It's summer in the Netherlands that much that it's almost impossible to do “real” work. Spend half of the day with the family at the Zuidlaardermeer (<Dutch>Er gaat niets boven Groningen !</Dutch>) and the other half of the day on weblogs. My main “problem” with weblogs is that there is far to much to read and follow, you just have to make a selection. I gave the news agregator RSS bandit a second chance and this time it seems to be working well with the dnj weblogs. Last time, before the .text era, it got stuck in the XML feeds. Having set up RSS the next problem is whose logs you are going to read. It will be a growing list, I keep watching the general dnj weblog (and others) to see whatever comes by.
What struck me was the appearence of a number of blogs in German. English is has become a second language to me as all the software I use is in English. You can get Dutch versions of some software, but not all. Besides that most of the translations are bad, even of the MS stuff. So when working behind my screen it is English, switching from app to app won't give much of a culture shock. Imho there is another point : <German/>Ich kan Deutsch lesen und (ein wenig) schreiben. Die meiste leser aufs net aber nicht. Die Deutsche sprache hat sehr schoene worte fuer (int kbd funktioniert hier nicht, deswegend keine umlaute) rechner and aehnliches, aber die machen Deutsche IT literatur schwer zu lesen. Ohne fuercht zu haben vor “kulturele dominaz” glaub ich das es besser ist die Aenglische sprache aufs net zu benutzen.</German> For those of you who could not follow this : that's exactly my point.
To get a better feel for weblogs I decided to install the .text weblog server on own machine. I used the source code setup, the source is where you learn the most. It gave me quite some troube setting it up. All info is there, loud and clear, but due to the weather I just didn't get it right. Let me share some of my experiences.
Setting up .TEXT
First you have to create a database to store the logs. Administrating databases is a science and culture on itself, if you don't do it every day its a puzzle every time. You need two tools, the enterprise admin to create the database and its users. To create the database tables and stored proc's there is a sql script included. You have to run that in the Query Analyzer. And when you run it, make sure you have selected the proper database, else all is created in the master database. Oops. But the script is fine.
Installing the sources is a matter of copying. Copy the web.config and blog.config, update the database connection string and you're ready to build the app.
Next comes IIS. Creating a virtual dir is no problem. Creating the IIS mapping for the virtual setup was something which I didn't get done. Filling in the dialog worked but the OK button, to save the mapping, stayed gray. This is a known bug in (my version (XP-pro) of) the IIS manager. Workarounds I found on the web didn't work either. Does anybody know a workaround which does work ? Somewhere in the registry ? (Long live IIS 2003 with it's xml metabase) I left this a problem and created a directory by hand.
The last thing was setting up a weblog itself. It is so simple but it took me so long to see what was meant. In the database is a table blog_config. Here you enter a row for every blog you want to serve. Where application is the name of the virtual dir. Makes sense in IIS speak. And all is wriiten here.
Now I am up and running. I have a weblog on my notebook, can study all the source and toy around with it. Great stuff.