Tonight at Soccer practice, we scrimmaged for a while then ran through some drills.  We have an English guy and a Scottish guy (who hardly anyone can understand) on the team who are a laugh a minute.  You can imagine their surprise when we started a shooting drill and our team manager tells them that we all have to shag our own balls.

Seems like all sorts of open source projects have been releasing lately.  Darren Neimke and Keyvan Nayyeri proudly announce the release of BlogML 2.0 on CodePlex.  Here’s a list of new features on Keyvan’s blog. With a bit of luck and lots of persistence, BlogML will hopefully be a key component in breaking vendor lock-in when it comes to blogging engine. 

Darren Neimke apparently is not one to shy away from a bit of trash talk.  He IM’d me via MSN recently to warn me about a new SUB, ready to take down Subtext. In this case, it is his newly open sourced blog engine, SingleUserBlog or SUB, which is now hosted on CodePlex.  Darren has been on a roll lately with the recent release of BlogML 2.0.  Now SUB enters the scene with torpedoes blazing!

This past weekend my wife and I drove up to San Francisco to attend a friend’s wedding, which ended up being a lot of fun.  We always like visiting The City because of the many friends we have in the area, though being there reinforces the fact that it is not a place where we’d want to live (no offense to anybody who lives there, it’s just not our style).

I mentioned several heuristic approachs to blocking spam in my recent post on blocking comment spam, but commenters note that I failed to mention CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).  At the moment, CAPTCHA is quite effective, both at blocking spam and annoying users.

As a follow-up to the recent release of Subtext 1.9, I would also like to introduce a little something I put together at http://subtextskins.com/.

Well my friends, it took a bit longer than expected to get Subtext 1.9 out the door, but we did it.  When we released Subtext 1.5 back in June I said,

I am still continuing my experiment in running as a LUA (aka Non-Admin).  Let me tell you, it has been a total pain in the ass and now I totally understand why more developers do not do this, which feeds into the vicious cycle in which apps are developed that do not run well under least user privileges.  When I have some time, I will write up my experiences.

Let me start off by noting that Subtext 1.9 requires ASP.NET 2.0!  Thus the upgrade process from a prior version of Subtext (all which run on ASP.NET 1.1) will not be quite as simple as before, but should hopefully not be overly complicated as is the spirit of Subtext.

Scott Hanselman sets the geek-o-sphere abuzz with his latest (and apparently now annual) Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows.  The publishing of this list usually coincides with a productivity drop for me as I find many new toys to play with.  Unfortunately, many tools don’t work so well when running as a non-admin.

Scott writes about making DasBlog work on Mobile Devices.  The approach he takes is to programmatically detect that the device is a mobile device and then present an optimized TinyHTML (his term) theme.

Update: Rob renamed his project to Subsonic.

Lately my blog has been hit with a torrential downpour of comment spam.  I’ve been able to fight much of it off with some creative regular

The other tactic I neglected to mention in my previous post on combatting comment spam is more big picture.  How do we remove the incentive for spammers to comment spam in the first place?

Unbelievable!

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.

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.

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.

Just sticking my head above water long enough to take a breath and to link to some rubbish called the Programmer’s Bill of Rights that Jeff Atwood declares on his blog.

This post is an ode to one of my favorite, albeit extremely minor, additions to .NET 2.0.  This is the method that I am sure we have all written in some sort of StringHelper library of some sort, but are now glad it is included in the framework as it makes our code a tad bit cleaner and shuts up that pesky FxCop warning about using the length of the string to test for empty strings.