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.

Tonight we had our first game of the new season against Hollywood United who now feature Alexi Lalas and Frank Le Boeuf, among several other former pro and national team players.  Let’s just say the result wasn’t pretty.  At least not pretty for us as they dismantled us 12 to 0.

Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report is in my opinion the funniest comedian on television right now. As Mugatu (played by Will Ferrell, the funniest comedian in movies) would say, “It’s that damn Stephen Colbert! He’s so hot right now! Stephen Colbert.”

Interesting post on the 37Signals blog regarding competing against Google.  Harb references a post by Paul Graham about Kiko’s founders putting their site up on eBay. 

Work on Subtext 1.9 is progressing well with more and more contributors chipping in. No firm release date yet, but hopefully soon.  The latest builds are pretty stable, but there a few more minor bug fixes to get in there. Also we plan to implement the MetaWeblog API newMediaObject method in order to better support Windows Live Writer.