I finally updated my blog to run on dasBlog 1.8. Not too painful. I unzipped the binary dis­tri­b­u­tion, downloaded the content folder from my server to my local drive, ran the provided upgrade utility, and used WinMerge to update the con­fig­u­ra­tion files.

The most obvious change is that I’m using a new theme (skin), which gives the site a very different look. The previous default theme had problems if your browser window was too narrow, due to some hardcoded table sizes (I think).

I also figured out how to post to dasBlog via w.bloggar. I looked for info on con­fig­ur­ing w.bloggar a few weeks ago, and couldn’t find it then.

Followup: the multiword links in this post are mangled when they appear in a browser. I think this is an issue in dasBlog’s XML transforms. Specif­i­cal­ly, it only seems to happen when the multiword link contains "dasBlog": ego-surfing, perhaps. Reported as dasBlog bug 1354987.

Followup #2: the problem turned out to be one of the out-of-the box rewriting rules in site.config. Commenting out:

<ContentFilter find="dasBlog" ...

fixed it.

These rules seem to be generally useful. The default con­fig­u­ra­tion allows you to convert several varieties of smilies to graphics:

as well as Google searches, $g(bush sucks) → bush sucks, and dictionary.com lookups, $d(de­fen­es­tra­tion) → de­fen­es­tra­tion. (The preceding examples were escaped by bracketing the first character in the pattern with a <span> tag.)

[Note: the above examples no longer display correctly, as this site is no longer hosted on dasBlog.]

More details on Con­tent­Fil­ter at the new dasBlog doc­u­men­ta­tion site, http://dasBlog.info.