Welcome to The (new & improved) Dead Hand!
If this is your first visit to the site, you really can't appreciate what an improvement its new incarnation is over that of 24 hours ago. Beside the purely cosmetic enhancements—significant, I assure you—we also have a number of functionality upgrades.
If the inner workings of a blog site bore you... well, my dad's cyber-meanderings about as devoid of technical expertise as it gets, so strap on your hip-waders and go there. Otherwise, read on.
The Dead Hand is implemented in .Text. For the half-dozen of you out there are aren't yet aware of it, .Text is the brainchild of Scott Watermasysk and his cyber-cronies over at GotDotNet Workspaces. .Text is open-source, tightly-coded, and implemented in ASP .NET, mostly in C#.
It is also very poorly documented. This is doubly surprising since .Text appears to be the blog software of choice for .NET afficionados around the globe. Go figure.
Anyway, in the last 24 hours I've done the following:
- Upgraded my .Text installation from version 0.94 to 0.95.
- Implemented a customized version of the LuxInteriorLight skin.
Not surprisingly, I ran into a few issues.
0.95 Upgrade
Whenever you have a system that works—and despite its rough exterior, the old site did work—it's worth asking the question: Why upgrade?
In this case, I think it's justified. Here's why:
- We had an issue with post display. Basically, we seemed to have a choice between displaying the entire site history on the home page (long download) or chopping off long archive listings. In retrospect, this problem may have been more due to my ignorance about skinning than to any inherent problem with version 0.94, but in any case the upgrade fixed it, so I'm happy.
- The stats didn't appear to work. Now they do.
- Progress marches on. Most of the new skins out there are written for version 0.95. I'm lazy, so I'd rather steal other people's work than do my own. As we say in the Navy, plagarism is the finest form of literary compliment.
The upgrade process went surprisingly smoothly. The process is fairly well laid out on Scott's Wiki, but here's how I did it:
- Go get the 0.95 release from the workspace. Both the binary and the source-code versions are available; you shouldn't need the source code. Unless you do.
- Export your current .Text database to a new database on the same server.
- Pick a temporary web name or IP address. You'll use this to test your new installation.
- In the new database's blog_Config table, manually change all the host fields to your new web name or IP address.
- Find the Updates_095 script in the download's Data folder. This script contains an error. Line 179 reads:
ALTER TRIGGER blog_Content_Trigger
Change it to:
CREATE TRIGGER blog_Content_Trigger
Why? Because blog_Content_Trigger doesn't exist in the old database, and your script will crash if you don't fix it.
- Run the update script. Make sure you run it on the new database! In SQL Server Query Analyzer, the way to do that is to insert
use dbname
into the top of the script, where dbname is the name of your new database.
- Now run the Sprocs095 script from the download's Data directory. Again, make sure you're running it on the right database.
- Create a new web on your web server, give it the IP address or web name you picked earlier, and feed it the contents of the download's DottextWeb directory. If you're set up the way we are—an outer wrapper application around the blogs web—copy over that infrastructure as well.
- Replace the web.config file in your new web with one of the config files in the download's Configs directory. Use your new database as your data source. Just follow the instructions, and don't forget to delete the comments in the file's header.
- Try out your new blog. When you're happy with it—we'll talk about skins in a minute—it's time to go live.
- Reset the host fields in the blog_Config table to their original values.
- Point your original web—the live one—to the new web directory.
- Once you're comfortable with the changes, you can delete the old database and the old web directory.
You're done!
.Text Skins
Quite a bit has been said about the topic of .Text skinning, and I'm not going to repeat it. The most comprehensive reference I've found so far is Mark Wagner's .Text Skinning 101. Don't get your hopes up. Mark obviously knows what he's doing, but he's a coder, not a communicator. Remember that source code download? As usual, if you want to write great .Text skins, your best bet is to read the source and figure it out for yourself.
Fortunately for the rest of us, though, there are already quite a few nice skins out there to modify. I selected gosatango's LuxInteriorLight, for the simple reason that it looks nice and is compatible with .Text 0.95.
Installing a skin is really easy. Just copy the whole skin folder into your Skins directory and update your Skins.config file, which for some reason has relocated to the Admin directory in the new .Text version. It's really that simple.
Unless you are completely satisfied with the skin as-is, however, you're going to want to customize it. This can be tricky. LuxInteriorLight is a good example of why that's so: it's a beautiful skin, but under the hood is CSS hell. gostango, bless him, appears to have hacked his style.css file out of solid rock, with only the slightest nod to any kind of coding standard. I'm still cleaning up the mess, and will post an updated version of the entire skin once I've tweaked it to my own satisfaction.
gostango, if you're listening, please don't be offended. I stand on the shoulders of giants, and all that... if I had to create my own skins from scratch, I would have given up a long time ago.
The Bottom Line
It's been a long day, but the Dead Hands appear to be happy with the result. As usual, I'm open to suggestions.