Chris May

One one of my dasBlog sites that was built before Akismet was supported, I accientally allowed for pingbacks to be tracked.

Ping backs are supposed to happen between blogs whenver you link to another blog article.

It's really a great idea!  If you are reading a blog post, you might see a list of 4 ping backs at the end.  These URLs are the locations of other blog articles that reference the article you are reading, so you might want to check some of those out to get those authors poing of view on whatever topic is being discussed.

But, of course, spammers ruin it for everyone.

Yesterday I got 18,000 pingbacks from sites selling prescription drugs in a matter of a hour or 2.

So I turned off ping backs, but that left me with a ton of spam to clean up.

Lucky for me, someone else has already run into this, and built a tool for stripping it out!

Really nice!  The only problem I found was that it didn't report issues with my config file (I had a bad character in there).  Actually, it WOULD report them, but would immediately begin processing the files (with no patterns to match against) so you couldn't tell that it was reporting it.

So if you run into a problem with this tool, try putting in a bad content path.  This was throw an exception and you will have time to read any debug info in the command terminal indicating if there was a problem with your config file earlier in the process.

After I fixed this issue, it worked great!

Thanks!

 

Scott Hanselman has a little post about how to setup paging in DasBlog.

This is something I will implement when I upgrade to DasBlog 2.0, but I won't be doing that until they get off of asp.net 1.1 and onto 2.0.

They were supposed to be releasing a 2.0 version a few weeks ago, but hopefully it will be out soon.

Scott Hanselman has released the final .net 1.1 version of DasBlog, to be quickly followed by the first .net 2.0 version (thank god)!

I will have to upgrade things here when that happens.

CoComment allows you to track your comments, and those that come after you, in the various blogs around the internet.

http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/CoComment/

I might see if I can implement this for fun.

Here is a list of dasBlogMacros.html">all the Macros built into das Blog.

Vasanth Dharmaraj has an article here showing how to create your own macros, as well as his out creation dasBlog Extra Macros.

I am proposing some updates to dasBlog.  I made some changes that fix some problems with the Insert Code feature, as well as adding a few features ("Left Justify of the code") and the addition of JScript support (I had nothing to do with the XML file changes... those are from the original author.

Here are my changes.

 

Yesterday I wrote about the changes I made to dasBlog to solve an outstanding bug in the Insert Code option in the textbox editor.

I added some extra features, like the ability to insert JavaScript (this change was simply the merger of some XML data that the original author has released) and some code that will remove extra white space from the left side of the code block.

I used this article from Scott Hanselman to submit the patch.

Yesterday I added the links you see at the bottom of this article that allow users to quickly submit these articles to your favorite social networking site.

This wasn't as easy as you would think.  I didn't fully understand dasBlog's template system, thinking I could use server side script inside the <% %> brackets.  This is of course not the case.

I ended up finding a partial solution here by Mads Kristensen.

However, I found that this solution failed in a few ways.  First, the URLs being submitted in the querystring were not fully encoded.  The result was that some sites (I verified Digg.com) did not accept these.  It would give you an error that your URL was not correct.  The other problem, was that most of these links include a title, which is good, but they cause JS errors if you have a single quote in your article title.

After some screwing around, I realized that the only way around this problem would be a custom dasblog macro on the server that could encode the titles.

So, I just removed the titles for now.

As an added bonus, this will be an opportunity for me to test out the new JavaScript syntax highlighting I now have on my blog.

<script type="text/javascript">

  var tn = document.createTextNode('<%ItemTitle%>');
  var div = document.createElement('div');
  div.appendChild(tn);
  var html = div.innerHTML;
  var index = html.indexOf('&gt;') +4;
  var title = html.substring(index, html.length - 10);
  var social = '<div style="float:left">';
  social += '<a href="mailto:?body=Thought you might like this: <%permalinkUrl%>&amp;subject=' + title + '" target="_blank" title = "Email This Article">Email it</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;';
  social += '<a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=' + encodeURIComponent('<%permalinkUrl%>') + '" target="_blank"  title = "Post To Digg">Digg it</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;';
  social += '<a href = "http://del.icio.us/post?url=' + encodeURIComponent('<%permalinkUrl%>') + '&amp;title=' + title + '" target="_blank" title = "Post this article to del.icio.us">Del.icio.us it</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;';
  social += '<a href = "http://reddit.com/submit?url=' + encodeURIComponent('<%permalinkUrl%>') + '" target="_blank" title = "Post to Reddit">Reddit</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;';
  social += '<a href = "https://favorites.live.com/quickadd.aspx?marklet=1&amp;mkt=en-us&amp;url=' + encodeURIComponent('<%permalinkUrl%>') + '&amp;top=1" target="_blank" title = "Post to Live">Live it</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;';
  social += '<a href="http://www.dzone.com/links/add.html?url=' + encodeURIComponent('<%permalinkUrl%>') + '" target="_blank" title="Post to DZone">DZone it</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;';
  social += '<a href="http://www.dotnetkicks.com/submit?url=' + encodeURIComponent('<%permalinkUrl%>') + '" target="_blank" title="Post to DotNetKicks">Kick it</a>';
  social += '</div>';
  document.writeln(social);

</script>

Not bad (looks like it got a little confused by the nested strings, but that IS confusing).

Just put this code in your template of choice and you should see good results.

This looks pretty cool.

http://www.jforsythe.com/jforsythe/proj_dasblog.aspx#tabi_2

 

If you want to do anything on the server side with Dasblog, you need to make a custom macro.

This article shows how to do exactly that:

http://blog.krisvandermast.com/CreatingCustomMacrosForDasBlog.aspx