After the dasBlog migration this weekend, I discover a one issue that is causing some of the posts I imported to dasBlog not to be displayed. Sort of.

Most individual posts will show up correctly, and all will be displayed correctly on the per-date pages. Except, for a few entries that will show up on the per-date page but not will fail to render if you follow the entry's permalink (either the name-based one, or the guid based on). What's more annoying: you don't get a 404 error back, just an empty page, as  dasBlog seems to just choke on the request.

So, here's an example: go to http://www.winterdom.com/weblog/default,date,2006-01-09.aspx. Try to follow the link for the first post in the page, and you'll get a blank page (no html generated at all).

When that happens, dasBlog will leave in it's log an entry similar to the following:

Error:
Entry was not found: 572 at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Services.AggregatorBugHandler.ProcessRequest(HttpContext) at System.Web.CallHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication+IExecutionStep.Execute() at System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep, Boolean&) at System.Web.HttpApplication.ResumeSteps(Exception) at System.Web.HttpApplication.System.Web.IHttpAsyncHandler.BeginProcessRequest(HttpContext, AsyncCallback, Object) at System.Web.HttpRuntime.ProcessRequestInternal(HttpWorkerRequest) at System.Web.HttpRuntime.ProcessRequest(HttpWorkerRequest) at System.Web.Hosting.ISAPIRuntime.ProcessRequest(IntPtr, Int32)
while processing .


AFAICT, the problem seems to be with the post-date handling. I have my dasBlog installation configured to use my timezone (UTC-05:00), and all the imported entries have all dates and times specified in the same timezone in the .dayentry.xml files. It seems, that when the time the entry has reported is too close (how close I haven't verified yet) to the end of the specified day, dasBlog will just fail to display the entry completely. At least that's my appreciation of the problem.

Also, a really newbie question. What timezone should dasBlog be saving the dates for entries created in dasBlog directly? At least for my site, it seems to be saving the time in UTC-08:00, which seemed rather weird to me.

Any ideas?

Update: I think I've managed to fix this. The problem, in essence, is that while the date & times stored in dasBlog's content XML files are in "Local Time" (whatever the local time is for the server itself, hence the -8:00 I was seeing), the actual date in the XML filename should be in UTC. This is not very intuitive, as it means that if you open a file named, say, 2006-01-10.dayentry.xml, you might find that the dates on the entries contained therein actually reference an earlier or later day.

If anyone spots any entry giving trouble, please let me know and I'll see if I hosed anything else up :)