Kerry D. Wong » dasBlog

Site Upgraded to dasBlog 1.9.7174.0

kwong — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 00:53:48 +0000

OK, the Captcha issue has been bugging me for quite a while. It seemed that it might have been the 1.9.6264.0 build. So, I decided to upgrade 1.9.7174.0 even though dasBlog for .Net 2.0 is right on the corner.

Well, indeed, after the upgrade the comment Captcha is back, and the mysterious timeout issue (it may or may not be related) seems to have been fixed as well.

Captcha Problem with dasBlog 1.9 under ASP.Net 2.0

kwong — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:33:22 +0000

I upgraded my blog engine from dasBlog 1.8.5223.2 to 1.9.6264.0 roughly a month ago. A few people recently brought to my attention that the capcha on the comment page no longer worked properly. Since I have been pretty busy recently after my move, I haven’t really got a chance to look at the problem yet. But just a quick Google, I found out that many people apparently are having the same issues.

From what I have read, it’s a compatibility issue between WebControlCaptcha.dll and ASP.Net 2.0 (which is what my site is running on right now). I will try to find out if there is an easy way to fix this problem (I can’t simply revert back to ASP.Net 1.1 since many new pages I added were in 2.0). Stay tuned…

dasBlog on Mono? Not so easy

kwong — Tue, 15 May 2007 00:27:50 +0000

Over the past few months, I have been tempted to convert the current version of dasBlog to run under Mono (Note, there is a much older version that runs on Linux/Mono http://www.go-mono.com/ports/).

So far it has proven to be quite impossible. Unlike most of the open source projects, dasBlog heavily relies on some third party .Net libraries where source is generally not available.

For the most of the part, the windows specific source code (e.g. source code that accesses Windows registry) can be modified to do without relying on Windows API. And most of the third party libraries dasBlog relies on have no compatibility issues.

However, there are a few show stoppers. The following is a Mono Migration Analyzer report generated against the latest dasBlog (1.9.6264.0). As you can see, the two worst offenders are FreeTextBox.dll and DPAPI.dll. Frankly, I am quite disappointed that such a wonderful blogging tool cannot be easily ported to Linux and UNIX variants and there seems to be very little interests in the open source community to make dasBlog a true cross-platform blogging tool. Well, I guess for now I will keep running it under Windows…

WebForm_AutoFocus Issue with Custom Pages in dasBlog

kwong — Sat, 05 May 2007 00:21:11 +0000

I have created quite a few customized pages (e.g. http://www.kerrywong.com/cmsg ) on my blog site. One thing I noticed is that some of the .Net generated client side java scripts (e.g. WebForm_AutoFocus and some client side validations) do not fire correctly when running under framework 2.0. At first I thought that this was due to some build problems or some incorrect configuration settings in machine.config. But when I deployed the same webpages to a new website (say on a different port), all the client side java scripts worked fine. And if I load the same page deployed on the same site where dasBlog is deployed with IE, I got a scripting error which complains WebForm_AutoFocus is not defined. So I knew that something is wrong with the web.config that came with dasBlog.

After some searching, I found out that the problem was caused by certain settings in web.config. In .Net 2.0 client side scripts are dynamically generated via WebResource.axd, and for whatever reason, certain settings prevent the generated client side java scripts to execute. Ross Hawkins has a great article on this issue In his blog, he examined many different scenarios which might lead to the behavior I discussed above. For dasBlog users, the key is to find this line in your dasBlog web.config file (located in section):

<httpCompress preferredAlgorithm="gzip" compressionLevel="high">

And change the compression level to "none". This approach is not ideal though since by removing the compression capability the website performance may suffer a little bit, depending on the request size and the website traffic. But right now, it seems that this is the only way that I can find to solve this problem. I will certainly investigate more and will keep everyone posted if I find a better solution.

Site Upgraded to dasBlog 1.9.6264.0

kwong — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 00:18:44 +0000

The official dasBlog version of 1.9.6264.0 was released in last September, but I have not upgrated to it from 1.8.5223.2 because I was afraid of something might break… Well, a few of my colleagues already upgraded and had assured me that the upgrade process was rather painless, so I decided to do it as well.

And indeed, following the instructions on dasBlog’s official site, the process turned out to be quite simple, except for a few missing image files which I had no problem of replacing from my backed up version. And while I was at it, I cleaned up of few broken links on my right navigation as well.

Everything looks good for now, I will see in the next few days if anything is broken…