I finally got around to signing up for a FeedBurner feed for DevHawk today. It’s available here. I’ve updated my site template, but existing readers are still getting the old feed. Scott has built support for FeedBurner into dasBlog, but it isn’t released yet. Feel free to switch over on your own if you want, but I’ll get the automatic redirection working soon enough.

Update: Apparently I didn’t look hard enough. FeedBurner support made it into the currently shipping version of dasBlog, so I’ve turned it on. Thanks to Tomas Restrepo for the heads up.

When I upgraded to DasBlog 1.7.2, I had to create an empty rss.aspx file on disk to fool the Title Mapper (that’s the part the handles the new title based URLs) into not looking for a post with the title “rss”. I knew that a large number of people read my post via the RSS feed, so I didn’t want to break what has been the feed address since DevHawk started. However, I didn’t think the atom feed would matter as much, so I didn’t bother to do the workaround for atom.aspx. Turns out I was wrong. Atom.aspx was requested nearly once a minute between 11pm and 12am yesterday. I got tired of counting, but I’m guessing that number is even higher during the middle of the day since just over half of my traffic comes from the US + Canada. So I created an empty atom.aspx page to fool the Title Mapper even further.

Now, will I have to do the same for my CDF feed?

I just finished upgrading my blog to the new 1.7.2 RC build. I’m excited about some of the new features, such as the major caching improvements, CAPTCHA for avoiding comment spam, and the new permalinks. The permalinks one is pretty silly, esp. because I pushed for a version that used pluses for spaces. So the permalink for this post will be New+DasBlog+Version.aspx instead of NewDasBlogVersion.aspx. But it’s a style thing (I am in marketing now, right?). Speaking of style, I also upgraded the site template and pared down my navigation links. I moved the blogs on that list to a new “friends and family” blogroll. I did add a link to the new Archives page, which lists all the posts I’ve ever made, by category. And I added flair links to add this blog to your desktop newsreader of choice (that supports feed://) as well as to My MSN and NewsGator.

There’s still room for improvement. DasBlog still need story support, IMO. Also, I’d like to have a good offline posting experience. None of the existing blog authoring tools work for me since I use crossposts for my MSDN blog (which is what gets pulled into Architecture Center). I end up writing my posts in FrontPage and then cutting and pasting into the dasBlog web interface. Yuck.

One quick note – because of the new permalink title support, a set of existing URL mappings on my site started causing internal exceptions. This is because any URL ending in aspx that isn’t a file on disk is assumed to be a permalink. Of course, all my existing mappings aren’t files on disk nor are they permalinks to blog entries. I changed these mappings from *.aspx to *.ashx to avoid these exceptions and my template and navigation links to match. The only .aspx mapping I left intact was rss.aspx, since pretty much all of my subscribers use that as my rss feed. When I upgraded from my original blog engine, I had to add the rss.aspx mapping to avoid breaking any existing subscribers. Of course, I certainly don’t want to break those subscribers now. As a quick and very dirty workaround, I created an empty rss.aspx file in my web app directory. Now, the title mapper doesn’t attempt to map to a permalink since there’s an existing file on disk. Oh well, that’s why this is a release candidate version.

At least one person was interested in an OPML of MSFT .NEAT and AE bloggers. So I hacked them out of my full blog roll and posted it on my site. I will be keeping it up to date, so check back every once in a while. I added a link to it in my nav bar so it is always available.

I love dasBlog. I was able to make one small change to the web.config file and now the OPML file is addressable while still being easily managed via dasBlog’s blogroll editor. Sweet.

I was reading Steve’s blog with my browser earlier today when I noticed his odd permalink url’s. Instead of a url like “http://devhawk.net/PermaLink.aspx?guid=9abbd5ea-3a10-44d8-8872-877033b7349c”, his look like “http://hyperthink.net/blog/PermaLink,guid,fc99ce5e-b748-44f0-853d-0a261632b885.aspx”. Turns out it’s a standard feature of dasBlog! Just check “Enable URL rewriting” in the config page and you’re set. Now my permalink url’s look like Steve’s.

Since Google doesn’t index pages based on query string, this feature should make my site more easily crawled and googled.

Update: This feature breaks sub category specific feeds, like “Blogging | dasBlog“, so I’m turning it back off until someone can fix the bug.