Scott announced some great news...

A few points to note about this release.

• This is the final release on an ASP.NET 1.1 codebase. No bugs will be fixed unless this release kills a kitten.
  • NOTE: To be clear, even though this is compiled under ASP.NET 1.1, it runs GREAT under .NET 2.0 as is. Just follow the comments in the web.config to change a few settings.
• The next release will literally be in a week or so, it will be called DasBlog 2.0 and will be compiled under .NET 2.0 and have changes to support Medium Trust environments.
  • This will allow folks downloading the source to compile DasBlog happily with VS 2005 or Orcas, or just MSBuild.
• We'll announce a one year roadmap with our plan to move towards .NET 3.5 as well as a new release every 60 days.
• We will very likely move to a location that is not SourceForge.
• We'll have a visual refresh of the main project page as well as some consolidation, but for now:
  • DasBlog.Info - For DasBlog information.
  • DasBlog.us - For "us," the DasBlog forums
  • DasBlog Mailing Lists - Subscribe to either the Developer's list, or the Checkin's List to see what's going on.

UPDATE: Alexander Groß has the definitive guide on How To Secure Your dasBlog Installation.

In this release we've fixed some and added some:

• Fixed a metric buttload of bugs
• Taken in more patches from the public than any other release (Thanks public!)
• Category and Home Page Paging Macros
• LiveComment Preview (thanks SubText!)
• Emailed Daily Activity Reports
• Windows Live Writer Custom Integration
• Support for Akismet Comment Spam Support
  • Go get a WordPress account, without a blog, and use the API key they'll send you.
• Optionally show comments on the Permalink Page
• Even more performance gains (4x+) in the Macro engine
• New Internationalized Languages, including Swedish (Thanks Per Salmi!)
  • This brings our total supported language count up to 15! Although we can ALWAYS use more, and we really need double-checkers and updaters to put in localized strings for some of the new features!
• Support for Blogging directly from Word 2007
• Many fixes in our Blogger API and MetaWebLog API support
• Better detection of referrals from Search Engines
• CSS fixes and additions like highlighting of the Blog Author's comments
  • Make the comment email address match the email address in sitesecurity.config for this feature.
• DHTML Timeline of Posts from the MIT Simile project
• Support for SMTP Servers like Gmail for notifications
• New themes
• Support for THREE Rich Editors - FreeTextBox, FCKEditor and TinyMCE (in DasBlog Contrib, see the source)

Thanks to the DasBlog team and the active folks on the Developer List (in no particular order)....

Omar Shahine, Clemens Vasters, Tom Watts, Ken Hughes, Paul Van Brenk, John Forsythe, Nick Schweitzer, Kenneth Lefebvre, Ben Scheirman, Tim Sherrill, Alexander Gross, James Snape, Raymond Llewellyn, Tony Bunce, Josh Flanagan, Aaron Fischer, Anthony Bouch, Ayende Rahien, Ben Taylor, George V. Reilly, Greg Hughes, Mike Schinkel, Marc Mercuri, Rajiv Popat, Tim Sherrill

...and the many patch contributors!

Lately I've been having a lot of trouble with getting a large amount of spam on my blog via trackbacks and deleting them manually is really one big job. Finally I got my solution to the problem of trackback spam HttpModule based Generic Trackback Spam Blocker for ASP.NET.

HttpModule based Generic Trackback Spam Blocker for ASP.NET can be plugged into any ASP.NET web application, for example, into ASP.NET blogging engines such as .Text and dasBlog, and that you do not need to make any changes to the application itself. The solution itself is simple and uncomplicated and you can download the HttpModule and it's source too.

Check it out..

Few days back Scott and Omar announced the release of a new version of DasBlog this release comes with tons of new feature. I just cannot wait to get my hand on it and update my current version.

Here's some of the new features.

• Much better multi-user/blogger support including a Top Posters macro and total comments - from Christoph De Baene
• TagCloud Support - from Scott
• Support for Mobile Browsers like Blackberries and SmartPhones - from Scott
  • Note the large section in your web.config and the mobile theme that is required for this support.
• Huge (100x+) speedup in Macro execution - from Scott
• Support for If-Not-Modified to speed up execution, improve RSS bandwidth and CPU cycles - from Scott
• Direct Feedburner Support with 301 redirection for RSS and Atom feeds. Don't lose a single subscriber. We're the only blog with direct support for Feedburner and Feedflare I believe. - from Scott
  • I encourage you to check out FeedBurner. You can add FeedFlare to your posts, and modify your feed in ways DasBlog can't. They also handle your Feed bandwidth and provide rich statistics. It's free ($ for advanced stats) and it's very powerful. Do be aware that when you make the decision to move over to FeedBurner your existing feeds will start redirecting folks to FeedBurner immediately. That's part of the power of the whole thing, but be warned.
• Delete comments directly from your mail reader - from Omar
• Comment moderation option
• New themes out of the box, 18 at last count - from Many Folks
• New XML-RPC support for newMediaObject and new version of XML-RPC.NET from Charles Cook - from Omar and Giuseppe Dipietro
• Macros for Next Post and Previous Post - Justice Gray
  • Check the DasBlog theme or add this line to the top of your itemtemplate.blogtemplate.
    <%PreviousLink("&laquo;&nbsp;",25)%><%MainPageEntryLink("Main", "|")%><%NextLink("&nbsp;&raquo;",25)%><br/>
• A few security and XSS fixes
• Support for Gravatars, images of your choosing that appear next to your comments - John Forsythe
• Support for limited HTML markup in comments
• Emails removed to avoid having email addresses stolen from Feeds
• Added an Email page for leaving comments to the author, includes Captcha
• New support for RSD so client software can autoconfigure itself - from Omar
• Pluggable Rich Text Editor, choose from the latest version of FreeTextBox or FCKEditor or write your own adapter - from Josh Flanagan
• Support for alternate SMTP ports
• We work with Windows Live Writer out of the box - from Omar
• Support for CoComment - from Scott
• Microsummary support for Firefox 2.0 Beta - from Scott
• Organized source, build, and packing for clarity - from Josh Flanagan
• New Feed Icons - from Omar
• Autometic generation of Google SiteMaps - from Scott
• Automatic disabling of Comments after a certain number of days. Also manual "close comments" support - from Omar
• ContentLookAhead show future dated posts - from Josh Flanagan
• Other fixes and suggestions from Tomas Restrepo, Jason Follas, Rene Lebherz and Steven Rockarts. Added entry CPU usage optimizatons from George V. Reilly.
• Ajax Autosave Drafts support from Steven Rockarts and Justice Gray.
• Better strings and support for German from Alexander Groß, Portuguese from Adelino Araújo, and Vietnamese from Phạm Đức Hải.
• Many great new themes

Download it

I'm really impressed with this tool. Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service.

Few things that I really loved about this tool. Firstly WYSIWYG authoring you can now author your post and know exactly what it will look like before you publish it.

Secondly Photo publishing writer makes inserting, customizing and uploading photos to blog. Once you've inserted the picture writer provides an editing tool to modify picture size, text wrapping, borders and apply effects.

Thirdly Map publishing writer inserts Windows Live Local map into your post and Lastly Drafts you can close your window anytime it autosaves, you can keep unlimited number of items in the draft.

Writer SDK is available it allows developers to extend writer's capabilities.

Download now

I have created a new design layout (theme) for my blog. I hope everyone will like it...

Hi, Welcome to my new blog..