I am using DasBlog
for about 1 year now. I think I started with v1.5 and upgraded to v1.6
a long time ago. I still think DasBlog is one of the best blog engines
around and overall it is one of the few good online tools that don't
cause much headaches.
Download link to DasBlog 1.8.
The new rich text box add post capabilities are nice (not only html,
but also a design view for direct editing or previewing), but they
don't really have all the features I need (for example there is no
search feature for writing a new post at all). I still think it is more
effective to write everthing in some powerful text editor (or some html
editor if you like) first and then just copy it over and test it.
Still, all improvements and new features are a good thing.
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So today Jeff Clark wrote me an email telling me that SharpReader wasn't able to use my RSS feeds. He also did sent a link to http://feedvalidator.org/ to help me check on that issue.
For some strange reason the returned feed was not in the usual Xml
format, but in a html format and the validator did not really like that
"feature":
I used http://feedvalidator.org/ for this and the returned error was "This feed does not validate. Feeds should not be served with the "text/html" edia type"
I didn't know where to fix that. Instead I thought updating DasBlog
from v1.6 to v1.8 could help and I wanted to do that sometime anyway.
The upgrade readme is quite long and looks complicated with a lot of
single steps and warnings, but it didn't took long to replace
everything, do the important stuff for ASP.NET 2.0 and just restart the
IIS. Everything worked fine after that. Even my custom theme didn't
cause any troubles. I just had to adjust the config files (web.config,
site.config) a bit to get rid of obsolete parameters and setting new
parameters.
However, the RRS feeds where still wrong in html instead of
xml. I checked some other sites using DasBlog v1.8 and their feeds
worked fine, sometimes with a couple of warnings. After some more
testing I was guessing that maybe the main site linking to the blog sub
directory was the cause and not the blog itself (since a browser still
points to the http://abi.exdream.com even if we are on another page).
And it turns out that you only get an invalid RRS feed if pointing to
http://abi.exdream.com/..., but you will get an valid feed if pointing
to http://exdream.dyn.ee/blog/...
I changed the links and RRS worked fine then, there are still
some warnings left, especially about relative links instead of absolute
URLs for images and other files (http://feedvalidator.org/
returns "description should not contain relative URL references"). I
will try to remember that for future posts and I changed some important
items, but I'm not going to fix all posts now to be 100% valid (who
cares anyway, at least it works again). If you are using an old RRS url
like
http://abi.exdream.com/blog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRssCategory?categoryName=Programming
please change it to:
http://exdream.dyn.ee/blog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRssCategory?categoryName=Programming
If you find other problems (e.g. with other RRS readers) and think
there are really important, drop a comment or write an email if you
want to see it resolved. Thanks again to Jeff for reporting this, I
wouldn't have noticed it. |