Dave Bost

Last night, my good friend Larry Clarkin invited me along to witness his beloved Milwaukee Brewers take on the Washington Nationals. Me, being the Cubs fan that I am, had to work in a few “Cubs are in first place” ribbings now and again (although that didn’t last long as their now a 1/2 game back). I also felt compelled to share my Brewers game experience with the world of Twitter with the following post:

Unbeknownst to me, the Milwaukee Brewers also have a Twitter account. Also unknown to me (until now) is they have (what I’m assuming is) an automated bot trolling the streams of Twitter searching for the keywords ‘Brewers’ and ‘Milwaukee’ and retweeting them. Here’s what popped up on my Twitter stream a few moments later…

After I picked myself up off the floor from laughing so hard, Larry and I had a nice technical discussion (yes…we’re geeks talking tech at a ball game) in what the MIL_Brewers bot forgot to do. It’s one thing to look for patterns and act on them, but you also want to be sure to apply exclusions in your pattern searches as well. I’m sure the MIL_Brewers bot is scanning for foul language. In this case they might want to determine if ‘Cubs’ is a 4-letter word or not. As a Cubs fan, I was happy to see this posted to all of the MIL_Brewers Twitter followers out there.

The Brewers ended up losing to the Nationals 8-3. Maybe my Tweet sent a little bad mojo to the Brew Crew. :)

GO CUBS!

Ramblings

Thanks to a heads up by Mike, whom I met at BarCamp Milwaukee, it turns out that my comments weren't working on my Community Server 2.0-based blog. When someone attempted to add a comment, the system would respond with an HTTP 404 error. Nice.

One of the problems I thought was due to the fact that I'm using Community Server against it's intended purpose, running as a single blog in an engine meant for..well…a community. I went over to the Community Server site to pull down the new v2.1 files and apply them to my installation. This just opened a whole new can of worms in that I overwrote my config files that contained the various information to make it work as a single blog. Needless to say, my blog was down for quite a few hours as I trudged through my memory banks and the internet to try and remember which config changes I needed to make. After the changes were in place, which I was pretty sure were correct, I was still encountering errors. But the fact that I wasn't running locally meant that I wasn't able to see the actual error message. Frustrating to say the least. It was at this point that Istarted to seriouslyconsider a different blogging engine. I've been thinking about this for the past few weeks or so. Community Server is a great piece of softare with a ton of features, but for my simple purposes it's a bit much. Too many things get in the way when I start to encounter some sort of problem.

One of my big conerns about switching to another blogging engine is howdifficult itwould be to build a mapping url handler that would identify a request url for the community server path and map that to the new blogging engines path. My criteria for a blogging engine was that it must run ASP.NET and I must have access to the source code. The blogging engines I started to investigate were Subtext and dasBlog.

Subtext is a forked version of the old .Text engine which was my initial engine up untilmy move to Community Server a few months back. The move to Community Server was logical in that new development seized on .Text as it's primary developer, Scott Watermasysk, joined Telligent and morphed .Text into Community Server. Subtext forked it's source branch off of .Text and carried on new devlopment as Subtext. The good thing about Subtext is it looks as if the URL's for the content matches pretty much exactly to what Community Server serves up, so there would be no need to create a mapping handler. There's a bit of work involved in getting the content out of Community Server and into Subtext. I have a few issues with my comments and author details and trackbacks. But it's close.

I'm also looking into dasBlog which doesn't have a backend database as it stores all of it's content into serialized XML. Importing the content into dasBlog is certainly much more difficult and it will certainly require a URL mapper. I tried finding a Community Server to dasBlog converter but one doesn't seem to exist. There's plenty of discussion about going from dasBlog to Community Server but not the other way around. I find that interesting.

After bouncing back and forth between Subtext and dasBlog, I went back to my Community Server update to 2.1. I find out that during my upgrade process, I happend to skip a step that required me to update my membership database schemas. Once I applied that update script, my blog was back up and running. I wasn't able to determine this until I had my blog running on my local machine which makes it possible to determine what the actual problem is. Needless to say, I'm back up and running and the comments are working. Yay! However, I'm still looking to migrate to a new blogging engine. If you have any suggestions on easy ways to convert to Subtext or dasBlog, please let me know.

Tag: Community+Server, Subtext, dasBlog

Ramblings

Microsoft has an Employee Purchase Program (EPP) set up with a number of companies, including Dell. As I was perusing Dell?s website to order a new computer for the misses, I happened across a non-descript banner ad labeled ?Dads and Grads ? Spin to Win?. What the hell, I thought, I?ll give it a shot. Once I entered the obligatory personal information, I was presented with what looked to be a Flash application resembling a slot machine. The rules are, match 3 items and win ? naturally. I clicked on the ?Spin? button and watched lady luck spin away. Slot 1: TV, Slot 2: TV, Slot 3: TV. Woohoo! I won? but what did I win?

At first I thought, ?Oh how cute, I probably won a Dell branded 128mb memory stick or something?, but I was wrong. As the next screened informed me? ?Congratulations! You are the grand prize winner and have one a 23? LCD Dell TV!?? My reaction was, ?Wha? Huh?.. Yeah, right!? Suddenly, I had visions of several airlines websites selling round trip tickets for $1. Surely, something was wrong. I read over the rules which clearly stated that if an error has been determined to occur, Dell is not responsible for awarding the prize for such an error. (Bingo!) That?s probably what happened. Next, I saw were I should be expecting an email from Dell immediately, verifying my prize. So I waited?and waited?and waited. After an hour or so, no email. Damn!

On a hunch, I decided to check my Junk Mail folder, and lo and behold there was an email from Dell. I anxiously opened it and read that ?Yes, Dave! You pessimistic bastard? you won a Dell 23? LCD TV!!!? (I?m para-phrasing, of course) Attached to the email was an affidavit instructing that if I want my prize, I must sign my life away. For a TV?!? You betcha! I even had to get the affidavit notorized, so it must be real.

Well? we?ll see. Seeing is believing. I had to send the affidavit back to Dell?s prize department within 10 days. No fax allowed. It must be mailed. The chances are higher that the snail mail won?t make it in time. Further increasing the chances of not claiming the prize I suppose. Anyhow, I won?t truly rejoice until I receive a special shipment from Dell within 8?10 weeks.

Update: The nicelady in the brown truck and brown polyester shirt and shorts delivered the TV on Aug. 23rd. People really do win on the web!

Ramblings

Microsoft has just finished our Fiscal Year 2006 (FY?06). Apparently the month after a fiscal year-end is a great time to travel the country for a number of meetings. FY?07 Kick-off meetings? sales conferences?.technical conferences?etc.

My July is shaping up to be the ?Dave Bost World Tour 2006?. Tomorrow we kick it off with a team offsite in Dallas from July 10?11, than the infamous Microsoft sales conference (MGX-Microsoft Global Exchange) in Orlando from July 19?23. And than, for some miraculous reason, Microsoft?s internal technical conference (TechReady), taking place July 23?28th in Seattle. I?m not sure who came up with the grand plan on schedulingMGX on back-to-back weeks with TechReady? on opposite ends of the country!

Normally, DE?s wouldn?t attend the sales conference, but our manager?s-manager thought it would be valuable for new employeesto attend MGX. After all the pain of traveling this month though, I?m looking forward to it. It will be nice to reinvigorate the batteries and get ready for some great things to come in FY?07. It?s surely shaping to be an exciting year.

Ramblings

I’ve been getting hit with a lot of comment spam once again. Strangely enough, I haven’t received comment spam for a while. This is partly due to a little trigger that I have running onmy .Text database that helps check the content before it’s committed to the database. It essentially runs through a few rule checks including the processes of scanning for known words found in typical spam. The trigger isn’t perfect, but it’s effective. Every so often, I need to update the list of words based on the spam I’m receiving. I haven’t had to do that for a while – until now.

Why is spam picking up once again? Maybe there are new “spam” words that my trigger isn’t catching. Frankly, with this new round of spam, I’m getting tired of updating my spam rules. It’s time to hop off the blogging engine that I’ve been using since Day 1. It’s also important to note that this particular blogging engine, hasn’t updated it’s underlying source code since January 2003. It has since rolled into Community Server.

I tried Community Server back in the day, before it was easy to convert the .Text content into CS friendly content. There just wasn’t the ease nor the time to convert all the content back than. Blogging engines have matured and (I’m assuming) their spamming protection has matured as well. The time has come to finally update my blogging engine. The question I have is which engine to I want to “upgrade” to?

I’m struggling with a couple of things. One, now that I’m working for the man, should I jump on over to http://blogs.msdn.com? I’ve seriously considered it. For one thing, my traffic would jump by gazillion fold from ~20 readers to, well, a gazillion. However, moving over to http://blogs.msdn.com would take the control out of my hands. And as we all know, people with Type ‘A’ personalities like to maintain control. Nothing crazy mind you, just the ability to… i don’t know… scan your log files 10 times a day to see who’s linking, reading and searching on your blog. Ok… I don’t scan them 10 times a day… maybe 10 times every few months (I don’t want you to think I’m obsessive).

As I’m sitting here at the Deeper in .NET event in Milwaukee, Scott Hanselman is presenting a session on dasBlog and a behind-the-scenes look on how it works.I’vechecked into dasBlogon a couple of occasions and havealways been intrigued by it. First, it’s built on top of .NET (huge plus), but so is Community Server.dasBlog is file driven vs. database driven. Not a big deal, but it sure is nice to have to have to worry about a database when you don’t have to. dasBlog is stillan open source project found onGotDotNet.com whereas Community Server isnow a product. True, there’s a free version available but it’s stilla commercial product. Being a developer, I like to dig into code to see howother bit-twiddler’s work.

I’m still on the fence. Do Imove to http://blogs.msdn.com and lose all control or upgrade my site to an evolving blogging (and really cool) engine such as dasBlog? I’m sure you (my 20 readers) will find out soon enough.Any help in the decision making process is appreciated.

Ramblings