Technorati recently released their latest State of The Blogosphere report (renamed to something about the Live Web to avoid confusion with the Dead Web) chock full of statistics and pretty graphs.
This would be interesting, if I were interested in anything other than myself. No, I don’t care about how other blogs are doing. I only care about Me Me ME!
How is MY Blog doing?
To find out I could check on some external sources. For example, Alexa.com shows that my site has experienced steady growth in the past three years (click on the chart to see the actual report page).
But...
Jeff Atwood points out several problems with using blacklists (specifically Akismet) to prevent comment spam. He makes the following point: The core problem is relying on a single method of defense against spam. Absolutely. Subtext employs several measures against comment spam, mostly of a heuristic nature. The latest release adds Akismet support as well as Visible and Invisible CAPTCHA. The funny thing about CAPTCHA and especially Invisible CAPTCHA is the number of people who claim it won’t work and is broken. As Jeff points out, this may be true among researchers, but it is not the case in the wild. However...
This is my third post about Skinning in Subtext. Previously I talked about some breaking changes. Then I gave a high level overview of skinning in Subtext. In this post I want to mention one new feature for those who use custom skins. Subtext 1.9 actually reduces the the number of pre-packaged skins that come with it out of the box. That’s right, we got rid of the skins that screamed, "Hey! I was designed by a developer who wears plaid pants with flannel shirts!". Over time, we hope to add more polished designs. Of course we don’t want to leave developers with custom...
In my previous post, I outlined some minor changes to the skinning model for Subtext. In this post, I will give a high level overview of how skinning works in Subtext. Subtext renders a Skin by combining a set of CSS stylesheets with a set of .ascx controls located in a specific skin folder. If you look in the Skins directory for example, you might see a set of folders like this. Skin Template A common misperception is that each folder represents a Skin. In fact, each folder represents something we call a Skin Template, and can...
With the Subtext 1.9 release just around the corner, this is probably a good time to highlight some minor, but important, changes to skinning in Subtext. We made some breaking changes to Skins.config file format to make the naming more consistent with the purpose. There was a lot of confusion before. The following is a snippet from a pre-Subtext 1.9 Skins.config file. <?xml version="1.0"?>
<SkinTemplates xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<Skins>
<SkinTemplate SkinID="RedBook"
Skin="RedBook"
...