 more libraries in order to work: scriptaculous and prototype.So if you built a custom skin that uses Lightbox v1 you have to manually update its definition inside the skin.config or skin.user.config in order to make it work with the new version. Almost 2 months ago I...

Yesterday, after a few weeks not working on Subtext main trunk (busy with the CC.NET Monitor and the testing of the soon-to-be-released 1.9.5 version) I updated my local working folder from the SVN repository. And as soon as I opened the solution I got errors saying that a project was missing. I removed the project in my local solution, and then VS complained that some file were added to some projects, but were missing on the disk: somebody in the team probably added a new solution and a few files to the project, but only committed the project files, but...

Phil Haack has been inverviewed by Tim Heuer for his new TimCast podcast. Phil explains why he started working on Subtext, and what his feelings are about the open source community on the Microsoft Platform. I'm very proud of having been mentioned by him during the interview, you know (!), he even said my name "almost" correctly. Thank you for that Phil. Here is the announcement of the interview, and here you can download the mp3 interview Technorati tags: Phil Haack, MIX07, SubText, TimCast

Yet Another Subtext Blogger: Dave Transom, web developer and web standard evangelist from Auckland has just moved his blog from Blogger to Subtext. Welcome to the Subtext world, and compliments to your webdesigner for the awesome skin: maybe you can share it with us on the Subtext Skin site. The question is: when are Nic and Leonie going to move from dasBlog to Subtext? Technorati tags: Subtext