Here is another open source project worth checking out. If you want to do some VNC development using Delphi, check this project out.

MidEss is still alive and kicking. Not much has happened with it lately, but that's due to it being rather stable. Be sure to leave a comment here or on SourceForge if you have bugs and/or features that you want to see incroporated into this project.

Also, in case you didn't know, SourceForge has RSS feeds for each project. For example, to subscribe to an RSS feed of MidEss releases, click here. Check out all of the RSS feeds out for MidEss.

This is a rather good overview of different traits that developers possess as they go through the levels of proficiency.

The first paper on BDP is up on my web site. This paper talks about what you need to do to get your custom BDP provider to work with the Borland DataExplorer. I plan on adding more content to this area ASAP.

I hate being required to do anything. Being required to be connected to the Internet to have an application work is especially ugly to me. To that end, I downloaded w.bloggar. It is a freeware application that allows you to enter your blogs in a Windows application and publish the entries to your blog server. It has worked rather well so far. However, in order to get this to work with .Text, you need to take a look at this. I had to make sure that the content handlers were working properly (I used the wrong web.config file) and that I could log in properly (I had the wrong value for the blog_config.Flag column). After that, the directions in the link are all you should need to get going. Be sure to add the Categories that you want in the .Text web interface too, as I couldn't find a way to add categories from w.bloggar.

I also took a brief look at BlogJet. It appears to be poised to be better than w.bloggar in many ways. The GUI is crisper. It supports .Text out of the box. However, I'm a bit concerned about the pre-beta status and having it time expire on March 15, 2004. They're also going to make it shareware as opposed to freeware. I'm OK with buying shareware, but it better add value over freeware apps then. w.bloggar will suffice for now.

Lastly, I did some digging on RSS aggregators. In my mind, FeedDemon stood head and shoulders above the rest. Plus, Nick Bradbury is a Delphi guy who writes amazing software (see HomeSite).

OK, so maybe I'm a little late to this party. But better late than never! I'll use this blog to capture and record things that I find interesting, post workarounds and tips on things that bother me, and launch into an occasional diatribe or two along the way. Feel free to email me, and if I get time, I'll get back to you!

I'm using version 0.95 of .Text as my blog engine. It looked like the best of the bunch from my fairly brief look into products in that space. It's OpenSource and uses ASP.NET and C#.

The author, Scott Watermasysk has a pretty good blog and some info on installing and using .Text. The main technical issues that I had installing .Text were:

• Follow the Installation Walk Through
• For more guidance for installing, read this.
• You need to grab the right web.config template depending on your setup. For example, if you use a virtual directory for a single blog, use Configs\Single2_Web.config as your base web.config file
• I needed to get my ISP host to add a virtual directory for me
• After going through the install, insert a record into the blog_config table. For example:

  insert into blog_config
  (username, password, email, title, subtitle, skin, author, application, host, timezone, lastupdated, flag)
  values
  ('admin', 'admin', 'your@email.com', 'Title', 'Subtitle', 'simple', 'Your Name', 'VirtualDirectoryName', 'distribucon.com', getdate(), 5)
  

  Note that Flag = 5. This is needed as the Flag field is a bit field that controls how .Text will work. If you only had Flag=1, then you would get a 'User does not exist' error message if you tried to login from another source