Website

YES! I’m finally alive with a new hosting provider - this time it’s Microsoft (who could have guessed that!). Thanks to the just released Azure Web Sites I have now moved my blog from my old custom blog implementation (that has been a fun project though), to running Orchard on Azure Web Sites using SQL Azure. This finalizes my cloud migrations - last year I moved e-mail and everything but the site to Office 365 and started with a hosted service for this site, but for running this little blog that was a bit to expensive (you’re not clicking the ads enough).

I have recently seen Wordle images here and there on blogs and sites and I could not resist creating one of my own site, to see what words do I write often here. As you can see it’s lot of stuff about Microsoft (surprise), SharePoint, Visual Studio and .NET. I also seems to like a lot of things. Have you created a nice Wordle?

Welcome to the new design, I hope you like this one better than the previous. Personally I got tired of the old one and decided to make a change. Please leave a comment if it behaves bad or does not look good on any weird browser (I’ve tried it on FF3b4, Safari and IE8b1). Tomorrow I’ll be back for work after a month and a half of parental leave, which was so nice. I wish it had lasted longer, but I will be home with my daughters Fridays throughout the rest of the spring…

Due to the large amount of users still using Internet Explorer 6 a campaign has started to save developers from having to making specific adaptations to IE6 - SaveTheDevelopers.org. The Save The Developers site contains a script that anyone can place on their web site and it will show a warning to IE6 users and urge them to upgrade to any of the four major browsers; Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari or Opera.

The Snap Preview Anywhere (SPA), as I earlier removed from this site, has been updated with some new functionality to make it better for site owners who don’t want their homepages cluttered with previews or users that do not want to see the previews. As a site owner you can now put up an option for your users to turn on or off the SPA: And there is also an option to have the preview to trigger on an icon instead of the whole link:

Scott Watermasysk led med to this article by Nick Wilson on why you should not have Snap Preview Anywhere on your blog and I’m now joining the bloggers who remove the preview features. I agree with Nick on that the preview is pretty annoying and that it’s not problem free (more than often you have to click more than once on a link). Byt why did I put it up in the first place? This blog is not just a blog for me I use it as a testing platform for different kind of techniques, hypes etc - and to have fun. I will still try on new interesting stuff and I may also remove old uninteresting stuff.

I have a lot of problem with comment spam on the blog as well as spamming on the trackbacks and the problem is spread widely over the blogging world. A lot of you turn off comments or have registration or other methods to get rid of the comment spamming. LinkSleeve (SLV - Spam Link Verification) is a link spam solution that checks a text for well-known URL’s in a text and tells if it contains any known spam addresses. This service is provided via an XML-RPC service without any licensing.

I have made some updates to this site, the most noticeable are the new addresses (URL’s) to the posts which now should be more descriptive than just an id-number. The permalinks in the feeds should be the same though. If you notice anything annoying or wrong, please leave a comment.

The comments on this blog should now be working. I had some glitch in my spam detection, which should now be fixed.

From now on my feeds are published through FeedBurner to get better statistics, yeah I’m a fan of stats. I’ve been using Google Anlytics for this site and others for some long time now and are very satisfied with it - but the lack of tracking feeds or any other type non-script-enabled stuff annoys me. From what I can understand Urchin (the company Google turned into Google Analytics) had that possibility before when making e-mail campaings, but I can’t get it to work. If you have any idea how to I’d be glad.

Simple List Extensions (SLE) is a set of extensions to RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds created by Microsoft to make it easier to exposing ordered lists through the feeds. Simple List Extension contains a set of tags that tells the feed readers how to sort or filter the items in the feed. It also contains a tag that instructs the reader to interpret the feed as a list. If the feed is marked as a list the reader should treat the feed as the complete ordered list which means that readers must remove any cached items not present in the feed.

This is the second part of my dissection of a blog and I will try to explain what a TrackBack is.TrackBack is a way to communicate between blogs; for example when a blogger writes a post with comments/links to another blog the blogger can inform the blog that is being commented with a TrackBack ping. This ping will normally be fetched by the commented blog and appended as a comment.To get this to work, both the commenting blog and commented blog has to support the TrackBack protocol, see below.

During the creation of this site I wanted to know more about how the blog world works behind the scenes. I will make a few articles about my findings in this matter and what I have done to create this blog. The first article will describe on how you inform other sources and parties that your blog is updated. This is done through a Ping. You should ping whenever you have created or updated a post on your feed. Pinging is either done automatically or manually. Manual pinging is done by finding a site with a Ping interface, like http://www.bloglines.com/ping, and then enter the Url to your feed. You can find some more on the Blog Ping List at AYWE

I have moved this blog to my own domain, http://www.wictorwilen.se/ and I decided to have it hosted at DotNetPark. DotNetPark has an excellent service at great prices. For me it was important to have ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server where I hosted my site and they have all that and more. I can easily publish the site using FTP from Visual Studio and connect to the SQL Server using the Enterprise Manager or Visual Studio. Their interface, called DotNetPanel, provides you with everything you need to host your site.You can also have a number of services installed at your request, for example how about Windows SharePoint Services!

Welcome to my new space and domain at www.wictorwilen.se. This new place will host my blog (previously at http://dotnetjunkies.com/weblog/wicwil/).During the next few days all old posts and comments will be moved to this location. Having my own place will make it more easy for me to create what I want and to present and blog about more stuff. This site will be an experimental playground for me and I will blog about some of the interesting stuff that I stumble upon. So expect some changes to the site and functionality.The site is just a hobby, besides my work and family, which both takes a lot of time, but it is fun to have something to rest your mind on.