.NET Blog - Chris Frazier Style : CS::Blogs

SubText, BlogML, and PostXING

Christopher — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 20:30:00 GMT

This is the end result after setting up SubText and importing my old blog (now moved to here). I had created a blogML exporter for cs11 and ran into some initial problems because the version of BlogML I had used was a smidge older (v0.9) and therefore had a different schema. Kinda makes me wish there were a way to clear out all the content and start over like subv2 allows me to.

So why didn't I go with subv2? (Sorry, Darren) The admin interface and WebParts' silly requirement of IE. I basically live in FireFox and although it's been quite some time since I've posted thru the web interface of .text/CS::Blogs, I do need to go in from time to time and make some changes. Plus, since subtext was forked off of .text, I'm already pretty familiar with the interface (and some of the code when necessary). Subv2 is a real nice exploration of all the fun new doohickeys in .net 2.0, and with Darren at the helm you know it's high-quality stuff, but I need something that works for me in the environment I choose to work with. Either way, I've got an install of Subv2 behind the firewall so I could just make that one public and import my shiny new blogML file if need be: I'm keeping a definite eye on it, that's for sure.

[ Currently Playing : Move Me on Down the Line - ZZ Top - Tres Hombres (2:30) ]

It's fixed.

Christopher — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 19:03:00 GMT

Yesterday I realized that I was having issues with anonymous users posting comments to my CS site. After going over the code a little bit, what I didn't realize is that the bug is a custom skin bug. (ie a skin that I wrote was missing one line containing a specific control.)

After a little searching I found someone with a similar problem, and Alex Lowe pointed them here: http://communityserver.org/forums/491886/ShowPost.aspx#491913

And it worked. Yay.

[ Currently Playing : Seed - Korn - Follow the leader (5:54) ]

CS::Blogs : beware the permission set!

Christopher — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 19:33:00 GMT

So I got some feedback about PostXING saying that someone who had setup multiple blogs with CS::Blogs was getting the wrong blog back while trying to communicate with the Metaweblog API.

After a couple of questions, it turns out that all of the users were set up as sysadmins in the CS permission set, so anyone making a request to the metablog api would get a list of all the blogs available. Since PostXING ignorantly just uses BlogInfo[0] from the metablog_getUsersBlogs() method, everybody was trying to post to the first blog returned in the list.

So if you are running a multiple blog setup and wish to use the metablog api, make sure that your permissions are set so that when a user makes a request into his/her blog, theirs is the only blog they get back.

Thanks, Jeff.

[ Currently Playing : Voodoo Child (Slight Return) - Jimi Hendrix - (5:12) ]

Blogging API commonalities

Christopher — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 19:59:00 GMT

Here is some of the common ground I can see between the metaweblog api and CS::Blogs BlogService asmx.

Blog/Authentication:

UserName
Password
BlogID/BlogName

Post/Entry:

DateCreated/Date
Description/Body
Title
string[] Categories (nice!)
PostID

Non-Conformities (for Posts):

Metablog API

Enclosure (although this is not used by CS::Blogs or .Text)
link
permalink
Source (name and url, was supported by .Text, not so sure about CS::Blogs)
userid

BlogService.asmx

Excerpt
Name (I guess this is for url rewriting)
Enable Comments
Enable Trackbacks
Moderate Comments
Enable Ratings
Syndicate
Syndicate Excerpt (I guess you have to define an excerpt for this to work?)
Syndicate Root (for communities?)
DisplayOnHome (again, communities?)
IsArticle (I really dig this one. I've wanted to be able to edit articles from the desktop for a long time.)

I've also been looking at ATOM a little bit - there doesn't seem to be any mention of categories in atom, which kinda sucks considering categories are a nice way to filter content.

All of the apis, including atom, have one other thing in common: getting general blog information is usually a two-step process. As an end user, I must supply a username, a password, and a url (although the atom api lets you enter a homepage url with a <link/> element that points to the service url (v1.0 of CS::Blogs asks for a blogname, too. Maybe this says that you should only work with one blog at a time?)). Then I get a list of blogs that I can edit with the credentials supplied. Then I can create, update, or delete a post. I can also get a list of recent entries (and articles in the case of the BlogService.asmx).

With atom, on blogger at least, you are required to use https:// as the uri scheme. Not a big deal, this just means that the common denominator for a blog has to have a couple of booleans: UseSSL and SupportsCategories, because those two are what separates atom and the apis of CS::Blogs from a coding standpoint. Since I'm going to be using libraries to handle the xml transfers (xml-rpc, soap, or rest) I could care less what the xml looks like.

Speaking of libraries, the code that I have for handling the metaweblog api also includes support for the old blogger xml-rpc api (thanks, dasBlog!), so I'll probably include support for posting to that api as well in the new version of PostXING.

ReverseDOS in Community Server

Christopher — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 18:31:00 GMT

After another slew of referrer/comment spam that showed up in my blog this morning, I went ahead and downloaded Mike's ReverseDOS.

I followed the steps outlined for setup, but it didn't quite work the way it was outlined at first - I got the dreaded "yellow screen of death". This was due to the entries that I had made in the web.config. So I looked at the entries that were already in there, and I noticed that some <section/> nodes were added to the <system.web/> node. Moving the default configuration from looking like this:

<!-- copy and paste the following code -->
<configSections>
   <sectionGroup name="AngryPets" >
      <section name="ReverseDOS" type="AngryPets.Web.Frameworks.ReverseDOS.FilterConfigHandler, AngryPets.Web.Frameworks.ReverseDOS" />
   </sectionGroup>
</configSections>

Instead, mine now looks like this:

<sectionGroup name="system.web">
	<section name="membership" type="Microsoft.ScalableHosting.Configuration.MembershipConfigHandler, MemberRole, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b7c773fb104e7562"/>
	<section name="roleManager" type="Microsoft.ScalableHosting.Configuration.RolesConfigHandler, MemberRole, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b7c773fb104e7562"/>
	<section name="profile" type="Microsoft.ScalableHosting.Configuration.ProfileConfigHandler, MemberRole, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b7c773fb104e7562"/>
	<section name="anonymousIdentification" type="Microsoft.ScalableHosting.Configuration.AnonymousIdConfigHandler, MemberRole, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b7c773fb104e7562"/>
	<section name="ReverseDOS" type="AngryPets.Web.Frameworks.ReverseDOS.FilterConfigHandler, AngryPets.Web.Frameworks.ReverseDOS" />
</sectionGroup>

And I of course moved the ReverseDOS node to be under system.web. We'll see how this pans out, but I thought I would put it out there just in case someone else was having issues with it.

[ Currently Playing : Stinkfist - Tool - Aenima (5:10) ]

Enabling styles in CS

Christopher — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 03:53:00 GMT

Straight from ScottW, I added

<MarkUp>
	<globalAttributes>
		<class enable = "true" />
		<align enable = "true" />
		<style enable = "true" />
		<id enable = "true" />
	</globalAttributes>

notice the style element? That cleared up the little non-formatted code issue that I had in my previous post.

A little CS hack for the metablog API

Christopher — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 00:01:00 GMT

Keith told me that CSBlogs was returning relative urls for its Metablog API implementation. After I installed it, I noticed the same thing - so I decided to hack it a little bit and find out what was going wrong. It turns out that the software is just doing what the guys at telligent are telling it to - thankfully I've got the code and I can poke around when I find little issues like this :)

First, I added a call to the Globals class to return a formatted url with the application path intact. This was in Components.SiteUrlsData.cs:

public virtual string FormatUrl(string name, params object[] parameters)
{      	

    if(parameters == null)
        return Globals.FullPath(this.Paths[name]);

    else
        return Globals.FullPath(string.Format(Paths[name],parameters));
}

But wait! This causes the rss feed to show up with something silly like http: / /localhost/cshttp://localhost/cs/blog... for the links in the RSS and Atom feeds produced by CSBlogs. So, I tried it without the "HostPath" to see if I could get the same results. This was in Blogs.Components.BaseWeblogSyndicationHandler:

/// <summary>
/// Appends http://Host:Port to all blog urls
/// </summary>
protected override string BaseUrl
{
    get
    {
        return ""; //return Globals.HostPath(Context.Request.Url);
    }
}

That's it right? Nope, not if you have galleries enabled. One of the methods (that I know of :) uses the modified FormatUrl above to try and get a MapPath to a directory. You'll find out really quickly that MapPath doesn't like fully-qualified urls passed to it...I know I did. So, I modified one more line to make sure that I've got a relative path passed into the photo gallery. This was in Galleries.Components.Picture:

/// <summary>
/// This static method gets the location of the picture cache directory, mapped on the local filesystem.
/// </summary>
/// <returns>string</returns>
public static string CacheDirectory()
{
	Uri uri = new Uri(GalleryUrls.Instance().PictureCache);
	return CSContext.Current.Context.Server.MapPath(uri.AbsolutePath);
}

After that, everything seems to be running as normal. I don't know if I'd recommend doing something like this on your install, especially if things are working well enough for you. I just use this particular feature of the Metablog API quite often, so it bit me a lot.

update: It looks like the trackback feature uses fully qualified urls as well as the rss/atom feeds. I'll post a fix tomorrow when I find out where the BaseUrl is set for the trackbacks.

update2: Found it :) I would've got it done last night, but I don't have the broadband yet. Any ways, like I thought it was just a removal of a baseUrl parameter (case notwithstanding). I found this in Blogs.Controls.TrackbackMarkup:

protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
{
            
    if(IsValid)
    {
        string baseUrl = Globals.HostPath(Context.Request.Url);
	writer.WriteLine(tag,/*baseUrl+*/PermaLink,Title,/*baseUrl+*/PingUrl);
    }
}

[ Currently Playing : Rooster - Alice in Chains - Unplugged (6:40) ]

My Migration to CS::Blogs

Christopher — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 17:48:00 GMT

So, mainly because of my comment problems with dottext 0.95, I decided to go ahead and take the plunge. Here's how I got CS installed in less than an hour:

Used the web installer. This was pretty useful as I'm very prone to error with just the sql scripts ;) . Just set bool INSTALLER_ENABLED = true; in the default.aspx of the /installer folder and got the base community up and running. Thanks Dan for your walk thru that outlined basically the same thing.
Ran Kevin Harder's DotText-CS-Converter. I tried to download CSVerter, but got a resource not found error from the download location. This one worked well, and very quickly for me.
Followed Ken's outline of How to configure CS::Blogs for a single blog
Added the latest version of the MetaBlog API implementation so I can post w/ PostXING

That was it. My only gripe so far is the MetaBlog API doesn't return fully-qualified urls like the dotText implementation did. I can't believe they'd introduce a regression like that, but maybe there's a reason for it. It totally breaks some features of PostXING tho - like the view blog feature. I guess I could code around it (or, maybe I should code around it :) but I'd like to see if it's addressed first. Another thing that I should probably address is the fact that one user can have many blogs in Community Server. The way PostXING works now, it would only grab the first one returned b/c that's the way that I've always worked with it.

Another thing that irked me was that Community Server broke an nGallery vdir I had running up here. Funny thing is, it only broke one that was version 1.6.1. I have a v1.0 (I think) nGallery up as well, and it works just fine afaict. Weird.

Anyways, that's my story and I'm stickin to it.

[ Currently Playing : Everything I've known - Korn - Take a look in the mirror (3:34) ]

Score for CS::Blogs

Christopher — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 15:43:00 GMT

I feel like a kid in one of those old milk commercials - you may try to com...ment $p4|\/| me, on....line pok...er, but my blog is running CS::Blogs, so your stupid comment doesn't get past my inbox. Comment moderation: it does a blog good.

[ Currently Playing : Floyd The Barber - Nirvana - Bleach (2:18) ]