It may not be original anymore, but I set up a weblog for my wife Julianne. She’s always sending email out to all our friends with updates about our son, her job and other general goings-on, so I thought writing a weblog would be a good way for her to keep everyone up to date. She picked the name TechieWife in order to inspire the wives of techno-geeks everywhere. 😄

I noticed she got the address of my weblog wrong in her inaugural entry. What’s funny is that my friend Chris Church (no weblog yet) is so lazy that he bought devhawk.com and set it to redirect to devhawk.net. Now he can use IE’s ctrl-enter shortcut key to get to my weblog.

A few months ago, one of my first enhancements I made to dasBlog was to change the way the CommentView page is rendered. Previously, it was rendered using the item template. However, I don’t include the entry post date in the item template, since it’s in big bold letters on the day template. So I changed the CommentView to render the single entry being displayed using the day template. This makes the CommentView page consistent with the Permalink page, which also renders the single entry using the day template.

However, when I made the change, I introduced a bug that shipped as part of the v1.4 release. When I called ProcessDayTemplate, I passed in the entry’s CreatedUtc time as the day to render parameter. This caused an issue where the CommentView would not render the entry when the day of the CreatedUtc did not equal the time-zone adjusted created date. For example, if I posted a new entry at 8pm PST, that is 4am UTC the following day. So if I ask to render the UTC based date, the time-zone adjusted entry does not fall on that day, and thus doesn’t render. So I changed the call to ProcessDayTemplate to use the entry’s CreatedLocalTime property instead of the CreatedUtc. I tested, all seemed good, so I submitted the fix, which made it into the v1.5 release.

Today, I noticed a thread on the dasBlog GDN workspace indicating the bug was still there. A little bit of tracking down and I discovered that what the server thinks is the local time does not always match what dasBlog thinks the local time is. CreatedLocalTime is based on the server local time. If you run your server in a different time zone than dasBlog is configured for, you run into basically the same issue as before. Of course, since I run my dev server in the same timezone as dasBlog, I never noticed it. However, since my production server is on the east coast and I’m on the west coast, the issue showed up on my production machine.

I posted a code fix over on the GDN Message Board Thread. Basically, I calculate the correct time based off the dasBlog configured time zone. Seems to have fixed the problem on my dev and production machines. (I’m running my dev machine in a different time zone now). Let me know if you run into any more issues.

If you’re reading this, you’ve found the new-and-improved DevHawk. I’ve changed both web hosts and blogging programs to deliver an improved blogging experience for all. Well, at least an improved blogging experience for me. You, you’re on your own.

I wrote two months ago that I was planning a switch to dasBlog. I helped out with a few features (so far just CDF support and comment deletion, but I’m working on story support). Actually, it’s kinda cool how dasBlog v1.5 shipped as I was moving servers. I did have to hold of on blogging for a couple of weeks, but in the end, I think it will be worth it. Now I get all the cool stuff I was too lazy to add to my own blog engine like comments, search and a web-based admin interface.

I am running a slightly non-standard version of dasBlog. If you read my site (as opposed to my RSS feed), you’ll see I have a little comment that I call a tagline associated with each entry. I got the idea from Matt Williams, who uses to record where he was when he made that entry. I got bored with just putting my location in there, so I started making snippy comments instead. I submitted the Tagline code to dasBlog, but Clemens rejected it on the grounds that it pretty much a Harry-only feature.

Since I haven’t got story support figured out, I’m just using static files for my articles, projects and presentations. DasBlog has a feature called FormatPage for rendering static content inline with the weblog template. Combined with the built-in URL rewriting engine, I was able to create simple URLs for my static content. Unfortunately, I still had to break all my old urls. And I’ll (probably) break them again when I get story support figured out.

Anyway, now that my new site is live, we can return to normal programming.