Search on enter has been broken for a while in BlogEngine.NET (I'm running the latest 2.8.0.1 version). Finally got a chance to look at this today and there is a simple patch to the JavaScript to fix it. See the issue I just filed on CodePlex for details.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Fix search on enter problem in BlogEngine.NET #code #javascript #blogengine.net How to fix the search on enter problem in BlogEngine.NET. )

2013-06-16 Update: There is now a patch for the issue discussed below.

I just upgraded to BlogEngine.net 2.8 as it contains a fix for broken links from Facebook. There were a couple of hitches that I'll share in case they help anyone else.

I messed up the first upgrade attempt because the updater utility updates the source folder (containing the newly downloaded 2.8 code) instead of the destination folder (containing the current version of your blog). This is a little odd and the result is I uploaded an unchanged instance and then embarrassingly complained the the Facebook bug hadn't been fixed. It had, just not in the folder I was expecting. I probably didn't pay enough attention to the instruction video.

Having got that out of the way I discovered that new posts were appearing with a bad link (to /.aspx instead of /blog-title.aspx). I rarely post using the editor as I have a home-grown post by email service running. After a bit of digging it turns out that prior to 2.8 you could leave the slug empty when creating a post but now this results in the bad link. Luckily there isn't much effort require to fix this, you just need to set the slug before saving the new post:

In the middle of playing with this my live site died and started returning a 500 error. No amount of uploading the working local copy would fix this. Happily Server Intellect have outstanding support and restored a working backup for me in the middle of the night. Thanks chaps!

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(Published to the Fediverse as: The curious case of the missing slugs (in BlogEngine.net 2.8) #code #blogengine.net How to fix bad links in BlogEngine.NET caused by missing slugs - quick patch instructions. )

Testing posting by email with a picture of the moon from last night...

I've extended BlogEngine.NET to post by email. Not horrible for the very specific case of this blog and a short list of email clients. I shudder to think of extending it to the general emails and different templates.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Moon on a Wire #code #blogengine.net Picture of the Moon close to a wire. This is actually a test of posting by email from blogengine.net. )

I’ve just moved ITHCWY comments over to Disqus. BlogEngine.NET now supports Disqus out of the box, but doesn’t export comments to anything that Disqus is willing to eat. I’ve knocked up a quick converter that takes a full BlogML export from BlogEngine.NET (and at least in theory any other source of BlogML) and converts the comments to WXR. You can import the WXR file under the Generic option in Disqus.

The tool is a Windows console application that takes two parameters, the BlogML import file and the WXR output, i.e.:

BlogMLtoDisqus.exe C:\BlogML.xml C:\ForDisqus.wxr

It isn’t fancy and there is no error checking so it will either work or die horribly. If the latter, leave a comment and I’ll try to fix it for you.

Download BlogMLtoDisqus.exe. You’ll need to install .NET 4.0 as well if you don’t already have it.

Updated 2011-04-22: Added an optional third parameter that specifies the XML namespace for BlogML in case you need to override the default.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Convert BlogML comments to WXR for Disqus #code #blogengine.net #c# #.net #blogml #wxr #disqus A command line tool to convert BlogML comments to WXR (i.e. for Disqus). )

I've written an extension for BlogEngine.NET that automatically adds several different geographical tags to blog posts. I knocked this up for my Hikes blog. It might be useful for any blog where some of the posts are related to a real world location.

To get started download GeotagFromKML.zip (2.24 kb) and copy GeotagFromKML.cs to the App_Code\Extensions folder in your BlogEngine.NET instance.

The extension does two things. Firstly it looks for a link to a KML file when post is added or updated (it does this because each of my hike posts includes a Google Earth KML file for the hike). If a KML link is found then a paragraph is added to the post containing the longitude and latitude of the first coordinate in the KML file. The paragraph uses the Geo microformat. You can customize the text in settings for the extension. You can also regenerate by deleting the paragraph and saving the post. 

The second function is to add ICBM and Geo Tag META tags when serving a post that contains the geotagged coordinates. You can take advantage of this without linking to a KML file, just include a location like this in your post:

Once you have geotagging up and running you might also want to add GeoURL to the list of ping services for your site.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Geotagging posts in BlogEngine.NET #code #blogengine.net #.net #c# #metadata #kml #geo #icbm #geourl #geotag A customer extension that supports geotagging posts in BlogEngine.NET. )

I finished off my BlogEngine.NET migration yesterday missing a couple of useful sections from the previous incarnation of this blog. The first is a list of the most popular posts based on Google Analytics data. I've just finished porting this from a UserControl to a widget for BlogEngine.NET. To use this just download and extract this zip file to your widgets directory:

MostPopularFromGA.zip (5.22 kb)

You can see the widget in action under the Most Popular heading to the left if you're reading this post on the blog.

Most of the settings should be pretty obvious. The Google Analytics profile is the exception. This isn't the ID included in your tracking code. To get the profile log in to Google Analytics and click Edit next to the profile you want to use. At the top of the page you'll see a Profile ID. You need to use this number prefixed by ga: (i.e. ga:1234567). Once you have this and your account credentials entered you should be up and running.

The Post must match settings is a regular expression used to filter the Google Analytics report to only include blog posts. The default value corresponds to a default BlogEngine.NET install and only includes pages that start .../post/ (the regular expression is ^/post/). If your posts are under .../blog/posts/ then just update accordingly (^/blog/posts/). If you want to include the most popular pages regardless of the path just leave this setting blank. 

If you have any questions or feature requests leave a comment below. 

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(Published to the Fediverse as: BlogEngine.NET most popular pages widget using Google Analytics #code #blogengine.net #googleanalytics A BlogEngine.NET most popular posts widget using data from the Google Analytics API. )

(Update June 22, 2010: I've released a tool, Blogger2BlogML, that converts Blogger's ATOM export file to BlogML. I ended up doing this because of problems with comments when I migrated this blog — I had to fix these up manually which was painful. I'm now working on some larger blogs where this would be impossible…)

In January I got an email from Blogger announcing that they're killing FTP support. Apparently only 0.5% of Blogger blogs are published using FTP and it's a huge pain to support, mainly because many hosting providers restrict FTP access to certain IP addresses and if the Google servers running Blogger that moment aren't listed it's technical support time. 

Fair enough, but a bit painful for me as I have five blogs running on top of Blogger. I need FTP publishing as the templates I use end up running as ASP or ASP.NET pages. I Thought He Came With You is the first to move - if you're reading this post then it's up and running on BlogEngine.NET. This is an open source ASP.NET blogging platform. If it works out for this blog over the next month I'll start migrating the others. 

Getting up and running with BlogEngine.NET is easy enough - download the latest release and follow the getting started guide. I added the default install to a new Visual Studio web site project and was able to run it fine in the development server, no need to configure IIS. 

The challenge was moving posts and comments from Blogger into BlogEngine.NET. BlogEngine.NET happily imports and exports BlogML, Blogger spits out it's own Atom export format. 

Luckily Aaron Lerch has knocked up a PowerShell script to export Blogger to BlogML. This takes your Blogger ID as a parameter and exports all the blogs associated with that ID. You can just pull the <blog> element you need out of the export if necessary. If you use this tool follow the syntax closely from the example on the post. If you're new to PowerShell run this as administrator to start with and enter "Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned" to give permission to run the script. Then exit and run a non-admin instance of PowerShell to run the script.

After getting the export BlogEngine.NET refused to import it. I kept getting an invalid username or password error from the BlogML importer. Digging into the code a bit I found that a crash was occurring in api/BlogImporter.asmx when a blank category was passed to AddCategories(). I patched this function to skip blank/null categories and was then able to import successfully. I added a bug report for the problem so please vote for it if you hit the same issue.

The blog was in pretty good shape after the import. Categories were lost so I had to create them again in BlogEngine.NET and then apply them to each post. I also found that the date for comments had been set to the date they were imported. This can be fixed by editing each post directly (the files in App_Data\posts). I fixed the timestamps and also added back the URL for each comment where I had one from Blogger. I also edited my own comments to match my new BlogEngine.NET account so they got decorated as "by the author".

At this point the blog was good to go, but using the default template.

I've now whipped up a new template to match the old blog - I was pleasantly surprised by how easy this was to do. At this point I Thought He Came With You is going live on BlogEngine.NET. 

Almost everything is working at this point. I had a couple of user controls I need to move over - one shows the number of people who haven't visited the blog, the other figures out the most popular posts using the Google Analytics API. I'll see if I can implement at least the latter as a Widget so that other people can use it - watch this space (Update - now available here). 

Overall, I'm impressed. I resisted the urge to just write my own blogging platform which is a testament to how easy it is to both get BlogEngine.NET running and to customize the look and feel. Now I just need to work up the enthusiasm to do the same for my remaining four Blogger based blogs...

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Migrating from Blogger to BlogEngine.NET #code #blogger #blogengine.net Moving a Blogger FTP published blog to BlogEngine.NET, converting Blogger to BlogML, fixing import problems. )