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Your One-Stop Shop for Web Design, Internet Marketing, Application Development, and Web Hosting! |
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The .Blog Weblog
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Sunday, September 09, 2007
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| MySQL Version on Hold |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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| We are discontinuing the MySQL development for .Blog at the moment. Unfortunately, MySQL still doesn't fully support the functions we need to make the software work properly. As a result, it's become a difficult process to make some of the stored procedures work properly in MySQL.
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| MySQL Version on the Way |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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We're working on the newest release of .Blog, which will be an update of v3.0 that is designed to use MySQL, instead of SQL Server.
Many low cost web sites don't have access to SQL Server, because the licensing fees are too high to allow web hosts to offer SQL Server for low-end web hosting plans. MySQL, however, is widely used for such plans. By creating a MySQL version of .Blog, we'll be able to offer it to a much larger group of users.
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Wednesday, May 30, 2007
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| .Blog v3.0 Released! |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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We have now released the newest version of .Blog! This version upgrades .Blog to the Microsoft .Net Framework v2.0.
In addition, we have also decided to release the source code for the application to all purchasers. While most non-programmers won't be interested in this, it will allow developers who purchase the application to fully customize it in any way they see fit.
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Friday, August 18, 2006
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| .Blog 2.0 Bookmarklet Fix |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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A user has reported a problem with the operation of the Bookmarklet feature. We have issued a fix for this bug. Simply download this zip file:
Dotblog.Admin.BlogEntry.zip
This contains a new copy of the BlogEntry DLL. Simply place it the "bin" folder of your .Blog application, replacing the old DLL, to correct the problem.
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Tuesday, March 21, 2006
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| .Blog v2.0 Bug Fix |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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A user has reported a bug with the multiple trackback pinger. The fix for this bug can be obtained here.
This is a zip file that contains the Trackback Pinger DLL. SImply replace the old DLL in your "bin" folder with this new DLL.
Current downloads of the installation files include this bug fix update already.
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Sunday, January 29, 2006
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| .Blog v2.0 Update |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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We've added a minor update to .Blog v2.0. In this version, the RSS feed provides the full blog entry instead of an excerpt. You can download this update here.
Simply unzip the DLL from the zip file, and upload it to your bin folder to replace the old RSS Feed DLL.
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Friday, January 20, 2006
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| .Blog v2.0 is Up! |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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After a year of bug-fixing, tweaking, and adding new functionality, version 2.0 of .Blog is now available!
Several issues with v1.0 have been addressed, including:
1) Eliminating double comments by inadvertantly relaoding the comments page.
2) RSS feeds now display full date/time stamps.
3) The function for notifying the Ping-O-Matic weblog update service has been changed, and the XML-RPC functionality has been replaced by automatically opening the Ping-O-Matic online update form in a new window when you create a new entry. So far, this has been completely reliable. We still aren't sure why the RPC call no longer works for that service, but the replacement works great, and you can see it working, unlike the previous functionality.
.Blog v2.0 also contains several completely new functions, as well.
1) Content blacklisting prevents users from sending comments or trackbacks to your blog is they contain blacklisted terms. .Blog searches the text, urls, email, address and names to ensure that the blacklisted terms are stopped.
2)IP Tracking/Banning .Blog now stores the IP addresses from all comments and trackbacks, and refuses to accept them from banned IP addresses.
3) You can now organize your posts in as many Categories as you'd like. A link at the bottom of the post, lets users see all the posts in that category.
4) You can save posts as drafts, so that they are saved, but don't appear on your blog until you are ready to publish them.
5) You can mark posts to remain at the top of your blog, so that they have high visibility.
6) You can choose to have comments and trackbacks emailed to you. Each email contains all of the information you need about the comment or trackback, along with hyperlinks that take you directly to the source.
7) A calendar on the main page allows users to see all posts published on a selected day.
8) We have increased the available HTML formatiing tools, to allow you to use drop caps and left or right callouts in your blog entries. .Blog has the largest number of HTML formatting options of any commercially available blogging software.
As in the previous version, .Blog is designed so that the non-programmer can install a blog and be up and running in under 30 minutes. But, for programmers and web designers, .Blog can be fitted into literally any web site design you want, thanks to its modular design.
For more information, check out out documentation:
Installation Guide
User's Guide
You can get the new, time-limited evaluation version by clicking here. This is a fully functional version of .Blog, but it is limited to adding 50 blog posts before it stops working.
As of now, the system requirements of .Blog require that you have the .Net Framework v1.1 installed on your web server, and access to a SQL Server database for your web site.
As a plus, now that MySQL supports the use of stored procedures, we're working an a version of .Blog that will work with MySQL v5.0. It should be out shortly.
I hope you enjoy this new version of .Blog. I beleive it's light-years better than the previous version, and I think you will, too!
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Monday, June 06, 2005
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| Pinging Problem |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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| .Blog uses the Ping-O-Matic weblog pinging service for sending update notifications to the popular weblog updating services. For some reason, the Ping-O-Matic service seems to be having trouble today. In fact, the entire web site for the service is down. We'll be keeping a close eye on this, but hopefully the outage is temporary, and the service will be back up soon.
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Sunday, March 27, 2005
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| WYSIWYG Text Editing |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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We have given the FreeTextBox WYSIWYG text editor the old college try, actually running it in a high-traffic environment. It's not a bad tool, but after careful evaluation, we have decided not to add it as a standard feature of .Blog. Users who have Safari, Opera, and Lynx can't use the editor at all, and there are some bugs that cause Firefox users to be unable to use the hyperlink or image functions.
As such, we've decided to keep the plain text boxes as the standard method of input. Perhaps, in the future, there'll be some better, more universal WYSIWYG tools out there, but for the moment, .Blog will retain the plain text boxes.
Having said that, we do have the WYSIWYG version of .Blog around, so If you'd like to try that version, contact us, and we will provide you with the changes you need to impement to give .Blog a WYSIWYG capability for entries and comments.
We cannot, however, provide any warranty as to the satisfaction you will receive from using them.
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Thursday, March 17, 2005
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| Maintenance Update |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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| A new bug has been discovered in the Send Mail portion of the application. A fix for this bug, in the form of a new SendMail DLL is available here. Simply place this DLL in the bin folder of your web site to replace the old version of this DLL.
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Tuesday, March 08, 2005
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| European Date Formats |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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A British customer emailed us today wondering how to switch the calendar control to display the European date format (DD/MM/YYYY).
This is an easy fix. .Blog uses the Tigra Calendar javascript control. The Tigra Calendar comes with two javascript files, both of which are included with .Blog. Calendar1.js is the component that uses the European date format. As a default, the archives page uses Calendar2.js, which is the American date format. Simply open the Archives.aspx page in a text editor and switch the references from calendar2.js to calendar1.js. That should fix you right up.
The line you'll need to change is:
Change the "2" to "1", and your calendar will show in the European date format.
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Sunday, March 06, 2005
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| .Blog Security Update |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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Now that .Blog has been in the wild for one month, we've learned about some new blog spamming methods, and have updated .Blog to combat them. In the most recent build of .Blog, we've impmlenented an internal Blacklist function that will allow you to prevent being repeatedly spammed through your comments or trackbacks. Every time a trackback or comment is sent to your weblog, .Blog will compare it to your blacklist, and block any trackback or comment that contains any word or phrase that matches a word or phrase in your Blacklist.
All new purchases of .Blog contains these new security features. If you have already purchased a copy of .Blog, you can download the relevant updated files by clicking here.
We hope you find these enhancements makes .Blog an even better blogging platform for your use.
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Monday, February 28, 2005
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| Installing .Blog |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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Over this past weekend, we received emails from an individual who was having errors trying to install .Blog. This was a bit of a surprise to use since no one else has ever reported the difficulty he had with his installation. Unfortunately, despite emailing us about his installation problems, he refused repeated offers of help, so we're not quite sure why he was having problems. But, in looking at his web site, and noting the errors we were getting, the more we looked into it, it appeared that he simply wasn't following the installation instructions that come with .Blog.
Even if you're a programmer, don't get the idea that you can cowboy your way through the .Blog installation, or that you can open it up in a development tool like Visual Studio and "tweak" it. (Actually, since .Blog wasn't created through Visual Studia at all, you're likely to cause a number of problems by doing so.)
The installation instructions for .Blog were created over a long time of testing the installation, and working out an installation that non-programmers could perform easily.
If you decide not to follow the installation instructions, then you probably shouldn't be surprised when .Blog fails to install properly.
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Friday, February 11, 2005
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| The Scary CDO.Message Error |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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If you've received an error message that says, "Could not access the 'CDO.Message' object", then you're undoubtedly asking yourself, "What's the problem?"
This error message us probably the most common error generated by the System.Web.Email object in .NET. It is almost always the result of a configuration problem on your mail server. Usually, this error only appears in .Blog if you are running your own server, rather than hosting your web site in a shared server environment with a hosting company.
When you set .Blog authors to receive emails containing comments, .Blog uses the commenter's email address as the "From" address. If your server is set to block emails sent from unknown addresses, a configuration error will be thrown, because the SMTP server is not set to relay such messages..
To solve the problem, perform the following steps:- If you are using Microsoft's SMTP Server, open the Properties window on the SMTP Server and go the the Access tab.
- Click on the the Relay button, then change the option to All except the list below and clear any other options.
- Click the OK command button.
If this remedies the problem, this means that your normal settings do not allow the commenter's email addres to be used as the "From" address when sending emails.
Leaving your server completely open to SMTP relays is an extraordinarily bad idea. So, go back to the SMTP servers Properties window and change the Relay option to Only the list below, then add the IP address of your web server to the list. This will configure your SMTP server to relay any email messages it receives from your web server.
If this does not fix the problem, then you will need to dig a little deeper. The FAQ that is posted at the System.Web.Mail, Oh My! website is a very valuable resource for tracking down and fixing this problem.
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Wednesday, February 02, 2005
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| What are you doing with .Blog? |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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| If you have purchased .Blog, and you'd like to be included in our showcase of .Blog weblogs, contact us at info@webmasterdeveloper.com for consideration. If you're chosen, you'll get listed on our sidebar here at the .Blog weblog.
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| Blogging is for Business |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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One of the biggest phenomena of the past year, in case you haven't been keeping up with current events, has been the explosion of popularity in the world of weblogs. Most of the attention has been put on the social or political commentary provided by blogs.
Less noticed has been the fact that businesses have begun to realize the benefits of blogging. In fact, blogging is an excellent way for businesses to increase their visibility on the web, and to project their brand into the marketplace. The business blog offers several key advantages for business that are seeking to get the word out about their products or services.
Because most blogging software (including, of course, .Blog), send notifications to the major weblog update services whenever the weblog is updated, thousands of potential customers are notified when they peruse the list of recently updated weblogs. This helps to bring more customers to the web site. The more often the weblog is updated, the more often this potential customer stream is pulled towards the web site.
In addition, constant updates help with search engine placement. Many search engines use an algorithm in their "spiders", i.e., web programs that catalogue your web site's content for the search engine, that causes them to spider your site more frequently if the content is regularly updated. If you have a static web site, the frequency of spidering falls off, and your web site may begin to drop lower and lower in search engine placement as its perceived relevance declines. By maintaining a regularly updated blog, you keep the search engine spiders coming to your site, and your relevance stays high.
Additionally, a blog is an excellent way to implement search engine optimization. If you want people to find your web site through searches on Google or Yahoo, you have to have content that the search engine can match with the types of searches that users are doing to find businesses like yours. A blog is an excellent way to create content that contains those important key words and phrases that users enter into a search engine when looking for a business or service.
A blog is also a fantastic communication tool. Because of the power of blogs to increase your web traffic, they also provide you with an avenue of direct communication with your customers. Traditional methods of communicating with the public, such as press releases, often have to pass through a media filter. This means that the information may not be reported the precise way you'd like to see it presented, or indeed, it may not be presented at all. And, of course, press release distribution has a cost. Effective PR services can charge hundreds of dollars for every press release you submit for distribution. The weblog, on the other hand, offers a low-cost method of direct communication with your customers. Moreover, because most weblog software (again, including .Blog) offers weblog readers a comments function, your readers can communicate with you directly as well. This gives you the opportunity to get direct feedback from your customers, and to respond to customer feedback directly through the blog, and to do so in a highly public way.
A weblog also increases the ability of your staff to contribute content to your web site. One of the drawbacks to a traditional web site is that it is difficult for many of your employees to add content, because they don't know how to put content into web pages. So, either you must have a Webmaster on staff that can convert that content into a web-readable HTML content, or you have to be satisfied with less staff input on your web site's content. Weblog software, on the other hand, requires no serious knowledge of HTML (and that includes--do we have to say it?--.Blog). You simply write text into an input box, and the weblog software handles all of the tedious HTML formatting for you automatically. Having a weblog means that anyone on your staff can contribute content easily and directly to your web site, and do so instantly.
So don't be fooled into thinking that blogs are solely the province of political junkies or compulsive journal-writers. The weblog offers your business effective new ways of communicating, building web site traffic, and increasing your search engine placement. And that translates into more customers and more sales.
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Tuesday, February 01, 2005
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| The FAQ is up |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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| We've started a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for .Blog. The page is posted here, and as new questions come in from users, and prospective users, the list of FAQs will grow.
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Sunday, January 30, 2005
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| .Blog Evaluation Version |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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| An evaluation version of .Blog is available here. This evaluation version will allow you to make 50 new weblog entries. After you have made 50 entries, it will cease operating. Other than that, however, it is a fully functional version of .Blog. It's an excellent way to familiarize yourself with .Blog before making a purchasing decision.
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Saturday, January 29, 2005
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| Product Availability Press Release |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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| The new press release announcing the availability of .Blog has been put up on the web site, and you can read it here.
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| Get It Now |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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It's ready to go! The initial public release of .Blog v1.0 is now available for order!
Order it now by clicking the button below!
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Monday, January 24, 2005
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| Release Update |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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As the beta product of .Blog matures and we near the release date (only 7 more days!) we're still tweaking. In this case, we've added a login and logout function so that you can log out of the blog, or login in under a different identity. In addition, the commenting functions have had some increased security added to prevent users from embedding malicious code into the comments, while retaining the ability to use the standard HTML formatting tags.
Additionally, we are getting back some very nice comments from the test community. One of the chief features that the users like is the pinging functionality to send upodates to the 12 major blog update listing services. Extrasformovies.com has switched over from Blogger to the .Blog beta for their business blog and reports that not only has traffic increased substatially, but that linkage their blog has also mushroomed.
So far, blogging at QandO under .Blog (now in it's fourth month), which is a fairly high-traffic blog, has not had any signifigant difficulties with comment spam. It was the problem with comment spamming and the server load it put on Movable Type that led QandO to switch over, and prompted the development of .Blog in the first place. So these reports indicate that there are some very nice advantages to running .Blog.
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Saturday, January 22, 2005
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| Standard Stylesheets |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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| .Blog will ship with 5 standard stylesheets. If you'd like to see examples of the stylesheets, usning the "Two Sidebars" template, then go here.
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Wednesday, January 19, 2005
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| .Blog for MySQL |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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One of the drawbacks of .Blog currently is that it only runs on SQL Server. As a practical matter, this limits .Blog's use to bloggers who are willing to pay extra every month for a web site that has SQL Server space.
We do plan to rectify that in the future. The alpha release of MySql v5.0 is now available at MySql's web site. .Blog requires the use of some stored procedures, and the current version of MySQL doesn't support their use. Version 5.0, however, does. As soon as v5.0 is released publicly, we will create a MySql version of .Blog as quickly as possible.
Many web hosts, including us, offer a generous amount of MySql database space for their entry-level web sites. For instance, we ofer 25MB of MySQL database space for Plan 0.
Hopefully, this will alow us to expand the user community for .Blog substantially, so that even entry-level blogs can have very affordable web site space.
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| User Interface Changes |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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One of the responses from beta testing has been how the user interface in the admin console presents the preview of new and edited posts. In the beta version, the preview would appear at the bottom of the New Entry or Edit forms. This required you to scroll to the bottom of the form to begin proofreading a post then scroll back up to save or re-edit the post. Moreover, some testers pointed out that, if you didn't know the preview appears at the bottom of the post, you might think that something went wrong when the form reloaded, because all you saw was the top of the form, with your entry. The Preview was way, way, down at the bottom.
So, we've changed that in the public release. Now the previews, ping notifications, and trackback responses will be presented at the top of the form. This makes it immediately apparent what's going on when you preview or save a post. It also eliminates a lot of scrolling up and down during the posting/previewing process.
Each of these changes we've made during beta testing has made .Blog a better and better product, and we're getting very excited about the release date as it approaches.
Comparing the beta version to the current release version now makes the beta look a bit...neanderthal.
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Tuesday, January 18, 2005
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| Updated Features List |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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Just to keep you up to speed on what .Blog will contain when it it is released, below is a list of features .Blog contains.- Unlimited authors with three levels of security permissions
- Full editing control of entries, comments, and trackbacks
- Comments and trackbacks emailed to each author who chooses to receive them
- The widest range of HTML editing tools when creating new posts
- Simple Blogroll Administration
- Powerful spam-killing features to help eliminate comments spam
- Calendar-based and keyword archive searching
- Automatic pinging of the top weblog update services
- Trackback pinging, as well as a standalone pinger for multiple trackback pings
- Autodiscovery code to allow Movable Type blogs to authomatically ping your weblog
- RSS Feed
- Bookmarklet for single window blogging while browsing
- Fully integrated file upload
- CSS Style sheets to customize both the blog, and the administrative console
- Easy installation on your web server
We've worked hard to make .Blog both simple and powerful.
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Saturday, January 15, 2005
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| .Blog Features Improvements |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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One of the criticisms of the beta testers has been that .Blog will not automatically send emails about Comments and Trackbacks. After discussing this, we've decided that this is something we can add to .Blog before we publicly release it.
So, in the public release version of .Blog, each author will be able to decide whether or not he wishes to have comments and trackbacks mailed to him. So, once agin, while it won't be part of the beta version, this functionality will be part of the public release of .Blog.
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Friday, January 14, 2005
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| Bug Fix |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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In the "Add Entry" screen of the admin console, the text of the extended entry was encoded using the Server.HtmlEncode command. This caused HTML code from the Extended Entry text to be displayed as plain text. This bug has, so far, been the only major finding from beta testing. It's now fixed in the release version.
Anyone downloading the beta version, however, should be aware that this is a known bug, and has been addressed.
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Thursday, January 13, 2005
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| .Blog Logo |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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Here's the new version of the .Blog logo that'll ship with the publicly released version on Feb 1:
Not only is is prettier and more compact, it'll also help people to pronounce it as dotBlog!
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| A Word about .Blog Typing |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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Although the classes in the beta version of .Blog are not strongly typed, the public release version will have strongly typed names. For instance, the DLLs themselves will have names like Dotblog.Admin.DeleteComments.dll. Class names will also be strongly typed so that the class name for the Comment Deletion class will be DotblogDeleteComments.
So, if you'd like to integrate .Blog into an existing ASP.NET application on your web site, you should be able to place the DLLs in the bin folder, and transfer the four keys from the web.config file into your existing web.config file without having to worry about a conflict between .Blog and your existing .Net web application causing problems.
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| New Press Release |
| Posted by: Dale Franks |
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| If you're looking for the newest .Blog press release and you've found this page, you can get the press release by clicking here.
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Other Blogs
1 Chap from Blighty
Extras for Movies
Northwest College
Pictures For The Web
QandO Online Magazine
.Blog Documentation
Installation Guide
User Guide
End-User License
Evaluation Version
The evaluation version of .Blog is a time-limited, but fully functional version of the product. Download it now. |
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