Commentor is a new BlogEngine extension that should make your life a little easier when you have problem with spam comments. At first, I simply wanted to try existing extension to filter spam. My intention was to use anti-spam service as automated moderator and workflow for the task supposed to be pretty simple and look somewhat like this: More...

Are you getting a lot of spam lately? BlogEngine has built-in filter and it worked just fine for me up until now. But for the last couple of months I got some spam getting through. Not a hole lot yet and sources seem to be pretty obvious so that I probably could’ve easily block it myself with simple home-made solution, but I decided to use it as an opportunity to take a look at big boy’s spam fighting machines. More...

This post is a sequel to Keeping things private and will explain how to secure images so that only authenticated users can see them. This is relevant when you want to publish private album on the web. All image files in the web application are viewable by default, you can right-click any image to see information about it in the properties, you can load image into browser directly (just type in http://rtur.net/blog/pics/rssbutton.gif for example), you can download any image by saving it to the local drive etc. Obviously, with private albums you don’t want this kind of behavior. More...

Blogging is all about openness, spreading and sharing. Most likely you want as many eyeballs on you blog as possible and blogging software, naturally, optimized for doing just that. But what if you want to keep things private? May be you keep your personal diary online because you want to have access to it from anywhere or you want members only blog for friends or family? Yes this is true that you might look for alternative first and get specialized software, but if you already feel comfortable with BlogEngine, well, you know that story about hammer and nail, right? More...

Default admin interface for extensions in BlogEngine works fine in most cases and very easy to use. But sometimes you just got to get creative, right? That means, you want no limits. Obviously, some of simplicity will be lost – but still it is surprisingly easy to get along using plug-and-play BlogEngine architecture. Lets say, we ran into nice DHTML color picker and want to use it in the admin page for our extension. We want admin page look like this picture – it should allow us to enter a word, size and color. This values will be saved in the extension manager, so we don’t have to deal with databases or file system – usual BE stuff. And when you click “Color picker” button, nice color picker will show up and you can visually select value for a color. More...

Lets say we want to write an extension to track user activities on our site. Blogger should be able to set basic settings, for example choose to track  posts, pages or both. Then every time user requests post or page, we increment corresponding counter by one. Look at the picture above. Its clear that we need two sets of settings: one for post/page options and another to list user activity.

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In the first part, we wrote simple extension that changes case in the post to lower. Let’s say, we want user to decide show post in the lower or upper case. For this, we need to be able to maintain variable and let blogger change it’s value through admin interface. Normally, you would need to add a data access functionality for extension to handle this kind of operation, create admin form etc. BlogEngine uses Extension Manager to help make job a lot easier. Take a look at the code below. In the constructor, we subscribe to post serving event and then call InitSettings. There we create ExtensionSettings object, which can hold singe value (scalar) or/and table of values. In our case, we want it to hold single scalar value, so we set settings to scalar. We call our variable “Case” and initialize it with default value of “upper”, then call ExtensionManager.InitSettings and pass name of extension and settings object. More...

This is the first part in the series of tutorials about writing extensions for the BlogEngine 1.4. I’ll start with simple “hello world” example and then gradually move to the more advanced techniques. You don’t need to have any previous experience with BE extensions to follow this tutorial. More...

Yesterday newly installed Firefox 3 crashed on me at least 10 times, which, I believe, is a new world record (ha-ha). It could be because I am visiting a lot of Microsoft-centric sites that often run Silverlight. It looks like Silverlight 1.0 does not work in FF3 at all and Silverlight 2.0 kills it. Or vice-versa. Lovely... At the end, I had to drop to IE 6 (tough without tabs, but works fine). So, where does it put Silverlight and who is to blame? Specially considering the fact that problem with compatibility was known long ago and existed since early betas?

It doesn’t matter, everybody is a looser. Firefox – because it is crashes. Microsoft – because it’s cross platform/cross browser technology did not cross anything yet (very limited on Linux, still not working in Opera despite promises etc.). Average Jo – because “internet is broken”.

A lot of "power bloggers", prefer to use Windows Live Writer instead of built-in web editor. No matter how good web editor is, desktop publishing is just too hard to beat, at least at the moment. I personally like WLW myself and use it whenever I can. But this is not the only choice you have on the desktop; another big one is MS Word 2007. I'm not an Office guru, but if you watch the video at the end of this post you can get ideas how easy and intuitive content creation can be when you have the right tool at your disposal. You can set it up with BlogEngine just as easy as WLW. Simply open new document and go to Publish/Blog in the office menu. More...