If you're actually looking at this page on the web, rather than viewing it in Google Reader as my stats say is more likely, you'll have had a bit of a surprise yesterday.  This is why I've been so quiet recently: I estimate that I've spent something like four man days on this skin and I've got to admit I'm quite exhausted.  Although Origami is a good professional skin, half of the .NET internet is using it and my customizations probably weren't noticeable to most of the users of the site. Let me set out what I wanted to...

Sun has always felt a need to educate its developers.  Sometimes this has led to Pearl Harbour scale disasters like J2EE, but it has also produced an extremely technically literate community.  On the other hand, sometimes you wish Microsoft didn't even try.  I've pretty much come to the conclusion, for instance, that the Microsoft Enterprise Library is the Wrong Thing.  Every so often, we come across stuff which falls under the heading of "mistakes you need a PhD to make", as Francis Fukuyama describes his advocacy of the invasion of Iraq.  The provider pattern is top of my list...

The good news is, skins have hardly changed in Subtext 2.0.  The skins were very powerful in 1.9, so there wasn't a big reason to change them.  The bad news is, they're not quite the same.  If you've got your own skin, here's all you need to do: Copy across any non-standard skin you were using from your version 1 folder. Copy across the skin settings from the old Admin/Skin.config to the new one. If the skin is locked, put a space in the web.config first, which will unlock the skin.  Note that if you're using a modified...

It's a source of embarrassment that most of the traffic for my web site is uploads of blogging software, but there's nothing better for embarrassment than publicizing it, or so I was told.  So, if you haven't done the upgrade yet, here's my routine for doing it: Export your existing blog to BlogML, back up the database, do whatever you can to avoid borking your site because of the upgrade. Make a copy of your current web.config.  The configs aren't compatible, but you'll want to refer to it. I uploaded the new software to a new folder...

If, like me, you've set up Feedburner with a Subtext 1.9.6 blog, point FeedBurner at RSS.aspx, not at Atom.aspx.  Most things work whichever way you do it, but when you view an article in Google Reader, it won't include a link back to the original article.  As far as I can tell, this is because the Atom feed uses rel=self rather than rel=alternate.  This appears to be fixed in the latest code base, but that means it's part of the huge 2.0 release. It will take a while for FeedBurner and Google Reader to catch up.  I mean hours, not minutes,...

I know a fair bit of CSS.  I know about the three pixel bug, I've even contributed IE5 fixes to three column layout solutions.  However, I've just been reminded extremely forcefully of my limitations. As is pretty obvious, I'm using SubText as my blogging engine.  It's a good, fully featured system that supports more use cases than you might imagine if you're still thinking "How hard can it be to write a blog engine?".  It comes with a number of default skins and a "Naked" skin for developing your own skins. The skinning system is really powerful and very easy to understand. ...