Plenty of other folks have already announced that the Subtext 2.0 bits finally dropped this past Sunday afternoon, hot off the CI server. And by finally, I mean – over a year after the last official release, and four months after we said it was just around the corner. Good things come to those who wait At least that’s what the Heinz company says. Or maybe they just had a brilliant marketing department. Anyhow, Simone Chiaretta and several other folks have already hit the release highlights, so I’ll just steal their summaries: ...

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......

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...

Phil recently went public with his pending career shift - he's leaving VelocIT to make waves at Koders. Naturally I wish my friend only the best... but I've got to get something off my chest. My gut reaction When Phil first called me to break the news I thought I took it rather well. I mean, I certainly understand where he's coming from when he talks about his love for OSS and the communities that are built around great projects like Subtext - boy do I understand! I also tend to agree with his there are only two kinds of...

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....

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++...

I am proud to announce the release of Day Dreamin', a new skin for Subtext. Okay, so it's not exactly the most exhilarating news of the day, but I think it's a pretty sweet little skin. Plus, I'm hoping to stir up some interest in the Subtext Skins Gallery. Phil announced the gallery almost six months ago yet at the time of this writing there are only five user submitted skins (including the new Day Dreamin' skin). I know that there are a lot of people using custom skins in their Subtext installation, but I'm not sure how many of...

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...

UPDATE: A fix is now available for the Sitemap issue that many users reported after the original release. Check out the notes here. Sorry it took so long to get here - but I'm happy to finally announce that the next version of everyone's favorite blog platform is ready to... err... launch! Below are the official release notes for Subtext 1.9.4 "Windward" Edition. For those keeping track, the official version number for this release is v1.9.4.78, but who's really counting. Bug Fixes 1583948 - Recent Comments should strip comments along with HTML 1585529 - sidebar disappears after config save ...

UPDATE: I just pushed Subtext v1.9.4.75 out to this blog. It includes several bug fixes as well as a couple of new features - including a SiteMap implementation. You can see my SiteMap here. Simo is also dog fooding a recent Subtext build on his blog. I just finished upgrading my production Subtext installation to the latest bits from the 1.9 branch - hot off the build server! That means that both this site (stevenharman.net) and my other blog (Steve's Life) are both running on the v1.9.4.72 code set. As of right now the 1.9.4 release will include 14 bug fixes, 3...

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...

Barry just posted a great tip for recalculating your Subtext blog's statistics if they get out of whack. As he says in the post, under normal usage the stats should keep themselves updated and accurate... but there are situations that can cause them to get messed up. For example, we found a bug with an old database trigger that could cause the stats for your Comments and Ping/Trackbacks to get zeroed out. I'll be sure to fix the bug for the 2.0 release, but until then you might want to run Barry's script every now and then to clean things up....

I was just browsing the Subtext's Ohloh Metrics Report (previously mentioned here), playing around with some of the cool Contributors Features when I saw something new... a little box that said "0 Stacks, Stack It!" WTF is that? was my first thought... but before looking into it I clicked "Stack It!" and suddenly Subtext had 1 Stack. My next step was to figure out what I had just done. A quick trip to the Ohloh home page and I found my answer: New Feature: Stack It! We've introduced a new community feature called "Stack It!" which allows you to browse...

I just finished pushing an updated version of my blog's skin (I call it CityNight) out to my production server - so here it is for all to see! Pretty flippin' sweet, yeah? Normally I wouldn't throw together such a long string of random thoughts and attempt to pass it off as a blog post for something so mundane as updating my skin... but, I'm bored. Well that and I added a couple of new controls that other Subtext Skinners may find useful. Additions and Tweaks Added - SubtextSearch Control Probably the most obvious and exciting addition is the Search...

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...

Extra, Extra... read all about it! The latest version of Subtext just hit the streets! OK, so it took me a LOT longer than I promised, but I finally found a few spare cycles and was able to tease out the remaining show stopper bugs for Subtext 1.9.3. Most of those bugs had to do with the implementation of BlogML 2.0 and how we handle attachments when writing/reading a BlogML file. But fear not, I was able to work it all out. :) Now, on to the release notes: New Features BlogML 2.0 Support Subtext now has fully integrated support...

I just finished pushing the latest bits for the next version of Subtext out to my server... so are they working? Phil recommended (and I agreed) that it would be a good idea if I tested the upgrade process for the 1.9.3 version on my live blog - and you know what? It worked like a charm! (knocks on nearest piece of wood) Got a few minutes? If you've got a few spare cycles this morning, please poke around the site a little bit and make sure that everything looks good and the damn thing doesn't blow up! Most...

I just pushed the latest bits out to the SourceForge download server. This bugfix release addresses the upgrade issue I mentioned in a previous post as well as a few CSS + IE7 display bugs with Robb's KeyWest skin. This is officially Subtext 1.9.2.30. You can always find out what version you are running by logging into your Admin interface and taking a look in the bottom left corner. Just for completeness - you should check out Phil's posts about the 1.9.2 upgrade process as well as the 1.9.2.23 release. Get 'em While They're Hot! Download Here!

While preparing to upgrade this blog from Subtext 1.5.2 to the latest 1.9.2 bits I discovered a bug in the Upgrade process - I hope you all made a backup of your database like Phil suggested! Impact When upgrading to 1.9.2 we move all comments and track/ping backs out of the subtext_Content database table, into the new subtext_Feedback table. All of the feedback items to get moved over to the new table, but it appears that some of the comments get transformed into trackbacks. DOH! I've just checked in a fix, but I'll need to coordinate an updated release with Phil. Until...

Be sure to check out this announcement about the re-Release that we just dropped to fix a couple of bugs. So to be clear, the most recent (and now official) release's full version number is 1.9.2.23. Phew... it's out! You should check out Phil's full announcement to get all the details... or if you have a short attention span, then take a peek at the synopsis. One thing to note... PLEASE take heed to the warning about backing up your entire site and database before upgrading to 1.9.2. As stated in the release announcement, this upgrade involves some huge schema...

Some time ago I read a story (really, more of an announcement) on slashdot about a new Web site/service that was attempting to evaluate open-source projects. When I noticed that site was founded by a couple of ex-Microsofties my interest was piqued! Rather than blindly rely on the anti-MS propaganda that the slashdot readership tends to spew forth, I went ahead and checked out the site for myself. First question... exactly what does Ohloh intend to provide? Answer... directly from their about page: Ohloh is a resource for open source intelligence on thousands of open source projects. Ohloh collects software metrics from a variety of sources including...

I just saw that on Aug 8th, 2006 the subTEXT Project broke into the Top 25 projects hosted on SourceForge.net. Now I'm not exactly sure what that means - nor how the rankings are calculated - but I still think it's pretty awesome and stands as a testament to the great work that the subTEXT Team and Community are doing. Congrats All, and here's to breaking into the Top 10! UPDATE: Haacked just sent me a link to SourceForge's Ranking algorithm. Thanks Phil!

First, an introduction. "ATLAS" is a free (as in beer) framework from Microsoft aimed at building rich, responsive UIs by utilizing AJAX techniques on the web. This framework is different from other AJAX libraries/frameworks as it is built for, and fully integrates with the ASP.NET 2.0 server-based development framework. This tight integration makes adding AJAX-ish functionality to your existing ASP.NET applications quick and (relatively) painless. My First Take I recently decided to look into using ATLAS as the AJAX Framework of choice for the Subtext project. After running through the step-by-step installation instructions, and reading a few quick...

As many of you likely know, I am one of several [very talented] developers working on the subTEXT Project. As such I try to keep on top of our various Trackers and the items in them. If you take a look at our Bug Tracker you will notice that you can search and/or filter the items using a variety of predefined fields. One of these fields is labeled "Group". What is "Group"? The Group field is available in the Feature Request, Patch and (as I mentioned) the Bug Trackers. For the subTEXT project, the values for this field tend to be version...

As I'm sure many of you know, peer pressure can be a very powerful motivator... and I am not immune to such pressure. So, hot on the heels of Phil and Jon's posts on the magic voodoo that can be accomplished with the INFORMATION_SCHEMA Views, I felt obligated to add my own small bit of wisdom to the fray. In reading through Phil's article I noticed he didn't mention anything in particular about the creating, modifying, and/or dropping of Stored Procedures when working with a common schema among a development team. This is one thing we often have to deal with...

If you are currently (or have recently) tried out the 1.5 release of subText and then tried to run the dotText 0.95 -> subTEXT Migration Procedure you probably noticed a small problem... IT FAILED! Not to worry... I've made a fix and checked it into the version 1.5 Release Branch. Now all we (read: Phil) has to do is create a new release version for the download page and everyone should be good-to-go! However if you don't want to wait for the new release, feel free to click on the file icon to the left to grab the updated SQL script right...

UPDATE: All is well... I was able to fix the issue with a simple SQL Statement per Haacked's tip. Whoa, Whoa, Whoa... What is going on? I was just doing a little administrative admin to a few posts on my blog - namely adding them to a new subText Category and I just noticed that my homepage is showing some posts in the wrong order. And the posts seem to be from random dates. Quick, take a look at the top few posts on my homepage... notice anything. They go from Top to Bottom in this order: Beer May Help Prevent Cancer......

I was just checking out some of the stats for the subText project site over at SourceForge, and I noticed that we hit the 1,000 downloads mark this past weekend. Looks like it happened sometime on Saturday (April 8th, 2006) morning. A Hearty Thank YouWe [the subText Team] don't know who it was that made this historic download, and we don't have the funds to throw a huge party or give away something cool like an iPod... but on behalf of the entire subText Team I'd like to say Thank You. And also, a sincere Thanks goes out to everyone...

Do not adjust your browser... all is well! This is still the same old StevenHarman.net that you all (yes, all 3 of my readers) know and love... but now it's all new!I finally jumped the dotText ship and moved my site over to subText [jumped ship... get it? Because the subText logo is a submarine]. I'm looking forward to utilizing all of the features that the new platform will bring to my little piece 'o the web.The most noticeable change to all of you is my fancy new skin - CityNight. This skin was inspired in part by the GlueBlur...

As many of my cohortshave already mentioned, I am proud to announce [on stevenharman.net] that subText v1.0 (code named Nautilus) has been released. I would also like to thank all of those who have contributed to this project, whether it be submitting patches, testing, or just feedback... it is much appreciated. I also want to make special mention of the subText Project Team - great job guys! Now, on to the real business... here's a look at some of the sweetness that subText v1.0 is packing: Installation Check out the installation guide on our project site for a walkthrough of the installation....