The Coding Monkey

Email Problems

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:22:21 GMT

My hosting provider is having email issues right now. Any email sent since last night to nick-at-nickschweitzer-dot-net has not gotten to me, and may be lost. I still don't appear to be getting any email sent to that address. If you're trying to get a hold of me, try sending to schweitn-at-gmail-dot-com. I'll update this post as the situation changes.

Update: Email is being delivered to my normal email addresses again, but I'm afraid anything sent last night until mid morning today was more than likely lost. If you emailed me something during that time frame, please send it again.

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Be Back Later

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 03:19:01 GMT

Well folks... I'm off to the west coast for a little while. Blogging will be intermittent at best. Stay well, and leave the light on for me.

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More Web 2.0 Integration... Twitter Style

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:33:52 GMT

So along with the recent news that I've joined Facebook, you can also follow me on Twitter. One of the things that I kept hearing at Deeper in .NET a couple weeks ago was, "So what's your Twitter name?" and "Aren't you on Twitter yet?". I heard it from so many people, that I finally decided to give it a try. And if you're on Twitter and I should know about, feel free to drop your Twitter name in the comment thread so I can add you too. Some of my blogs also feature my latest Twitter updates in the sidebar.

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Email Troubles

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:04:56 GMT

For anyone trying to get a hold of me, it seems as if my two domain email addresses are not forwarding properly at the moment. So if you've been emailing me at nick-at-nickschweitzer-dot-net or nick-at-thecodingmonkey-dot-net and I haven't responded, please try me at schweitn-at-gmail-dot-com. I have a support ticket into my hosting service, so hopefully it will be resolved soon.

Update: Everything got resolved some time last night, and I even got an influx of emails from throughout the day. Nice to not lose anything, even if they were delayed several hours. I actually do prefer nick-at-nickschweitzer-dot-net however, since at some point, I may stop using gmail, and if everyone sends to that address, I don't have to worry about losing too much email in the switch.

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Blogging PSA

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Fri, 25 May 2007 10:03:03 GMT

This obviously doesn't affect me, but does potentially affect many of the other blogs I read:

Security analyst David Kierznowski shocked bloggers yesterday with a survey showing that 49 out of the 50 WordPress blogs he checked seem to be running exploitable versions of the widely used software. He said, 'The main concern here is the lack of security awareness amongst bloggers with a non-technical background, and even those with a technical background.' Mr Kierznowski also uncovered recent vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins that ship by default with the software, adding: 'WordPress users developing plugins must be aware of the security functions that WordPress supports, and ensure that these functions are used in their code.'

So if you run WordPress on your own domain, check your version and upgrade if you are running anything less than 2.0.10 or 2.2.

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Housekeeping

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 15:56:15 GMT

Just a quick note. I've disabled trackbacks for a while since I've been getting more trackback spam than actual trackbacks. I've got a couple changes to make to the code base I use, and will re-enable them when those have been completed.

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Warning to All My Feed Readers

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 17:39:40 GMT

Just wanted to give you all a heads up that I'm going to start using FeedBurner to supply my RSS feeds. Fortunately, dasBlog is so cool, that if you give it the location of your FeedBurner feed, it will automatically redirect people who use your existing feed to the new one. So hopefully, you'll never know it happened. But if for some strange reason you stop receiving my feed, you'll need to come back to my homepage and get the new feed address.

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We All Have to Pay The Bills Somehow

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 22:42:54 GMT

As you know, Blogging isn't free for me anymore, and I don't get enough traffic to support real advertising yet. But, I'd still like to make this little enterprise of mine self sufficient. As you may know, Phel at The Confidentials has started up a new Cafe Press store (which you should definitely check out). What you might not know is that I've been working on a similar enterprise, and have just opened one up myself called CubicleRevenge. You can find it at CubicleRevenge.com. Right now there are three designs with several more on the way in the next few days.

So head on over and check them out. And if you feel so inclined, support my blogging with some nice merchandise. And as Bartles and James would say... Thank you for your support.

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Oh What a Difference a Hosting Service Makes

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Wed, 31 May 2006 09:51:58 GMT

As I mentioned last week, and as some of you continued to notice, my blogs were having some issues after I moved to my new domain. As I've mentioned before, I chose a great tool for blogging called dasBlog. It is used by hundreds of people, has an active developer community, and is used by many high traffic blogs. I felt like I made a solid choice, and still do. Unfortunately, I took the word of one of the community members about which hosting service to use. Big mistake. The hosting service I was using up until yesterday was BoundGrid.net. They offered a pretty good package, and a very reasonable price. But as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for. And what I didn't get was good service.

I'm sure that if everything went smoothly, I would have loved them like the person who had originally recommended them. But the true test of any company is how they react when you are having problems with their service. Last week, The World According to Nick was crashing about 3 to 4 times per day due to Out of Memory Exceptions. This also had the effect of taking down The Coding Monkey. The sites would automatically recycle, but would be down for 5 to 10 minutes while this happened.

When I originally emailed the technical support group, they looked at the site, said it was up (it had recycled by then), and told me to contact them when it happened so they could "investigate further". I sent them my copy of the error logs that showed exactly what was happening, but they insisted they could only do something if the site was down. For a problem that occurs randomly, this is not an easy thing to do. Luckily for me, I was able to catch it when it was down, and I immediately contacted them. Their "solution" was to perform an iisreset and thank me for using their service.

This would happen 3 to 4 times a day, and each time I happened to notice it and saw the site was down, I would contact their technical support group, and all they would do was perform an iisreset. As I continued to escalate my complaint, their response turned into "check your code". Of course, I'm running production level code that hundreds, if not thousands, of other people are using, but I did anyway. I also contacted one of the lead developers for dasBlog (Scott Hanselman), and asked for his help. He was baffled and had never heard of anything like this. We started asking basic questions about the environment I was running on, to try to see how the site was configured. BoundGrid basically told me that I had more memory than a site like mine needed, and refused to answer my very specific questions about where I was running.

At this point, not only had I looked at the dasBlog code, but I had made more than a half dozen configuration changes to dasBlog that might ease the memory requirements. None of these changes worked. On Monday I finally got sick and tired of it all, and decided to switch hosting providers. I chose StormHosts, and I couldn't be happier with my decision. They're slightly more expensive, but their service and support has been fantastic thus far. When I originally copied my site up to their servers, there were some permissions issues that were not allowing me to post. They worked the problem through, kept in constant contact with me, and gave very personal responses that showed that they knew what they were looking at. They also host several other major bloggers who all use dasBlog. I highly recommend them. As for BoundGrid, I can only assume that their technical support team's only previous experience with computers was working the automated fry machine at McDonald's, and being handed a copy of "So You Want To Be a Network Administrator".

Thankfully BoundGrid offers a 30 day money back guarantee, which I am taking full advantage of, so my mistake won't cost me any money. However, it has cost me great frustration, time, and effort.

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Switching from Blogger to dasBlog

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Sun, 21 May 2006 21:37:04 GMT

As I mentioned in my earlier post, switching from Blogger to dasBlog really wasn't all that difficult. In fact, the hardest part was getting my data out of Blogger and Haloscan, not getting it into dasBlog. With that said, its always nice if other people don't have to reinvent the wheel, so here is everything you need to do in order to switch from Blogger to dasBlog in the most complete way possible.

Getting Your Data Out of Blogger: I had been hosting my blog on a blogspot address. In order to get Blogger posts and comments into a useable format, you will need to change several settings on your blog, and change your template. Then you need to republish your blog to an FTP site so that your blogspot address won't be affected, and so you can easily download the resulting data to your computer.

Step 1: Change Your Settings All the setting changes that I describe here will make sure that the resulting XML file you will download will be as clean as possible, and have the data in the most useable format.

First turn off Quick Editing and Email Post links. This will make sure that Blogger doesn't try to insert extra CSS or Javascript into your XML. This may be unnecessary, since your template won't have a <HEAD> tag, but I did it to be safe.

Change your time stamp format for both your posts and your comments. This will ensure that all dates and times in the XML file can be easily read into a DateTime object by the Importing tool later.

Step 2: Set Your Blog to FTP Publishing This will make sure that your blogspot blog won't get overwritten while you're doing your exporting. It also makes it easy to get your XML files when you're done, and allows you to turn off the Blogger Navbar. You can only turn off the Blogger Navbar if you're using FTP publishing. Once again, it may not be necessary to turn it off since you won't have a <HEAD> tag, but it's probably a good idea.

Step 2: Change Your Template Download the following template, and copy the text into the template area of Blogger. Don't forget to save your old template for when you're done! This template will create a blank index.html file, and blank post files, but all the archive files will have your XML data in it (even though they still have the html extension). I used monthly archiving, so this worked out well. You could try to just use the index page, but if you have more than a few months worth of posts, Blogger won't allow you to put every post on the index page. Likewise, you could put each post in it's own XML page using the <$ItemPage$> tag, but if you've been blogging for as long as I have, then you will have hundreds of files to download. Also, you'll want to turn off the Navbar.

Step 3: Republish your entire blog. Once that is finished, use your favorite FTP program to download all the archive files to your computer.

Importing Your Content Into dasBlog: The first thing you need is the Importer program I wrote. If you just want the executable, that is here (requires the .NET Framework v1.1 to run). The source is available here. Unzip the binaries to a directory on your computer, and run Importer.exe.

The Source Directory is the directory on your computer where you downloaded the archive files to. The Destination Directory is where the dasBlog XML files will be outputted to. You can import old posts with a default category if you'd like. I chose Old Blog, but if you don't want a default category, then leave this blank. The username to import with is the username you will use for posting in dasBlog. By default this is admin. The checkbox for converting line breaks to paragraph was because of the template I use on this blog. Blogger by default will insert line breaks in your post which this template didn't render well. So I replaced all double line breaks with paragraph tags.

If you use Haloscan for trackbacks, check the Import Haloscan checkbox, and type in your Haloscan username. Please note, that if you check this box, importing will take a significantly longer amount of time because for every post you import, the Importer has to hit the Haloscan server. Unfortunately, Haloscan provides no way to export your trackbacks, but they do provide an RSS feed for each of your posts. Using that RSS feed in combination with the trackback display page, I'm able to get all the information about your trackbacks and import them into dasBlog. It just takes a while. When I imported The Coding Monkey (which didn't have trackbacks), it took about one minute. Importing The World According to Nick (which did have trackbacks) took more than half an hour.

After the Importer has run, copy the contents from the Destination Directory to the /content directory of the server where you have dasBlog installed. If you're running dasBlog locally, you could set the Destination Directory to output the files directly to the content directory of your dasBlog instance.

Forward People from Blogger to Your New Blog: The last step of course is to point people to the content on your new blog. This requires you to modify your current Blogger template (you know, the one you saved before you replaced it with the XML template.) All you have to do is add the following code to the <HEAD> section of your existing template:

Obviously you'll want to change the base URL to your weblog location. And that is all it takes. I hope this helps anyone who is looking to move off of Blogger.

Why Switch to dasBlog?

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Sun, 21 May 2006 16:45:46 GMT

I first found out about dasBlog about a month ago when I attended Deeper in .NET, a conference sponsored by WI-INETA. One of the speakers was Scott Hanselman, who is one of the primary contributors to dasBlog. I personally thought he was the best speaker of the bunch, and though he didn't talk an awful lot about dasBlog specifically, he mentioned enough to get me interested, since I had been thinking about moving off of Blogger for a while at that point. I also thought that anything this guy was involved in was probably going to be pretty damn good. So far I haven't been disappointed. My problem is that the tools I used for blogging to this point, Blogger and Haloscan (for trackbacks) were both black boxes. Though they worked well in general, you never had access to the back end data, and could only use their web interfaces to do things. Customization was difficult to say the least. Of course, this also means that getting your data out of these services would take some work also, but that is a subject for my next post. For me, there were several requirements for picking my new blogging engine:

Must Be Extendable: This was probably my biggest frustration with Blogger. Although you could do a lot with the templates if you worked at, it lacked certain basic features, and they seemed in no hurry to add any. This meant that I was constantly trying to pull features in from other services to complete my blog package. It made things much more difficult than it needed to be. Although many people prefer WordPress for switching from Blogger, because it's written in PHP (which I only have a cursory knowledge of), customization would be harder for me. Because dasBlog is written in C#, which I know like the back of my hand, customization for me is extremely trivial. In fact, I've already written several macros which are being used on my blogs, which took about a total of 1 hour to write and test.

Had to Run Locally: I wanted to be able to run a version of my blog locally on my laptop. This would allow me to do all the importing and testing locally on my machine, before I even bought server space. That way I could get everything exactly as I wanted it before I moved to my server. This goes hand in hand with picking a .NET blog engine, because I already have all the tools available on my laptop without any extra configuration. WordPress requires PHP and MySQL to run... neither of which I have. dasBlog only requires ASP.NET with no database requirements since it uses XML files as its datastore. This has an added advantage of making it cheaper to host, since most hosting services charge extra if you want to run an instance of a database on your domain.

Import Old Content: I had to be able to import all my old content. That means posts, comments and trackbacks. Though getting this data out of Blogger was going to be a pain no matter what, I wanted to make sure that importing wouldn't also be difficult. dasBlog has an extremely well thought out Data Access Layer that made this process trivial. I can't stress enough how simple it really was to get my data into dasBlog.

Preserve Permlinks: They're permlinks, not templinks. I get a lot of hits via Google, am on many people's blogrolls, and have a lot of old posts which people have linked to while I've been blogging. One of my biggest blogging pet peeves is when you follow a permlink, and you find out that the blog has moved, but you simply get forwarded to the person's homepage. I wanted to make sure that I could change my Blogger template in such a way that people going to a specific post of mine would get forwarded to that same post on my new blog. Once again, dasBlog made this simple because you can pick the unique identifier for imported posts.

Active Developer Community: I wanted to make sure that whatever engine I chose was still being actively developed, and that there was an opportunity for me to get involved. I haven't really been heavily involved in any extra development since I was participating in Winamp3, and wanted to get involved in something again. dasBlog is still being actively developed on SourceForge, and there is an opportunity for me to get involved.

Extra Blogging Features: Of course, one of the primary reasons for moving off of Blogger was that it didn't offer certain basic features. I wanted Categories, built in Trackbacks, and built in file uploading. dasBlog does a very good job with all those things. In addition to that, it has built in ability to cross-post between multiple sites (which is great since I was doing that manually from time to time between my two blogs), and has a really sweet search engine that outputs search results using your template with word highlighting.

Don't worry, my next post will include all the steps and code that I wrote to do everything I've described here so that if you want, you too can move from Blogger to dasBlog.

Welcome to My New Home

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Sun, 21 May 2006 03:18:47 GMT

Welcome to the new home for The Coding Monkey. I've moved both of my blogs to their own domains. You can find The World According to Nick at this new location. My blogs are being powered by a very cool .NET blogging engine called dasBlog with lots of great features. Importing my old posts along with the comments was very easy. In the next few days, I'll post a more complete informational post on how to import your Blogger posts and comments into dasBlog, along with all the code you'll need right here. I've also written some macros for dasBlog (which allows you to extend its functionality) which I'll also provide here.

In the mean time, take a look around (the Search feature is really sweet) and stay a while.