When it came time to implement the blog component of the subliminal effect Web site that you are currently reading, I surveyed the various blog writing tools, engines and services, tried out some of these, considered writing my own, read reviews and solicited opinions from colleagues. Ultimately, I settled upon the dasBlog.info">dasBlog engine for convenience (a lot quicker to get running than to write something less functional), features (does what I needed and doesn’t do what I don’t need like implementing forums) and price (it’s difficult to argue with free).

After downloading the dasBlog Web files distribution, it was installed and running on my local server within minutes. Unfortunately, getting it to work correctly alongside the rest of the subliminal effect Web site on hosting.com’s remote server wasn’t nearly as quick or easy.

While some of my colleagues use dasBlog to implement their entire Web site, I felt this approach was unnecessarily restrictive and inflexible for what I wanted to do with subliminal effect. For my particular scenario, the setup instructions for dasBlog were to create a virtual directory (vdir) to install into (rather than the site root) and change a configuration setting for this new location accordingly. These instructions had nothing to say about the resulting issue where the blog application files were now picking up the settings in the Web.Config files located in both the blog vdir and Web site root.

Understandably, the site administrators at hosting.com couldn’t provide any application support. They will just do whatever administrative task you ask of them (as long as it is prudent from a security viewpoint). Through trial and error, we went through a few different arrangements like having the vdir created as a folder physically removed from the rest of the Web site content but that still didn’t help. Presumably, having the blog set up as its own separate Web site and domain would have worked correctly but I wanted the blog to seem to be an integral part of subliminal effect and share the same domain name.

In the end, my work around was to rewrite the Web.Config file in the root of the Web site to remove the offending global settings that were causing dasBlog to fail. Other work arounds may be possible but these seemed even more obtuse.

With this show-stopper resolved, I started to edit the supplied default blog settings in earnest and promptly ran into another issue… You can edit the default entries in the blog roll via the administrative functions provided by dasBlog but adding new entries doesn’t quite work. I think the fault lies in the XSLT transform used to insert the new entry into the OPML file that stores all the blog entries but I didn’t look into this too closely. It was much more convenient for me just to open the OPML file in this really cool XML file editor called Notepad that I had conveniently at hand. Actually, adding blog entries this way was a lot faster than using the built-in administrative function, even if it did work correctly (which it didn't).

I now have the first few blog entries written and posted. The first two of these, I also cross-posted to my former blog. dasBlog does have a cross-posting feature but so far I haven’t seen where I can selectively cross-post based upon the categories that I mark for each blog entry. For those of you who subscribe to the feed for the MSDN blogs expecting lucid developer information and insight, I am kindly sparing you from being subjected to my heirloom gourmet stuffed mushroom recipe…

Next on my to-do list with this blog is to devise a new skin that resembles the rest of the subliminal effect Web site. You may have noticed the jarring transition to and from a page of the Web site proper. Unfortunately, this appears to be a non-trivial task. I spent one night editing one of the supplied skins to approximate the look of subliminal effect. I got a fairly close match before deciding that I really should create the skin from scratch to do it properly (i.e. without the use of HTML tables for layout). Uh, you’ll see when I get this done…

<listening to… This is Stina Nordenstam>