After seeing Scott's announcement of the 1.9 release of dasBlog, I just went ahead and updated my blog to it. The upgrade was pretty uneventful, consisting mainly of overwriting all dasBlog files with the new version.

I only did one minor change to the default Web.Config that shipped with dasBlog 1.9 and that was to remove debug compilation. I didn't need to keep any of my own customizations because the only one had been to add my feedflare macro, which Scott so graciously made into a built-in dasBlog macro

After uploading the new file, I just spent a little time adjusting my existing Commonality theme to use some of the new features, like the cool Tag Cloud. I may do some further customization down the road, but for now I'm pretty happy. Way to go guys! Excellent release!

As some of you have probably noticed by now, I've been trying to pick up my posting frequency on this blog; mostly trying to become more regular with the stuff I post and trying to share a bit more about the stuff I'm working on and the stuff I'm playing and experimenting with.

I would love to hear from some of you, though, on what you think of the blog. Do you like the content I'm putting up? Is it useful? Are the topics I'm focusing interesting to you? I sure appreciate any feedback on this and any comments on topics you'd like to see more/less on. I certainly don't promise anything, but I do try to post stuff that will benefit someone besides myself

Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email!

After reading about the Windows Live Alerts service over at Mads Kristensen site, I thought it sounded interesting enough to warrant a look and thought about experimenting with it out on my own weblog. Turns out the signup process isn't quite the experience I expected:

• The signup page asks a lot of information, much of which seems unwarranted for this kind of service (why all the need for all the personal information?)
• Even though the page asks a lot of personal information, it isn't a secure page (i.e. no SSL). Certainly not what I'd expected from the now security-minded Microsoft.
• The page kept insisting that the Contact Phone Number was invalid, but gives no clue as to what the proper format is supposed to be.

Even though I noticed all of this, I still went ahead and submitted the form. It claimed I'd see an email to complete the subscription process, though I have yet to see it. It might have been swallowed by the spam filters, though I doubt it. And why the heck is a windows live services' page a JSP page? :P

From Rory Blyth, on his new www.TheSmartestMan.com site: Rory's resume. Hillarious! (See Rory's own comment on the site here).

What are people using this day to post code (and I mean good looking code) to their blogs these days? I've tried a lot of options without finding a good way of doing it, though I see a lot of people getting it done without issues, so I must be doing something wrong. Hopefully one of you can enlighten me as to how :)

Here are some options I've tried:

• Copy from VS, paste into Word, paste from Word into your blog entry. I've used this one successfully on the past (though it's cumbersome) as long as I did my posting from IE (never could get it to work right with Firefox and of course it just plain doesn't work with Windows Live Writer), until a couple of days ago when it just stopped working right; no clue why.
• Use a third party formatting tool, including: CopySourceAsHtml (which I haven't been able to get fully working with VS2005, btw), all the code-formatting Windows Live Writer plugins I've found and this. All of the seem to generate HTML that looks great on the browser, but, for some reason, the code turns to sh*t by the time it reaches my RSS aggregator.

So, any clues would sure be appreciated