GravityCube

BlogEngine Upgrade from 1.3 to 1.4.

jesse.foster.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (jf26028) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:36:56 -0600

This week, I decided to upgrade to 1.4, primarily because I want to try out some new theme kung fu and I wanted to do it on the latest and greatest version of BlogEngine. In short, the conversion was very simple. I ran into a few hiccups, some my fault, some not, but all very minor.

Changes in CSS

There were some changes in css elements that caused me a problem or two. The first issue was a collision with some of my own css classes being named "content", which is thrown around a lot in blogengine. This caused some floating issues with the sidebar and the widgets.

Changes in Related Posts

The related posts section, when you view a blog post, has been enhanced. And, I personally think it is better now. But, there are some issues with the new technique that I know the blogengine team have seen before, and I'm sure it wont be long till they are fixed up. The good news is that you can just replace the RelatedPosts.cs code file with the version from 1.3, and it works exactly the same way it did in 1.3. There is more info on codeplex where I created an issue.

Changes in Blog Links

This fix is actually better for all of man kind....except for me. Basically, I lacked the forethought of having "---" in your post slug, even though it was mentioned to me before. Not only is it kinda ugly (some think so), but it creates invalid html, which is terrible, right. Well, BlogEngine fixes that now, but I have lots of links to my posts with those three hyphens, and I didn't want to let that go, so I tweaked the code to continue to allow it. That's the beauty of open source, right there. And, just as a side note, when my posts were not being found, BlogEngine was good enough to do a quick search and provide the users with a link to the correct post anyway, so it's not like people were dead in the water, so kudos, once again.

Permission Issues

This one, I think, was caused by my host. But, on app_statup, BlogEngine attempts to write all the xml configurations for the extensions you have installed. The app has no issues writing to those xml files any time, other than on app_startup. If anyone else has that problem, or has a fix, drop me a line. For now, I just threw a try/catch around the trouble code, and everything is good to go.

Overall, the experience has been pretty painless. The only real reason for me to upgrade was widgets and their affect on themes, but its so simple, it may be worth doing just to keep recent. Just make sure you grab the comment security fix noted on codeplex before you do upgrade, though.

If you see anything else that is out of place because of the upgrade on this blog, please let me know.

Jesse

Visual Studio 2008 and Visio for Enterprise Architects

jesse.foster.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (jf26028) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 11:41:46 -0600

So, I rebuilt a workstation because I am soon to lose my current wicked awesome hp laptop. Like many people, reloading a workstation is both, a pleasure and a pain. On one hand, you get to refresh your xp installation, so everything seems super fast again. On the down side, none of your tools, plug-ins, extensions, settings, or any of that stuff is in place, so you have to redo all that work.

Anyway, I installed visual studio 2008 and Visio. Then, like zillions of other people, I said "Hey! Where did the generate menu go?". Turns out, Visio Professional is just not quite professional enough to generate a script from a database diagram. Good grief. So, where is this Enterprise Architect version? Sweet. Its on msdn. Pulled it down, and started to install, and soon, all would be well in the world....or so I thought.

Now, I came up against the dreaded "You must first install one of the qualified Visual Studio editions" or it's evil cousin "you must first install visual studio 2003 enterprise architect". Blast! Turns out, you can only install the good Visio if you have visual studio 2003 or 2005 enterprise architect installed. You have got to be kidding me. I have msdn. I have access to both of those applications. I do not want to re-install visual studio 2005 over my new, pristine 2008 installation, but I really need Visio, with the generate functionality.

Well, after lots of searching, and accepting the fact that I was probably violating some sort of licensing agreement, I came up with a hack workaround. If you have an installation of visual studio 2008, and want Visio enterprise architect, but do not want to install visual studio 2005, this can work for you. I gave filemon a try, but it didn't look like it was doing anything interesting. Then, I gave regmon a try, filtered on msiexec, and found some interesting keys. The last thing it did before bailing out on the installation was look in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0. I did have that key in my registry, but it obviously didn't have exactly what the installer was looking for. In the 9.0 folder was my visual studio 2008 installation.

I exported the 8.0 folder using regedit for a backup, exported the 9.0 folder, opened the exported .reg file, did a search/replace on "9.0" to "8.0", and saved it. Then, I imported the modded 9.0->8.0 .reg file into the registry, basically pretending that my visual studio 2008 installation was actually a visual studio 2005 installation, at least as far as the registry was concerned. Fired up the Visio installer, and, kachow, it worked. After installing, I reverted back to my original 8.0 export, and everything is good to go.

It is a hack to get you going, but if you have the same problem, and are crazy like me, this can get you going.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

HydrogenCMS upgraded to asp.net mvc preview 3

jesse.foster.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (jf26028) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:26:42 -0600

I upgraded HydrogenCMS for it's second release to asp.net mvc preview 2 tonight, and updated the HydrogenCMS.net site. Overall, it was not a difficult exercise. I had a hiccup or two because I had a view unfortunately named "View", and with the renaming of the RenderView method to View, it caused some problems.

Another issue was simply changing ViewData to ViewData.Model for the strongly typed pages. Simple enough.

And, finally, there were some routing changes. Routing, apparently, is not my strong suit, so it took a little effort to get it lined up because I am trying for the super seo friendly url of just the slug of the page, so there is a little kung fu in there, but not much. The biggest routing issue was how Default.aspx actually gets called now, so you have to put a redirect in the codebehind, where the old version just never got called. I don't know what the reason for that is, but a little research can fix that.

All in all, considering how much effort the .net people are putting into asp.net mvc, and how much they are listening to the community, the changes were minimal. If you have a project in preivew 1 or 2 (I upgraded from the first preview), then I suggest upgrading. It is mostly painless, and it will keep you from having to drop a big chunk of updates in when the library goes rtm.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

HydrogenCMS Released

jesse.foster.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (jf26028) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:23:17 -0600

Well, at least an early version was released.

HydrogenCMS is a fully functional, extremely minimalist, open source, cms using asp.net mvc, linq2sql, linq2xml, and a bunch of code/ideas from BlogEngine, Kigg, and a ton of other places. It started out as an experiment on some of the new technologies floating around in the asp.net world, but it also fills a need.

Most of us, at one time or another, have had that relative or client who needs a simple, tiny web site that just has a few pages. Something easy to stand up, configure, skin, and turn lose so they can do their own updates. There aren't many apps like that, especially in asp.net. Hopefully, HydrogenCMS can help fill that gap. With the simple xml providers, you just deploy the site, change the admin username/password, and tell your client the metaweblog api url, and you are good to go. They can use Live Writer or some other blogging utility to manage the whole site. It doesn't get much simpler than that.

I will produce a set of blog entries in the next few days to help document the system, and give some insight into some of the features and design points that may not be obvious up front. If you have any comments, feel free to drop me a line here, on my contact page, or at the CodePlex site.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

Why are all the good apps in firefox?

jesse.foster.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (jf26028) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 23:13:01 -0600

So, I was looking around for a good ftp client because the ones I have used in the passed seem to be letting me down lately. Not terribly, but little features go missing or some other excuse. And, what I found was that fireftp turned out to be the quickest and simplest solution available in my quick search on the google. Then, I started paying attention to the other applications that I have installed as add-ins to firefox, and some of them are among the best solutions available in their space, plug-in or not.

DownThemAll (dTa) - not really fair because you wouldn't necessarily need it without firefox, but still, this is one of the best ways to grab all the downloads on a page.

S3 Organizer - The best client for Amazon's S3 cloud. I tried a bunch of them right when S3 first became available, but most were terrible, while there were few that were actually usable. Maybe that is different now, but at the time, and most likely, this is still the easiest to use client.

Ok, maybe the title is misleading. Not all the good apps are in firefox, but it seems that every time I search for a quick utility to knock something out, I end up installing yet another awesome add-in for firefox that's usually like 200k to install.

I kinda wish that I could have Firefox, the web browser, and Firefox, the application hosting shell. That way, I could keep my browser super tiny and fast, and another resource that was basically every other application that I may need to use all loaded up in a pluggable application host. I know you can do something like this using Firefox's profile capabilities, but I don't know enough about it yet to make it really simple to use.

And, keep in mind, that I haven't even gone into all the super handy development add-ins and tools, like User Agent Switcher, WebDeveloper, Firebug, DOMInspector, DustMeSelectors, Scrapbook, and Page Saver, that make Firefox a must have in a web developer's toolbox, and I'm not just talking about rendering compatibility testing, either.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

This is funny.

jesse.foster.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (jf26028) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:22:00 -0600

I usually don't get off on re-posting comics and images that have been posted all over reddit and digg, but this one is worthy.

http://www.xkcd.com/393/

Heck, I haven't even played D&D, and I thought that was great.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

Inspiration and/or Instruction

jesse.foster.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (jf26028) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 22:12:00 -0600

In the open source world, there are zillions of resources and examples for developers. Practically everything you need/want to do, there is an example, some documentation, or a demonstration project that someone has put out that either gives you the answer you seek, or leads you down the path to glory. And, among these zillions of resources, you can find everything from bad code to just the right answer to truly inspirational. Browsing around this weekend, I found some inspirational stuff that I think is worthy of my wicked awesome blog.

IDesign, and more specifically the downloads section, is awesome. I'm sure that you have come across this before, but this was the first time I had seen this site, and the source is just awesome. I had been trying to do exactly what the Dynamic Factory project does, and I never quite got it figured out, and then to see their concise, tiny, simple solution was inspiring to me. I love it. I also found a bunch of their threading helpers and service helper stuff really interesting.

Kigg is my second inspiring resource. "Kigg is a Digg like application developed with ASP.NET MVC Framework, LINQ to SQL and ASP.NET AJAX." In itself, its just a mvc website written in asp.net, but the way it was written, is awesome. It is just simple, elegant, and I actually learned a lot from some of the techniques, namely their code benchmark class, and it inspired me to do a lot more interface based development. And, in my opinion, the unit tests are really well done, and I had no idea you could reference an mvc application from your unit tests just as if it was an assembly. (As you can tell, I am not on my a game in the area of unit tests.).

Anyway, I find it really interesting, and quite funny, where and how people find inspiration in different aspects of their lives. These two projects/sites really seemed to get me on track again, like a new high quality resource tends to do, and maybe it will do the same for you.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

New BlogEngine Theme - Natural Essence

jesse.foster.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (jf26028) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:28:00 -0600

Yes, another BlogEngine theme. Yes, I know more stuff than how to theme BlogEngine. No, this has not turned into a BlogEngine only blog. Fortunately, I am really into design mode these days, and it shows by the number of BlogEngine themes that I have put out here in the last few weeks. The latest release is Natural Essence which was originally designed by Arcsin and can be found here. Even though the inspiration for the theme came from Arcsin, and it looks almost identical, the underlying markup is the same as Envision, which I released last night. So, the implementation is completely custom, and I am still going with my attempt to use the same markup on as many different designs as possible. It may not mean much to you, if you are just looking for a quick BlogEngine theme, but it makes the design process more interesting, to me, at least, and it opens up a lot of customization opportunities down the line, but I will give you more details on that in a later post.

I think this will be the last conversion theme I do for a while. I will probably do a few completely custom themes next, unless I find a design that's really hot that I just feel the need to work on. And, I am curious if any of you have any suggestions on what kind of designs you might like to see here. No promises or guarantees, but I am interested in what you may be looking for in a BlogEngine theme. Feel free to drop me a line in this post, or on the contact page.

So, enjoy the theme, and drop me a line if you come up with any issues.

Download

Preview

Jesse Foster | jf26028

New BlogEngine Theme - Envision

jesse.foster.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (jf26028) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:44:00 -0600

I have had enough fun for a while with my previous experiments with BlogEngine, and after watching a few of my friends jump on the theming bandwagon lately, I decided it was time to finish up some of my more functional themes that I have been wanting to release. Envision is the first of a few themes that I plan on releasing for BlogEngine that all use the same markup for the layout, but rely on different styles for the design. Hopefully, all the future themes that I release in the next few days will all be universally coded, and you could then enable the user to switch them out, just like you can with ThemeEngine.LayoutGala or ThemeEngine.NFL.

Envision was originally designed by styleshout, and was released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, which is a really permissive license. More details are here. And, all the BlogEngine enhancements were released BSD style, so you can do whatever you like.

And, as always, drop me a line or drop a comment if you find any issues with this theme.

Download

Preview

Jesse Foster | jf26028

New BlogEngine Theme - Marketplace by Adam Zastawski

jesse.foster.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (jf26028) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:09:00 -0600

BlogEngine has been increasing in popularity, and it shows by the number of quality themes that have been released lately. Adam Zastawski released a conversion of the Marketplace design from styleshout. It's a very crisp and clean theme, supporting 3 columns and a clean, traditional layout. It is a great theme, and Adam has made his work available for download for free, so check it out.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

New BlogEngine Theme - StarGazer by Jason Lay

jesse.foster.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (jf26028) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:55:00 -0600

Jason Lay has adapted StarGazer from FreeCssTemplates.org, and made it freely available to download and use on your BlogEngine installation. It's a really sharp theme, and Jason did a great job on it, so head over to his blog and download it now.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

New BlogEngine Theme - ThemeEngine.LayoutGala

jesse.foster.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (jf26028) — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 01:42:59 -0600

Continuing the RND from my last post, I have created a very simplistic theme based on the Layout Gala example from back in November 2005. Yeah, that sure was a long time ago. If you have never seen the Layout Gala, it's worth checking out, even after all this time.

ThemeEngine.LayoutGala is 40 layouts, all using the same markup and styling, but a different structure stylesheet. So, you get 40 unique layouts, but all 40 are using the same colors, borders, styles, font, design. All 40 layouts have a header at the top, and a footer at the bottom, but the 3 (sometimes 2) columns are arranged in different orders, and the flow of the layout changes from fixed to fluid.

Just like ThemeEngine.NFL, it has the concepts of Zen Garden, but its still no where near that level of customization. This is simply an experiment in stylesheets, design, and BlogEngine, so this example is oversimplified to demonstrate the feasibility of the idea, and to prove that it can be done, easily, in BlogEngine.

Because I built this example on top of the the original ThemeEngine.NFL, the same customizations apply where you can specify a default layout, change the c# to disable visitor selections, and all those things.

Download it here: ThemeEngine.LayoutGala.1.0

Preview it here: http://www.gravitycube.net/blog/?theme=ThemeEngine.LayoutGala.1.0

As always, feel free to drop me a line if you have anything to say, or if you find any issues.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

New BlogEngine Theme - ThemeEngine.NFL

jesse.foster.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (jf26028) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:12:00 -0600

Introducing ThemeEngine.NFL, an experiment in BlogEngine dynamic theming.

I have been working on lots of ideas around BlogEngine lately, and I have found lots of themes that I would like to convert from lots of other places. But, for the most part, I am pretty conservative when it comes to my blog design, and I tend to really like the 2 or 3 column pages, with a header, menu, and footer. And, with that being the case, I thought it would be really easy to create a base structure, 2 column in this instance, and generate a whole bunch of color schemes for it, and let the visitors decide which they like the best. And, with that idea, ThemeEngine was born, and built as a proof of concept.

After I got the initial structure and scheme defined, I just needed a bunch of color schemes to fill it out. I needed a set that was big enough to prove the point, but not just a random set of colors. Somewhere along the line, I decided to generate a color scheme for each team in the NFL. Unfortunately, some teams have really ugly colors, and it reflects in the theme. (Sorry Bills fans.) This theme is not meant to be a perfect set of themes for all the NFL teams, but a base to prove what could be done with BlogEngine, so please forgive some of the unpolished themes contained here.

The visitor preference is set in a cookie, and is completely managed in the template, so no modifications to BlogEngine are required. And, if you open the site.master.cs file, you can turn off the visitor selectable theme by setting the COOKIE_ENABLED constant to false, and it will use the theme in the DEFAULT_THEME constant. Maybe it would be cool to build an extension to enable you to set these configuration values from the administration section of BlogEngine, but that's not available right now.

The following screenshots were all taken of the same theme, with a visitor-selectable color scheme.

Demo: http://www.gravitycube.net/blog/?theme=ThemeEngine.NFL.1.0

Download: ThemeEngine.NFL.1.0.zip

This opens up lots of doors for people running different kinds of blogs. Say you ran a celebrity gossip blog, and you could design themes for your favorite celebrities and let the user pick their favorite while they browsed your site. Or, if you actually did run a sports/NFL blog, this implementation would be great. And, the same idea could be applied to all sports, or practically any other genre out there. The options are limitless, and this is just one more example of how BlogEngine enables you to do whatever you want with YOUR blog.

Anyway, check out my experiment, and let me know what you think, or if you find any bugs. And, please forgive some the lack of tuning on the actual designs.

Special thanks go out to Adam Zastawski and Jason Lay for all their help and inspiration.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

Lightbox Extension for BlogEngine

jesse.foster.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (jf26028) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 12:55:00 -0600

I don't like the default behavior of inline images when you insert them via livewriter. It completely navigates the page away from the content, and the visitor has to hit back to get back and then find where they left off, and so on. Fortunately, BlogEngine is flexible enough to allow me to change that, and I decided that the best thing to do would be to create a lightbox extension for BlogEngine to fix the issue.

This is my first stab at creating an extension for BlogEngine, so I tried to keep it as simple as possible, so it does not have some features, such as the loading progress bar, animations, and the grouping of images that are in the more recent implementations of a lightbox script. Then, I found out how amazingly easy it really is to create extensions for BlogEngine, and using the mp3 extension from rtur.net, which I found on the codeplex BlogEngine extension project site, as my base, I had it done in no time. I wish I had just left the more advanced features in. I was going to take the time to redo it with some more advanced features, but while I was testing it on GravityCube, I got a request for the code. So, I am going to release it now, with plans on an upgrade in the near future. Feel free to download the code, but keep in mind, this was my first attempt at an extension. The lightbox script was actually taken from the original lightbox at huddletogether.com, and it has been tested quite a bit, but the release is a bit old.

And, now, some included images for your lightbox pleasure (hopefully, I still have the extension enabled...)

Download: Lightbox 1.0

Let me know if you have any issues with the code,

Jesse Foster | jf26028

New BlogEngine Theme - Gluttony from the WPDesigner

jesse.foster.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (jf26028) — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 16:38:00 -0600

I tend to browse wordpress themes from time to time for two reasons. First, there are zillions of them, and second, there is some really good work going on in that space. With wordpress being as popular as it is, it draws some of the best designers, I guess.

While looking around, I stumbled on the WPDesigner. I just like this guy's style. His Jello Wala, Digg 3 Column, and Wpdesigner5 are among my favorites, but I really liked Gluttony with a preview here. The theme is a bit flashy for my taste, but it just looks really good. So, I took the time to port it to BlogEngine.net not so much for my site, but just to see what it takes to convert a wordpress theme to BlogEngine. All in all, it was actually pretty easy. The theme video from the videos site on the BlogEngine site is more than enough to guide you through the process.

The conversion of the theme is imperfect, and some things just don't look right, most notably, the search box in the upper left. But, I will get to those sooner or later, but I'm in a bit of a time crunch right now. You can download the BlogEngine version and finish it up yourself, if you like. Or, check out the preview.

If you happen to like the theme, drop Small Potato a note and let him know, but don't ask him for any help with the BlogEngine version.

Jesse Foster | jf26028