I was hit with trackback spam on my blog some time ago and decided the easiest way to stop it was to disable trackbacks on the site all together. The unfortunate downside to this is that I'm not automatically notified when someone blogs in response to one of my posts. I have to go looking.

Today I found a post by Doron Yaacoby written in August (sorry I took so long) about the Live Space support I added to the BlogML project. As I originally mentioned when I posted about this feature, I was too lazy to code a GUI for it. Thankfully, Doron has written one for us, and in WPF too!

It has been a while since I actually used my Live Space BlogML code to convert my own blog but, in response to Doron's note about comment support, from memory the API exposed by the Live Spaces website for querying blog data does not expose comments. Maybe they've changed the API since. Maybe there's a clever way to screen-scrape it.

Thanks for contributing Doron, and thanks for your kind words about my code too.

It can be expected that for any blog about a difficulty experienced by a user of  Windows that the third comment to be posted will recommend the Linux or Mac OS as the solution to the problem. The first two comments preceding the third usually add actual value for other readers of the blog.

The theory is not restricted to just Windows and could equally be applied to a language (eg VB), a concept (eg Agile), a product (eg iPod), or any topic with distinct followers and opposers. Obviously, in these cases the suggested solution corresponds to the exchanged topic. For example, an article about VB's failings will be responded to with "You should use C# instead".

A few months ago I upgraded this web site from the DasBlog 1.8 installed by my ISP to the latest version at the time, 1.9.6. It was remarkably easy to merge my web.config and site.config files and upload all the new binaries.

Yesterday Scott Hanselman announced DasBlog 1.9.7 had been released. Last night I tried to upgrade again, following a very similar procedure as I did the last time. Being a point release, I expected even less effort and was happy to find that very little merging was required with the config files.

Unfortunately, once I had uploaded the new files to my site I found I could no longer log in. I refreshed the browser several times, edited and uploaded the siteSecurity.config file several times and tried the default file with the admin/admin credentials. Nothing would let me login and all I had was a SecurityFailure message in the event log.

This took an hour or so and I eventually gave up and completely restored the backup I made before attempting the upgrade. Guess I'll have to configure IIS locally and experiment until it works.

On a better note, Scott says this is the final release for ASP.NET 1.1 and another release due very soon will be completely ASP.NET 2.0 and support Medium Trust. I was annoyed last time I downloaded the source and discovered that I would need to install VS2003 to work with it but finally I'll be able to contribute to the project.

Today I had the pleasure of visiting this web site with a Windows Mobile device. I was thoroughly pleased to discover that, without any configuration on my part, the blog rendered in Pocket Internet Explorer in a very clean, usable form.

I was even able to read the comments and submit my own. I must say though that the limited input capabilities of many PDAs really emphasise how annoying CAPTCHA can be.

Anti-spam mechanisms aside, the DasBlog developers have done an excellent job to provide yet another feature out-of-the-box that I was worried I would have to implement myself.

Thank you.

During the past week I have managed to transfer my posts from my Live Space to this new Das Blog site. It was pleasantly trouble free, due mostly to the hard work having been already done by the BlogML team.

The biggest headache was the limitation of the Live Space MetaWeblog API implementation. The API will only allow you to retrieve the most recent 20 posts or, if you know the postId, one post at a time. Unfortunately there is no supported method for retrieving the postIds beyond the most recent 20.

Luckily, upon inspection of the nature of the postIds on my Live Space, and inspection of the Live Space Team's blog for confirmation, I discovered a predictable pattern to the postId. It consists of a unique hex string for the space, and an exclamation mark followed by a decimal number that increments with each new post.

With this information I was able to write a Live Space to BlogML converter that, while not exhibiting amazing performance, is able to retrieve all posts on a Live Space much easier than doing it manually or by screen-scraping.

My currently one-way Live Space converter is available in ChangeSet 21935 and later of the BlogML project on CodePlex. Hopefully the project coordinators will build a new release soon and it will then be available as part of the main package.

To use the converter, start by enabling email publishing on your Live Space. Then create a new Visual Studio project and reference the LiveSpace.BlogML assembly. Construct an instance of the LiveSpaceBlogMLWriter passing the name of your Live Space and your email publishing secret word. Optionally set the PostCount property to a number ideally no greater than the number of posts on your site. Finally, call the Write method passing a preconfigured XmlWriter as the destination.

Please submit any issues you have with the converter to the BlogML Discussion pages and I'll endeavour to solve them. For those without the resources or inclination to write a program as mentioned above, let me know and I'll find some time to create a user interface for it.

UPDATE: Doron Yaacoby has created a GUI for the Live Space BlogML converter.

Welcome to my new blog domain.

I recently decided that I would commit to a more regular blogging schedule. I've kept to my plan for three weeks so far and decided I wanted some more control over my blog than Live Spaces would allow. This site is the result.

There may be lull in the posts while I investigate the Live Spaces MetaWeblog API to export my old posts at Jason's Thoughts to BlogML then import them to this new site. Hopefully it won't be very long at all and will generate some material worth blogging in the process.

In the mean time, links to my scattering of other content is in the Navigation side bar and I highly recommend my favourite bloggers listed in the Blogroll sidebar.