A few months ago I drastically changed how the urls on my site were built. I moved to using the ASP.NET 2.0 virtual path provider to make more friendly urls. Because I changed the "directory" structure, havoc was wreaked upon my unsuspecting relative urls. I had to go through my posts and look for bad links. I figured I might had missed some.

So I decided to write a crawler, to crawl my site and look for bad urls. And sure enough...I did miss some. Just in case you want to use it yourself, I have it available for download, along with some notes on how you implement a crawler in C#.

Enjoy!

Some of my very nice readers pointed out some issues in my rss feed. I've worked through some of those issues. First, my guids were messed up. Second, posts for my rss feed weren't showing up in Google reader. I re-downloaded RSS Bandit and they weren't showing up there either. They were in Sharpreader, the feedreader I use, so I didn't notice. Anyway, that's now fixed.

Also, I updated my reading list. Making progress on those books. Four for the month so far. Will this be my biggest reading month of the year? Given the pain caused by the Great Fall of 2007, and the time I now spend on my rump, this seems likely.

Hello. Long time no blog. But I won't dwell on this...

So I've been busy lately. As faithful readers, you know I've been in a fight to the death with my fence. Well, along with my fence I've pretty much worked over my back yard. The key benefits of this are that my children have a better place to play, I have privacy again now that I have a fence, and I have a sunburn. I'm sure there's something positive about that last one.

Anyway, I have done practically nothing related to tech at home for several weeks. I have had a reskinning/redesign mostly done ready since before then, so I decided to go ahead and finish it up. Now it is here. I would LOVE to get your input on it. Still probably needs some tweaking. It has been pretty thoroughly tested in FireFox 2.0.0.3 and someone in IE 6. If you are using another browser and see something odd, I'd like to hear about it. Like the new look?

Now all urls for viewing posts, viewing them by category, and viewing them in the archives, is complete. All courtesy of the VirtualPathProvider...woot!

I continue to get a sporadic spray of comment spam, usually for pharmaceutical sites it seems. I'm still manually reviewing them all (so that doesn't take much time), but it obviously working. No more comment span.

I started getting my first comment spam. I think the total is up to 8 spams thus far. On the one hand, this does make me feel a little cool. I am apparenly worth blog spamming. On the other hand, I hate it when people do that.

So, I am now approving/deleting all comments before they appear. It is a useful feature that I've been needing to add to my Pylus project. If you make a comment, you won't see it until I approve it. But that shouldn't take long. And yes, comments can continue to be anonymous.

The commenting capabilities of the site have been functional, but not very nice. Html comments were not allowed, as one of you noticed, and the text entry was obviously basic.

I have now spiffied it up. You will notice that you now have the write comments that are very html-ish. Feel free to do so. The text entry control is called tinymce, and it is distributed under the GPL. It is very easy to setup for use on your blog/website. So far I am happy with it. Check it out.

I added a couple new pages to the site. At the advice of a friend I am now keeping a running list of everything I read. It can be found here.

Also, a credits page for the images and code I use on the site that do not originate from my own work. It can be found here.

I also added a link to my aStore. I like the idea of the aStore, but navigation is horrible. Not sure what I can do about that other than write my own :)