I recently attended CodeMash, the biggest-little-conference around, and had a great time. While the sessions and content at the conference are first class, they aren’t what bring people back. Its the conference attendees, the hallway conversations, and the vibe that bring folks back and make the conference what it is. As a matter of fact, I only made it to a hand full of the sessions this year. Why? Because the rest of the time I was caught up in Open Spaces talks and adhoc conversations with wicked-smart guys like Dustin Campbell, Keith Elder, Bill Wagner,...

Despite my hope for a quick turnaround on the Parley release things just didn’t go that way... they rarely do. I’ve got all kinds of excuses as to why it’s taken so long. Phil, Simone, and I each taking new jobs at Microsoft, Avande, and Quick, respectively, would be one. Carli and I buying a house and getting totally wrapped up in Buckeye Football would be a couple more. But in the end, who care because no one like excuses. Isn’t there even some old cliché about how. excuses are like... something... and they...

Phil officially broke the news early this morning... but for those few of you that don’t read his blog - MySpace China is using a modified version of Subtext for it’s blogging engine. Flippin' Sweet! Does this mean we’ve finally made it and we can start making insanely frivolous purchases like our own data center, ping-pong tables, and a yacht? Nope, not even close. That’s the beauty of the OSI license under which Subtext is released - others are free to do pretty much whatever the heck they want with Subtext. And that’s cool by us......

One of the things I’m most excited about with Visual Studio 2008 is it’s ability to target various versions of the .net framework, a feature known as multi-targeting. I recently rebuilt a (hand-me-down) laptop for use at developer group meetings, conferences, and coding from the couch. When building out the machine I decided to only install VS2008 and make use of multi-targeting to work on my various .net 2.0 projects... like Subtext. Today I finally got around to loading Subtext up in VS2008 and I was expecting some heartache. But I did a little research first and...

Not too long ago a user sent us an email informing us that Subtext’s Origami skin didn’t have a #feedback tag, meaning it was missing a named anchor that would allow you to jump directly to the feedback portion of the page. I took a look and sure enough it didn’t. This kind of bug is typically referred to as low hanging fruit - easy to spot, quick and easy to fix. So naturally I went ahead and added the named anchor tag, checked it into the Subtext SVN repository and called it fixed. But it’s not fixed. Today I...

After a very hectic month or so things are starting to slow down around here. They are slowly getting back to normal, or at least as normal as things ever were. And since Phil is utterly overwhelmed with Cody "O.G." Haack he’s been hounding me to give up my day job and spend more time Subtexting. Unfortunatly we’ve not found a rich benefactor to pay our salaries while we do what we love - build Subtext and evangelize the goodness of open source software. But I digress... The point of this rant? The point is - we were not planning...

As several of my comrades have already announced, Subtext has been nominated for two, count 'em two Community Choice Awards! Apparently my pleading worked! Nominations Best Project for Communications: The best project for talking to your friends or sharing information. Other nominees include - Miranda, Pidgin, and FileZilla. Most Collaborative Project: The project most likely to accept your patches and value your input. Other nominees include - Azureus, XOOPS, and Zimbra. This is a really big achievement for the project and we're proud to be one of only two .NET projects to be nominated. The other project is VMukti, a corporate...

Recently several Subtext users have asked how to integrate Lightbox JS into Subtext's photo galleries. My standard answer has been Right now it's not possible because the control that renders the galleries emits links with relative URLs rather than fully qualified URLs. We'll look into making a change to the data binding mechanism for a future release - so hold tight! I finally had a few spare cycles so I looked into the existing data binding logic and realized that it is possible to get the control to emit fully qualified URLs right now! Notice, I said it's...

The SourceForge.net team is proud to present our second annual Community Choice Awards. Winners are selected by community members like you, and it's that time again! Cast a ballot for your favorite projects now and make your voice heard. That short blurb pretty much says it all. The Community Choice Awards are a chance for you, the community of open source software users, to nominate and then vote on the projects that you find most useful, best designed, most collaborative, etc... Actually, there are eleven different categories that a project can be nominated for - though...

asp.net 2.0 introduced a new section in the web.config file -ConnectionStrings. This new configuration section allows you to add connection strings in your web.config, like we always have, or in a different data source. In Subtext 2.0 we're using this new feature to split the connection string out into a new configuration file, user.config. Doing this should make day to day development easier for our development team by reducing the number of merge conflicts in web.config. Since most every developer has a different database configuration, it makes sense to keep this information in its own file and away from the...

A recent post by security analyst David Kierznowske reports that 49 out of 50 WordPress blogs that he checked out were running an exploitable version of the WordPress blogging engine. According to the post, David looked at blogs running on versions as far back as WordPress v1.2 (with v2.2 being the most recent release, as of this writing). So does this mean that WordPress is buggy software that is to be avoided? No, not at all. It just means that those users need to do a better job of dealing with the bugs. The sky is blue and software has bugs...

UPDATE: Simone found a bug with the recently refreshed Day Dreamin' skin - basically I forgot to update the User.Skins.config file to use the Prototype and script.aculo.us libraries. I uploaded a fix last night and bumped the skin up to version 1.1.1. Be sure to get the update if you're running Subtext 1.9.5 or greater. I just uploaded a new version of the Day Dreamin' skin to the SubtextSkins site. You can get it from the Skin Showcase section of the site. What's New As Phil mentioned in the official Subtext 1.9.5 release announcement, we added a few goodies for...

After a lot of hard work by Dru and Jeff, it sounds like the GeeksWithBlogs site is ready to make the move to Subtext! To my knowledge this will be the largest multi-blog site running on Subtext - 1,398 blogs at the moment. This should really put our little application through the ringer! Everyone cross your fingers at 8PM (EST) tomorrow night tonight... and don't uncross them for 4-5 hours. The GWB guys are going to need all the luck they can get seeing as tomorrow today is Friday the 13th. Yeah... so I just realized that it's 1:30AM here, so...

OK, so it's not like I made it on HeadlineNews or something... but it still feels good to see your name in the headline for a news item. And it feels even better when the news is coming from your employer - VelocIT Hires Steve Harman. Admittedly, this is somewhat old news, but I just noticed the announcement yesterday so it's exciting (to me)! Besides, I've been meaning to blog about this transition for a while now and this gives me an excuse. The story As the news items says, I was introduced to VelocIT (pronounced: vuh-los-i-tee) by company co-founder Phil...

As I usually do prior to a new release, I am going to eat my own dog food - but don't worry, it's not that tainted pet food that's all the rage right now. I just finished upgrading this blog to Subtext v1.9.5 (pre-release). So please click around and look for any odd behavior. A few changes In the comments section of each post you'll notice that I now have Identicons enabled. This release also brings the ability to distinguish between an regular commenter and the blog author. So any comments that I've left should look a little different than the typical comment....

In his Working for The Man piece Jeremy Allison lays out six lessons he's learned over the course of his career in software; six lessons he'd like to go back and tell himself at the beginning of his career. Whether you're a code-slinger just starting out or a seasoned veteran with wisdom and design patterns coming out your ears, this is a great read. So go read it now... I'll wait. This is me, waiting... See I told it was good, didn't I? Even though I've only been in the software business for half a decade I've already learned many of...

Recently Ayende posted a simple SQL script for calculating the most popular posts in your Subtext blog. Being of the curious nature, I couldn't help but run the query against my own blog... The Results: iPod Shuffle - What I Learned My First Day. .Text's MetaWeblog API - Edit Post Error... Hotfix KB928388 - Revised Daylight Savings Time subText Reaches 1,000 Downloads - and Counting! Debugging a .NET WebApp in VS.NET Gaim - MSN Crashes Using MbUnit with COM+ 1.5 transactions... a big Gotcha! CVS - Keeping your branch(es) in sync... Notepad++...

This rant started as a comment to Jeff 'Coding Horror' Atwood's recent posted entitled "What's In a Version Number, Anyway?" In his post Jeff take a look at some of the What, Why, and How software gets its version numbers and how those influence the product's name. The topic is particularly interesting to me as not too long ago Phil and I were discussing a possible change in the naming scheme used for Subtext. Anyone who has been following Subtext development (and releases) lately has probably noticed the flurry of version numbers that are leaking into the product...

Subtext v1.9.4 "Windward" officially dropped this past Sunday, and pretty quickly several users and developers pointed out that the new Sitemap implementation was some-what busted. It's never good when a new feature is broken straight out of the box. I take full blame for the foul-up. I wasn't aware of Google's apparent requirement that the Sitemap file live as close to the root of the site as possible. So when I tried to make the HttpHandler be more specific I accidentally broke the implementations in Google's eyes. The Fix To fix my screw-up, I had to change the Regular Expression that...

Tonight while working on some blog posts about CodeMash I decided to make use of a new Windows Live Writer plug-in, Insert XFN Link. In my post about becoming a more productive programmer I tagged a link to Jon Galloway's site with the XFN markup. I quickly realized that I didn't like the icon that Subtext's XFN Highlighter uses. So naturally I set to the web to find some alternatives. I came across some great icons for the XFN Microformat, and I just had to have them. Since they are licensed under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 1.0 license I pulled them down...

Today I was merging the Subtext 1.9 branch back into the trunk in our SVN repository and I came across an interesting "Gottcha" to keep in your back pocket - Microsoft has changed the Time Zone settings with the fix for KB928388. The Back Story One of the great things that Subtext has going for it (from a developer's perspective) is our great suite of Unit tests. At the time of this writing we were up around 39% code coverage. So, being the contentious developer that I am, after I merged the branch into trunk and cleaned up any...