Yesterday I posted about how I got ScribeFire to work with dasBlog. Today I will go into a little more detail, complete with pictures.

To start, under the "Blog" section, choose Add.

Step 1 -- Choose "Manually Configure"


Step 2 -- Choose "Custome Blog"


Step 3 -- Choose "MetaWeblog API" and enter the url of your blog + "blogger.aspx"
 

Step 4 is login, you don't need an image for that, just enter your credentials.

Finally, you should see your blog added to ScribeFire:

Next, remove the auto-inserted ad "Powered by ScribFire". Click the "<<" in the upper left like so:

This will open the options. Choose settings and uncheck"Automatically insert 'Powered by ScribFire'", like this:

I really enjoy this firefox add-on. I added and edited this post from within firefox, and it seems a little snappier that the default editor in dasBlog.

According to the Live Search blog the live search I was complaining about before should be updated. Let's see if its fixed.

I guess the answer is, it depends...

Here is a shot on a search I just did for "your doing it wrong"


Look at the results, the #1 result is from 2003 and doesn't even include my search terms! The 5th result, and the 3rd site returned, is from 2005, and it is a forum post from some second rate hit counter. The post is 2 messages long! Here is what you see if you follow the webstat link:


That is what happens if I go to live.com and search.

However, it looks like I can access the new search if you append &FORM=PRESS. So if you use this query you can see the new and improved results. And they are indeed new and improved. The results are more topical, and they include my search terms. However, you have to either follow a link from a press release with the &FORM=PRESS or you have to know enough to put it on. Anyone who just types live.com, or live.search.com gets the old stuff. I don't know why, but it is typical Microsoft in the past 5 years. Shout about some new, cool thing and then it doesn't work or it is inaccessible.

By the way, here is a picture of the kind of thing I was searching for. I think its funny, and I guess so do the people at this site

I recently switched this blog to dasBlog and I had a nice little firefox addon called ScibeFire that I could not get to work with it. Thanks to Kelly Keeton for the tip that made the connection in my head.

My confusion was the end point on dasBlog is called Blogger.aspx, but the type (API) is MetaBlogAPI, so when setting up the blog in ScibeFire you have to choose Manually Configure-->Custom Blog-->MetaBlog API then put in <%yourBlogPath%>/blogger.aspx.

Then it works great. In fact, this is my first post from ScribeFire.


Edit: The only problem is ScribeFire appends an ad to your post. To disable the add/trackback, click the ">>" in the upper left, choose "Settings" and uncheck "Automatically insert' Powered by ScibeFire'"

I'm a Microsoft guy, a fan, supporter whatever. I've been programing with Microsoft for Microsoft almost since I got my start. I want MS to do well so I do well, which is why their live search pisses me off. It's not very good in general, but when I see things like this, it makes it worse:

It's fixed now, but a search for "Your doing it wrong" shows 0 results on Live (Live Search?) and 69 Million on Google. I was using IE7 with Live as the default provider, and immediately switched.

Even now that live search returns results, they suck. Compare Live Vs Google

It seems a new feature fo MSSQL 2005 is that any new accounts have to change their password at first logon. This is kind of a pain, since most people don't 'logon' to their accounts, at least for me because I do web programming. How is my website going to change its password?

Luckyliy I found a must change post with some tsql to do the trick:
ALTER LOGIN X WITH PASSWORD = 'Y'

That bit will unlock the account so you can use it.

I'm not a tsql guy, so maybe this is easy for some people, but for a guy just trying to store some information in a DB, this was a pain. It made a routine task of setting up a user into a 30 min hair tear.

Thanks to Peter for the tip.

Maybe that is easy for some css gurus to remember, but I always have trouble getting it to work. Use the style vertical-align: top to align inline children elements of a block parent.

Here is a sample that should illustrate:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head >
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></meta>
    <title>Text Align Test</title>
</head>
<body>
    <div>
   
    <div style="height: 100px; width: 300px; background-color: teal; vertical-align: top;">
            <span style="background-color: red; font-size: 28px;">Align This</span>
            <span style="background-color: #00A4FF;">Inline</span><br />
            Next Line
    </div>
   
    <div style="height: 100px; width: 300px; background-color: teal;">
            <span style="background-color: red; font-size: 28px;">Align This</span>
            <span style="background-color: #00A4FF; vertical-align: top;">Inline</span><br />
            Next Line
    </div>
    </div>
</body>
</html>