system.reflecti0n.net

Ok, I’m still playing catchup with all the shows and I’m only on episode 5 but I have to say Weeds 4th season is off to a great start—

Guillermo, I know he’s super-bad and all but I’m rooting for him, like I don’t want this character to go off the show. Most of Jenji Kohan’s characters don’t make their way back to the show, for obvious reasons. Andy is such a believable goof I hope they’re not going to wreck thing by linking him up with Nancy—I just don’t see it as a good match. Albert Brooks’ short stint was excellent but I expect he’ll turn up next season as a convenient plot wrinkle.

I bet those writers enjoy their jobs. What I mean is, they’re enjoying the entertainment just like we are—only they get some satisfaction from knowing they thought of it first. Born in the right place at the right time, that’s one sweet job.

And somewhere out there is the batter's circle and Californication is on deck. American cable-TV dramas rock. They really do. What a shame the regular networks go with only safe bets. I'm not saying I don't like some of the shows on the regular channels, I'm just saying it would be nice if more people stuck their neck out once in a while.

Actually, not all the the Showtime dramas are the shit. I never saw the pull of the Sopranos, for example. But people still liked it-- even when they didn't make an episode for nearly two years! Clearly an example of a show that was giving people something they wanted. I remember when the producers said they'd "skip" a season people when apeshit. No really, apes and shit, that was the visual on the Entertainment Tonite show. No fooling.

What a shame, I spend 10-12 hours at a keyboard nearly every day for 12 years and I still haven't written a prize winning novel. Sometimes the universe just don't make no sens

Tags: tv, weeds, writing

How many emails do you close with "Let us know if..." or "Let me know..."? If you recognize the phrase at all then I'm betting a lot. Maybe two or three a week.

I'd just like to tell you that is such a bad thing to do. You're basically saying: "Your reply is not important to me if you don't want to reply". And that is wrong, wrong, wrong!

To convey even the slightest interest in your subject's response (your subject being whomever is in the "To:" box of the email)  you must demand a response from them: "Tell me if..." is far better to say, even when you wanted to say "tell us"-- The point is with the right language you're going to engage your reader instead of wheedle them into a reply.

It's only up to you what sort of a reply you get, if any. I'm betting when you say "Let me know..." you're not getting a lot of responses in the first place.

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It's not a long story, but it sure took its time playing out.

So... about the end of July I had given up on the old SubText 1.9.5-- mostly I was too familiar with the features available and I was really wondering about how to keep my interest going (see, running a blog is more interesting to the likes of me than actually writing a blog!). Within days of giving up on ever seeing SubText.net releasing an update what should happen? They release v2.0!

I got down to work. After a hard 2 weeks at work I sat myself down with my laptop, a baseball game on TV, a smart gin-and-tonic and set myself to work on upgrading to SubText.net 2.0. If only it were as easy as it sounds!

Obstacle #1: Keeping it simple...not.

My first inclination was to avoid the upgrade path by dumping my blog to BlogML, replace 1.9.5 with 2.0 and re-import everything. The idea was to go completely around any struggle with whatever idiosyncracies may lie underneath my deployment of SubText as I'd done some customizations here an there (all cosmetic-- I never bothered to build my own deployment from source code).

But the BlogML export was where I reached my first fail. Moment after pressing the "Export" button I got an exception message stating it was invalid to put a <![[CDATA marker inside of a CDATA section. I certainly understood the problem, yet I had no idea of where or why this was happening. Frankly having seen several features in the Admin area go unfinished I assumed so to was the BlogML export feature. So I moved on.

Obstacle #2: Going with the flow, try the upgrade anyway

The ease with which I brought the original SubText.net blog up had left a long-lasting good impression so I didn't feel all that bad about doing the upgrade path after all. I was sure at deployments the SubText developers had taken a lot effort to make things go as "plug-and-play" as possible.

So, carefully following the upgrade instructions at the SubText project site, I prepared my version 2.0 folder and uploaded it to my web host (more on that aspect later...).

At last some progress was being made as up came the admin screen "This blog is currently being upgraded ... if you are a blog admin click here to finish," etc. However, when I clicked the link, I was steered back to the "This blog is being updated. I chose to wait just in case but thirty minutes went by with no forward progress.

Certainly, something was the matter but SubText was not able to tell me what it was. The time had come for something more drastic.

Obstacle #3: Slash-and-burn, baby!

The only way to find out if I was going to get to use SubText 2.0 at all was to start with a clean slate, and knock down each problem as it came along. Blogs are just data after all, so since I'd made my backups there was always going to be a way to put my archives back in place.

I removed all the old tables from my database, uploaded an unadulterated copy of SubText 2.0 to my host and voila: the real problem shows itself: my web host had locked down the "trust" element in machine.config so the setting in SubText's web.config file:

<trust level="Full" originUrl=".*">

...was never going to work no matter what setting I chose.

Endgame

At this point, I let it go. Sorry SubText developers. It's not you, it's not me, it's my ISP.

Enter the Blogengine... dot-net.

Now I've moved on. I did some looking around.

Hearing good things about dasBlog, I paid their site a visit, but a quick glance at the installation instructions left me with the impression it was another blog platform that was better suited for authors who had full control over their web server.

Even BlogEngine.Net was looking doubtful. Their default format is an XML-file based blog (a great idea if you have limited resources to publish with) but I didn't have control over setting folder-level read-write permissions. I had nearly given up on this whole blog project until I found a form posting that explained how to deploy BlogEngine.Net on SQL Server. (Note: the forum posting is from July 2007, since then they've changed the name of the blog provider from "MSSQLBlogProvider" to "DbBlogProvider")

That did the trick. About 40 minutes after letting go of SubText I had a new blogging platform up and running.

But What About the Archives

Ceratinly I wasn't going to deprive you of my past wisdom, but all my blog material was sitting in some unused database tables, how would I get them into the new platform?

Well, I hadn't given up on BlogML at all. After about 2 hours of false-starts fiddling with the SubText source code to properly extract my old blogs from the database I was at another crossroads. To be sure, I really, really wanted to use the BlogML assembly from Codeplex, but I couldn't make head nor tails of it. Being about midnight already I decided: "XML is XML, I'll just roll my own". I gave up on ever using any source from SubText or BlogML and mashed together a small console app to copy my blog into a BlogML file of my own making.

Using the sample BlogML file included with the binary download of BlogML I cobbled together XmlTextWriter and Linq (first time using it, what a mess) into an output file.

To my amazement, this worked. Now my entire blog is on the Blogengine.Net platform.

Conclusions: If it ain't broke, don't fix it

This whole ordeal spanned two days of my weekend, taking me into the wee hours of Sunday morning. If I had only been satisfied with SubText 1.9.5 then none of this would have happened.

But that's just not me.

And I'm not going to tell you one platform is better than the other. But I do think Blogengine.Net is going to suit me just fine.

As for the BlogML extraction code, it's far from perfect but I'll be glad to share it with anyone who wants a standalone app to make backups of their SubText blog-- but I make no guarantees on software authored after midnight.

Leave a comment if you want the source code for extracting BlogML from a SubText database.

 

Tags: blogging, subtext.net, blogengine.net, web hosts, upgrades

Novelty – it’s new, it’s never been seen before and that makes it all so very interesting!

Necessity – You’ve tried it, you liked it, now you won’t do without it. You never new you wanted it, now that it’s here you can’t imagine life without it!

Nuisance – Familiarity breeds contempt. You’ve come around to knowing this thing so well, you know all it’s failings too. With the novelty long since worn off, these shortcomings better be small enough compared to the necessity of it all, or that thing is “going to the back shelf”.

Examples: Hotmail, Twitter and the recorded music industry.

The iPod is still in the Necessity phase, maybe only having just reached it by turning itself into a cell phone—what will the Nuisance phase bring, if it ever arrives?

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