As I mentioned in one of my previous blog posts, I have been using Windows Live Writer to add/update my blog posts. I recently ran across a new plugin called CodeHTMLer for Live Writer. Its a great way for posting formatted source code. You can read more at Wes' Puzzling's blog.

Download the plug-in. 

Current supported languages include : C#, C++, Java, JScript, VB.Net, XML, and Powershell

Sample Source CodeHTMLer

/// <summary>
/// Summary description for Main.
/// </summary>
static void Main(string[] args)
{
  // string variable
  string myString = "myString";

  /* integer 
     variable */
  int myInt = 2;
}

Yesterday I decided to sign up for a feedburner account in hopes that I could track the number of subscribers for my blog. As a result my feed URL has changed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/KevinCastleDotNet.

A new version of dasBlog was released a few weeks ago. I must admit, that I downloaded and installed within minutes of seeing Scott Hanselman's blog post. When I initally started this blog I had a really hard time deciding which platform to use...should I use the more populare WordPress, should I try and get Community Server up and going, it was kind of hard to decide at that time. It wasn't until this release that I fully stood behind my inital decision to use dasBlog.

My favorite features include:

• Support for Google Sitemaps - The google webmaster tools and their analytics tools really make maintaining and running a site that much more fun. I think it was especially important to support google sitemaps since the content on our blogs are constantly changing. Note: The location to reference for your google sitemap can be found at [YourBlogDomain]/googlesitemap.ashx
• Better support for Windows Live Writer - Im assuming that the file uploading issues were fixed. Although I already configured LiveWriter to FTP all of my files up the server when needed.

I would also like to mention that the upgrad from 1.8 to 1.9 was a piece of cake. I just merged the web.config files and pushed the new files to the server.

More Information:

Scott Hanselman on dasBlog 1.9

Scott Hanselman on Google Sitemaps

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Analytics

dasBlog 1.9 upgrade information

This may be kind of late in the game to post about a feature which was probably discussed a while ago, but I thought that it would be worth mentioning anyway. Turns out the Microsoft Word 2007 will support blog publishing. I think its great that Microsoft has finally decided to start supporting many of the new "cooler" web features like RSS and Blogging.

Check out Joe Friend's Blog Post for more information.

I'm brand new to blogging so I get overly excited about every little tool which might possibly make my life easier. It was about a month when I had first heard about LiveSpaces, and ever since then I have completely changed the way that I interact with the Internet. Now, instead of using Firefox for viewing all of my RSS feeds, I imported all of them to my Live.com homepage, also instead of using stupid MySpace for my social-network-time-killing activities I now use LiveSpace which is great. Although I do have one huge complaint about it, it doesn't support the ability to leave a comment on someone's page unless it is in reference to a blog entry. I'm sure it won't be long until someone makes a gadget for this but until then I think its gonna be hard to move anyone over from MySpace. Enough about that.

When first contemplating which .Net blog engine to use, I basically narrowed it down to Community Server and DasBlog. Although I thought Community Server looked much better (the dasBlog themes are lacking a lot), I decided to go with DasBlog mostly because I felt that some of the features in Community Server were overkill for the kind of blog which I was looking to start.

LiveWriter offers:

1. Manage your blog(s) from a local windows application.
2. Automagically upload all local images which were locally added to your posts. (for DasBlog this needs to be configured using FTP)
3. Bult-in publishing support for DasBlog, Community Server, Word Press, of course LiveSpace, and many more.
4. An SDK for developers to extend its functionality.

Download LiveWriter (beta)