Applied a couple of upgrades to the blog this morning. Decent amount of work that will have absolutely zero impact on you the reader. 🙂 I did a decent amount of research on upgrading from my .Text blogging engine to it’s successor, Community Server. CS is now at 1.1 and it’s improving, but it’s got a lot of pork with forums added. While it is certainly feasible for me to migrate, great people out there have written wonderful tools to help make that possible, I’m going to wait a bit longer I think. Perhaps wait for a 2.0 release. In the meantime I’m stuck using my great, but now dead, open-source .Text package. So, time to spiff it up a bit.

First, I removed all the old spam protection I put on my sites with the random character CAPTCHA and all that and went a different route using this ReverseDOS toolkit from angrypets.com. I just installed it this morning so we’ll see how it goes, but it doesn’t put the burden on a person and tries to make life real hard for spammers.

The second big upgrade was to move from FreeTextBox 1.0 (built into .Text) to FreeTextBox 3.0. The main driver behind this was so I could have a nice, rich editing environment with spell checking in Firefox (FTB 1.0 did not support Firefox). This proved to be a bit of a hassle, lots of trial and error, but I now have it working great. Google is the savior here of course since there are about a dozen sites that tell you how to do it but they all seem to be missing one or two steps. You have to feel your way with Jedi-like focus in order to get it working. These are the best references: DanBartels.CS, Dave Burke (2.0 actually, but steps are helpful) and Markyologist (don’t forget the browsercaps!).